Students at Dundee University are pushing their Principal to commit to paying the Living Wage

The Living Wage campaign at Dundee University has been running since the start of the year and has gone from strength to strength. Dundee Labour Students are finding it outrageous that 153 members of the University staff not paid a Living Wage with 113 of them being women. Movement for Change has been working with Dundee Labour Students all through the school year to help them get organised around this pressing issue.

The Campaign has received a lot of media attention and support from the public

From the beginning of the campaign, the students have been collecting signatures on a petition which now stands at 500 signatures. The campaigners have also been leafleting and petitioning public lectures, pushed for online publicity and sent multiple letters to the principal.

The campaign has also received the support of Jenny Marra MSP, Jim McGovern MP and Cllr Richard McCready. This support has allowed for significant press attention in the local press which has allowed the campaign to gather further legitimacy and supporters.

Even after all this support and publicity, Principal Pete Downs hasn’t agreed to pay the Living Wage to the entire University staff.

With momentum building behind the campaign, our Dundee activists are heading into next week with a meeting on the 30^th of April in the student union with Principal Downs from which the students will seek a pledge of implementation.

Hear Connor McElwaine, one of the leaders of the Living Wage campaign and our residential training attendee from last November, talk about the campaign and how Movemvent for Change has helped give it focus.

Find out more about the campaign on the Dundee Labour Students’ website and stay tuned for updates!

Over the past year, Movement for Change and Labour Students have run Living Wage trainings and actions at universities across the UK. In the process, we’ve secured the Living Wage for low-paid employees (equating to as much as a £1,750 per annum pay increase in one case), including at the largest university in the country. Meanwhile, Movement for Change’s team of Community Organisers is training and developing students in areas as diverse as Swansea and Guildford to continue the campaigns into the new academic year.

Here, former Movement for Change organiser and current Secretary of Labour Students Teddy Ryan shares his personal thoughts on what Movement for Change activists have achieved so far.

TEDDY:  The gulf between young people and politics has never been greater. The largest group of unregistered voters are those under the age of 25; the majority of those who are registered do not vote. Reversing that trend is a huge task for the Labour Movement and only by understanding the root of the problem can we begin to overcome it. Fundamentally, too many young people feel disconnected from politics and local political action is an alien concept to most.

The optimistic outlook for Labour is that with a renewed Labour Party under Ed Miliband, and with the Liberal Democrats discredited beyond repair, 2015 will see millions of young people turning to Labour as the party of hope and opportunity. The polls are good and internally we have more Young Labour and Labour Students groups than ever before, but the honest truth is that simply pushing Labour in front of the other two parties is not good enough. Rather than simply winning the fight over whether or not the Labour Party is a force for good, we must be prepared to have and win the argument that politics itself is a force for good. We must proactively demonstrate that young people are able to change their own communities through positive political action.

Over the past year, I’ve travelled the length and breadth of the country, visiting universities and Labour Clubs working on the Movement for Change/Labour Students Living Wage campaign. In a short space of time, students have demonstrated clearly that politics can make a real difference. By working with Movement for Change, Labour Students has proved that young people can take political action which goes beyond raising awareness and creating debate – they can change people’s lives.

With successes at Manchester, Kent and De Montfort as well as successful accreditation at LSE, the campaign is cause for celebration. However, the political energy within ongoing Movement for Change/Labour Students Living Wage campaigns must not be lost. Many active and growing campaigns exist and where there has been success the clubs there are now working on pushing the living wage beyond their campus.

I am proud of how the Living Wage campaign has made a difference. It helps us win the argument that political action can be a force for good in our communities. Over the next year, Labour Students and Movement for Change will continue the campaign, pushing it into the wider community.  In doing this, and continuing to campaign hard for Labour on the doorstep, Labour students will seek to win the wider argument that politics and political action should be embraced and not ignored by Britain’s youth.

Find out more about Movement for Change’s Living Wage work, and contact us to get involved.

We at Manchester Labour Students have taken on the Living Wage campaign this year in an attempt to transform the University of Manchester into a Living Wage organisation.
Our campaign began on November 14th when Teddy Ryan came to do a training session with us about how best to tackle the campaign. This was very useful for members who hadn’t already been to a training session at a national labour students event and it motivated everyone to get behind the campaign ahead of us.
Later in the week, we made a huge ‘Manchester Labour Students Living Wage Campaign’ banner and posed for a photograph, alongside an article for the Mancunion, the largest student newspaper in the country. Not only did we get an article in the paper, but we made Pages 1 and 2.   

The following Monday (21st), we set up a stall outside the Student Union on Oxford Road. We had a stall up all day every day of that week and it proved to be a huge success. Everyone on the executive committee, not to mention other committed members, really got behind the campaign and we never had less than three people at a time helping out on the stall. This is a huge achievement considering lots of us had essay deadlines. We found there to be a lot of support from ordinary students, many of whom came to the stall having seen the article in the paper.

On the stall, we had a petition for people to sign who were interested in finding out more and who wanted to support the campaign. We have also given petitions to members for them to take back to their halls of residence and seminars in the hope of getting as many names down as possible. As well as having a stall, we have a facebook page which people can ‘like’.

As well as the support of students, we have received official support from other sources. We received a letter from Debbie Abrahams MP a couple of weeks ago, and we hope to receive similar official support from other local politicians soon. On 9th December, we hosted an event with Chuka Umunna MP and Shabana Mahmood MP and they both posed with us behind our banner. We hope that this kind of support will help us when persuading the directors of the merits of the Living Wage. On to0p of this, we hope it will reflect the seriousness of the campaign by showing them that this isn’t another fad student campaign that universities see so many of.

Due to the success of our campaign, the President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Manchester, Nancy Rothwell, has agreed to meet with us . In this meeting we hope to persuade her and the other directors not only the moral obligations of the university to pay a fair wage, but of the merits to the University of being accredited as a Living Wage organisation.

As well as meeting with Ms Rothwell, in the New Year we will start the stall up again. The plan is to have a stall outside the Union every Wednesday to keep the momentum of the campaign going. We will also continue to push for more official support from other large student societies, as well as local MP’s.

Grace Skelton is Vice-Chair of Manchester Labour Students

Labour Students’ priority campaign for 2012 and 2013 is a co-ordinated effort to deliver a Living Wage for workers on every college and university campus in the UK. Movement for Change has trained and developed teams of Labour Students activists to support actions on campuses across the UK. In the process, we’ve helped secure the Living Wage for low-paid workers in several universities.

The Living Wage is the minimum hourly rate someone has to earn to afford everyday basics like housing, food, childcare, etc. It is calculated by the Centre for Social Policy in Loughbrough University and in London by the GLA.

The idea behind the campaign is simple: if you work full time for our colleges and universities you ought not to be poor. To find out more about our plans for the current academic year, and to get involved in your area, contact us.