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The fight for the NUS

JamieSW — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:09:19 +0000

The NUS ‘governance review’ was presented to us as some great piece of social democratic reform by the union’s Labour-affiliated leadership, but in reality they seek to sideline the union’s elected officers and demolish the last remnants of political pluralism within the NUS. The rhetoric says that the union will somehow still be ‘led by students’, but this is patronising at best. The basis and vision for the review was provided not by students, but by non-student union managers. And the main proposal involves the transfer of ultimate power and veto within the union to a ‘trustee board’ made up of ‘external’ individuals such as lawyers and accountants.

What does that mean in practice? When I was elected equality and diversity officer at Leeds University student union, I became a trustee on a new board. I was asked to sign a contract stating that, as a trustee, I would not make any decisions to the union’s financial detriment. In one swift stroke, my right to campaign for the removal of the NUS’s multi-million pound contracts with unethical manufacturers was ripped from my grasp.

The trustees also had the power to overrule any decisions made by students if they were deemed to ‘jeopardise the union’s reputation’ – a phrase interchangeable with ‘having a non-mainstream political opinion’. I was informed that sitting on such a board would require me to take off my ‘student officer hat’ – I would not now be looking after the interests of the ‘minority’ students that you would expect an equality officer to represent, but those of the student body as a whole. Any suggestions that such a structure was a root cause of discrimination were dismissed as the ramblings of a renegade.

One year later, an almost identical review, conceived by a steering group that includes the brains behind the Leeds proposal, has been rolled out for the national union. This time it is suggested that the board will have no officers to represent minorities at all, hat or no hat.

The proposal effectively erodes the already limited democratic structures remaining between ‘ordinary’ students and those at the top. It works to centralise power, reaffirming the view that the union is nothing more than a playground for bureaucrats en-route to a career in Westminster. It is a plan to destroy a mass-membership organisation and create in its place an elitist, monolithic lobbying tool – a kind of student think-tank.

The union’s leaders seem to think that the huge losses students have suffered – the right to free education and the giant leaps made in its marketisation – would not have transpired had we adopted this way of working earlier. That is nonsensical: the reason students lost their right to free education was because the union was begging for scraps inside the minister’s office rather than throwing its energy and resources into mobilising students across the country.

Blaming the shaky governance structures is an easy way out of NUS’s failure to secure the interests of its core members. The union will continue to fail so long as it keeps moving towards becoming nothing more than a consortium of student unions, headed by union managers, that puts profit before students. The union certainly needs to change – but the current proposals have taken a dangerous wrong turn.

Hind Hassan is one of 12 part-time officers on the National Union of Students executive. She is a member of Student Respect, but writes here in a personal capacity

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The battle for the union: a timeline

April 2007 A motion is passed at the NUS annual conference in Blackpool, calling for reform of the union’s governance structures

Summer 2007 The NUS pays a management consultant £100,000 to write a ‘white paper’; a ‘consultation’ then opens. The union is criticised for holding the consultation over the summer, when most students will not be at their universities and so cannot be involved. Left groups realise that the reforms will remove their positions within the union, and set up a campaign against them

December 2007 An ‘extraordinary’ (emergency) conference to pass the reforms is called by the national leadership – at such short notice that delegates from most universities are simply appointed by their unions, not elected by students. Controversially, the chair refuses to count the vote, declaring that it is obviously more than the required two-thirds majority

April 2008 The reforms passed in November go to a ratification vote at the union’s annual conference, but the left mobilises in the form of the Save NUS Democracy campaign and narrowly wins the third of delegates’ votes needed to block the new constitution. NUS president Gemma Tumelty breaks down in tears as the result is announced

Summer 2008 The ‘consultation’ is restarted. New NUS president Wes Streeting says that despite the ‘setbacks’ there will be ‘no turning back’ on reform

November 2008 There are plans for another emergency conference to try to pass the reforms again

Student living - this isn’t Hollyoaks

Alex Doherty — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 09:32:15 +0000

With the beginning of the 2008/09 academic year fast approaching, students will soon be settling in to the realities of student life. For new students this means at some point they’ve made a choice: between studying away from home on the one hand and continuing to live with their parents on the other. Almost a third of students choose the latter option. This often means a long commute to a university chosen on the basis of its location instead of its merits – but at least these students have the security of a roof over their head. For those who have chosen to study away from home, often unaware of the true cost of student life, this means moving in to student accommodation and an ongoing struggle against poverty, unscrupulous landlords and, more often than not, appalling living conditions.

From the first day of the first semester there is one thing that all students can be sure of: their maintenance loan won’t be enough to keep body and soul together. Students are entitled to no more than £3000 non-income assessed, which rises to a mere £4600 for students from the poorest backgrounds. Compare this with an average rent of £60 per week (which works out at £3120 for the year) and then add on the rising cost of utilities, food and other necessities and the loan system is exposed for what it really is – a disgrace. The only way for most students to make ends meet is to work at least part of the time during the semester and burden themselves with overdrafts and credit cards the rest of the time. During the summer holidays when the loan has dried up students are forced to seek out whatever work they can get and have none of the usual rights to Job Seekers’ Allowance or other benefits that most workers can fall back on.

The Government has done nothing to make student housing more affordable. Most first year students looking to live away from home for the first time look to move in to university owned halls of residence. In this way they are guaranteed good quality housing at a cheap price. Thanks to PFI, these residences are now being opened up to profiteering vultures from the private sector. To give an example from a 2002 Unison report; at Luton University student nurses were told they had to leave their halls of residence and move into new PFI-built halls. Their rents shot up from £177 per month to £244 per month with at least one student being forced to sleep in their car! Besides incredibly inflated prices, these profiteers also force students to sign longer contracts, so that students living at university during term time are forced to sign 52 week contracts and pay rent even when they know they won’t be living there.

Besides being unaffordable, private housing is also a playground for bad landlords. Surely students ought to be able to expect landlords to fulfil their contracts as an absolute minimum? Apparently not. More and more students are living with damp, infestation, poor or nonexistent heating and unsafe appliances – to the complete indifference of landlords. Landlords therefore often get away with breaking the law – the long and arduous process through the courts will always favour the landlord in the long run.

All this begs the question: why is student housing in such a bad state and what needs to be done to improve it? The question of housing isn’t, after all, isolated to students. In the current economic climate more and more people are finding it difficult to keep up with their rent and mortgage repayments. The Tories and New Labour have no solution beyond opening housing up further to the private sector. PFI and private landlords only succeed in driving students to the breadline and ultimately out of education altogether. The only way to win our rights for both a decent education and decent housing is through the organised labour and student movements. The NUS and the Unions must organise together at the grassroots and fight to force the Labour government to act on the housing disgrace. The Labour government must adopt socialist policies now to assure workers and students alike affordable and secure housing:

No to privatisation of student halls of residence!

Begin a massive programme of decent social housing!

A living grant for all students!

Media Exploiting Young Workers

Ellie Keen — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 08:20:09 +0000

A survey of journalism student placements among various media outlets in the UK has found that over 50 per cent of them took place after the students had gained their qualifications. It has prompted the National Union of Journalists – which conducted the survey – to declare that “media companies are breaking the law by using bogus work experience placements to cover full-time jobs”.

The union says it is writing to companies warning them it will name organisations refusing to take action.

The survey also found that one-in-five people who did post-qualification work experience undertook a placement for three months or more, with some working for more than six months unpaid.

And that, of those people who had material published or broadcast, 78 per cent received no payment for their work.

More than half of the survey respondents felt that they didn’t get enough support or guidance during their placements.

Says NUJ General Secretary, Jeremy Dear: “This isn’t work experience, it’s exploitation. We’re all in favour of students getting a feel for life in a newsroom, but in many cases companies are just looking for free labour.

“Demanding that people put in months of work for free doesn’t help companies find the best journalists, it helps them find the ones that can afford to put in the hours without pay.

“Even those able to work for free are often getting poor quality experience. Some are given purely administrative tasks and get no editorial work at all, whilst others are expected to churn out professional material without getting any training from experienced staff.”

The survey is part of a major campaign by the union to tackle the unfair ways in which media businesses are using work experience placements to exploit newly qualified and student journalists.

Jeremy Dear added: “Organisations can’t go on treating newly qualified journalists as a lower class of worker to which they have no responsibilities. We will continue to campaign for employers and government to bring an end to this damaging exploitation.”