Many YCLers face similar challenges on campuses and communities: What does the YCL contribute to the student-labor movement? What are some ideas for getting started? How can a club come out of that work?
On college campuses, the YCL can help broaden student involvement, push for more strategic goals, and strengthen the relationship between student and labor organizations. The challenge for many student organizations is to break outside of the bubble. YCLers recognize the need for broad coalitions and unifying tactics that bring students together around racial and economic justice.
A common weakness on college campuses with student labor activism is that the majority of the activists are white and upper or middle class. Not only do tactics suffer due to lack of member diversity, but the movement can easily become isolated from other issues on campus if the members do not connect with other student organizations. There are sometimes huge barriers to creating broad and diverse coalitions around a particular issue. On many campuses, there are racial barriers, class divisions, and personal conflicts, barriers that segment the student and activist community. Even when things seem to be going well, sometimes a coalition is missing something.
On my campus, the student labor group had formed a coalition with MEChA (Movimiento de Estudiantes Chicanos de Aztlan), the Asian American Student Association, and the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored PeopleYu ), but no one even thought of contacting the Queer Student Association or the Muslim Student Alliance until the middle of the campaign. The YCL has to fight for better and broader coalitions--especially around labor solidarity because there is so much potential for a unified fight and concrete victories. The YCL can play a critical role in helping to build organizations that are diverse, draw in working class students, and find ways to form and support coalitions with other active student organizations.
The advantage of a YCL club is that while student labor organizations may feel that they can only focus on labor issues, a YCL club can branch out to support other types of campaigns, such as affirmative action, faculty diversity, and peace activities and look for ways to tie these efforts together. A first project for a club might be to brainstorm ways to bridge organizations and campaigns on campus. The first steps can be showing up at events hosted by other organizations, having a face to face meeting with the leaders and organizational chairs, or setting up mutual teach-ins for your organizations about issues that each are working on. Most of these coalitions probably won\'t have socialism on the agenda, but that doesn\'t take away from our political contribution. I see the YCL as playing a key role in coalitions because maintaining them is a priority in our organizing work.
Another area where the YCL can play a critical role is in forging stronger relationships between students and local unions and labor councils. Young people\'s attitudes towards organized labor have started to shift in the past decade due in part to the new direction of the AFL-CIO. With a new emphasis on community labor solidarity, unions have devoted more time to encouraging community, youth, and faith-based coalitions, encouraged younger and more diverse leadership, and broadened their organizing focus. Community and youth support can mean the difference between winning or losing an organizing campaign, and can bring great pressure on companies to settle a fair contract.
However, the youth labor alliance is not necessarily an easy one. Many students know very little about the labor movement or the basic structure and function of a union. Many have also been taught that unions are corrupt and self-interested, and some on the Left are stuck in an anti-union rut or are opposed to so-called \"hierarchical\" organizations. In other cases, local unions may not show interest in working with students, maybe because they are understaffed, have weak leadership, or simply do not see the potential of student-labor solidarity.
Whatever the reason, the YCL recognizes that connecting with organized labor is necessary to advance both the youth and labor movements. Because of this perspective, the YCL should work to overcome the barriers either through small meetings with union staff, student education, or simple persistence in bringing both groups together. Our attitude towards organized labor is extremely valuable and a important part of leadership.
These are the types of campaigns, which can pull in broad support even from students who haven\'t been active in the peace movement or labor movement. A local campaign around immigrants rights, job security, and against discriminatory legislation makes the connection between war at home and abroad and will begin to agitate young people to think on a larger scale and fight the policies of the Bush Administration.
The YCL also has an advantage because of its connections to other youth and labor organizations. In particular, YCLers on campuses should find out if their school is a member of the United States Student Association (USSA). If not, find out how your school can become a member. USSA works on a whole range of issues around educational access, from lobbying Congress for more financial aid programs, to training grassroots organizers, to coordinating the National Student Labor Day of Action. The YCL is also in the National Youth and Student Peace Coalition with USSA and other organizations and those connections should be built upon at the local level. The YCL values the connections to national organizations like USSA and Jobs with Justice and can play a critical role by getting more youth involved, bringing friends and allies to conferences, and tapping into these organizations\' resources for local campaigns.
Many other campaigns can spin off of one issue so if you\'re trying to figure out how to start a club within an existing student labor coalition, brainstorm some related issues and organize a few people to start working on them, this can be the start of your YCL club. For example, if the student labor coalition is running into problems around access to administration and university decision making, start a campaign to get a student seat on the Board of Trustees or to run a platform of progressive candidates for student government. Another example--sometimes youth and students aren\'t paying attention to local and national elections. See how you can tie local labor campaigns to the elections.
If local unions are doing precinct walking, organize a group to help out or find out which candidates are pro-labor and register students to vote. Bring something new to the coalition! In this way, the YCL club can contribute an important piece to the coalition, begin to establish itself as a reliable and principled coalition member, and draw in new members to get the club rolling without weakening the coalition. A YCL club can also be a place for students to talk about the bigger picture, Marxist ideology, history, and connections between labor organizing and the anti-globalization movement--in that case, maybe a reading group is the way to get things moving.
In the end, our work to build a stronger youth labor alliance not only strengthens the labor movement, but it is part of the struggle to make campuses and communities more democratic. Labor campaigns can be closely tied in to local and national elections, to registering youth to vote, to running candidates in student government, to holding public officials accountable, and to training the next generation with organizing skills. Working on labor campaigns is a good lesson in how capitalism sucks, a hands on experience that politicizes young people, teaches about collective action and working class unity, and can be a great way to start or build YCL clubs.
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