|
What
is LWAC? | Contact
Us | Photo
Gallery What is the Living Wage Action Coalition?
What is LWAC?
The Living Wage Action Coalition is a collective of
students and recent grads from campuses across the country
that share experiences from their living wage and student-worker
solidarity campaigns with new and existing campus campaigns.
LWAC has structured students’ experiences into
a series of workshops.
LWAC collective members have been doing these workshops
around the country on the LWAC campus
tour since August 2005.
We do not seek to form chapters on campuses -- we leave
this to the amazing national networks that already exist:
the Student
Labor Action Project and United
Students Against Sweatshops. Instead, we seek to
support student-worker solidarity organizing and deepen
this movement's radical analysis through our long term
project.
Background
Spring 2005 brought exciting news for the campus living
wage movement. Students and workers joined forces at
Georgetown, Washington University in St. Louis, and
other campuses, demanding that universities pay fair
wages to campus workers. Members of these campaigns
and other successful campus living wage campaigns in
turn wanted to use their momentum and experience to
inspire and strengthen other student-worker solidarity
campaigns. Thus, with the help of many allies, the Living
Wage Action Coalition was created in the summer of 2005
as a special project of the Center
for Community Change. LWAC is a project to strengthen
the national campus living wage movement by supporting
students working in solidarity with campus workers to
win living wage campaigns on their campuses. LWAC works
closely with existing student-labor national networks
such as the Student Labor Action Project (SLAP) and
United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS). LWAC also
works with American
Rights at Work and unions to ensure that the freedom
to organize be recognized at colleges and universities
(our schools).
LWAC has created a space for students involved in successful
student-worker solidarity campaigns to share their experience
with new and current campaigns on campuses across the
country. This is done through workshops, developed by
LWAC, which are based on the experiences, knowledge
and skills gained by students in their campaigns, and
as a whole primarily encourage campaigns that are led
by workers and are grounded in strategy. LWAC has been
touring around the country for the last six months speaking
about our various campaigns, running workshops on campaign
skills and engaging students in comprehensive strategy
discussions.
LWAC hopes to serve as a clearinghouse of information
and resources through this website to students across
the country.
Goals
Collective members and allies developed a list of
LWAC's goals during a retreat in December 2005. Our
goals include:
• encourage a campus living wage movement that
is more worker-led;
• place the movement more in the context of a
race, class and gender analysis;
• place campus living wage campaigns more in the
context of the larger labor and student-worker solidarity
movements
• encourage strategic thinking and concrete campaign
victories;
• provide resources and support for living wage
campaigns and all on-campus student-worker solidarity
campaigns;
• link together campaigns regionally and according
to specific challenges they face (i.e. in states with
"Right-to-work" laws, navigating the bureaucracy
of public or private institutions);
• connect student groups with existing national
student-labor solidarity networks such as USAS
and SLAP;
and finally,
• build leadership among student labor activists
and prioritize folks who identify as people of color,
women, working class, queer, or genderqueer.
|
