If you’re afraid and angry about Donald Trump, I have 15 words for you:
Sign up for this Organizing 4 Power workshop with 10+ of your friends right now.
If you’re a student, I have three more words for you:
Why You Should Unionize
I could fill 50 pages on why you should, but here are the top reasons.
- Billionaires are burning the planet, fueling our housing and debt crises, and monopolizing political power.
- Organized workers are the only thing that can stand up to organized billionaires.
- American schools produce American labor.
I’m writing this in a dorm room in Los Angeles, California, where I’m lucky enough to have an air purifier and N95s to combat the climate disaster horror show we’ve just experienced this month. In the past week, Trump has dismantled decades of policy and frozen every public health agency in the midst of an impending H5N1 pandemic. I made a joke yesterday about the imminent nerfing of labor law, and at the time of writing this Trump has begun to purge the NLRB. The administration is doing this to overwhelm us. We can’t let them.
Let’s Overwhelm Them Instead
What we need now is pure, hard organizing that relies on our ability to stop the economy in its tracks — not on law, not on policy, and not on the leniency of obscenely wealthy people.
If people have told you that you can’t change anything in the world until you get a degree and a job, ditch it from your mind. If it were true, the adults with degrees and jobs and individual power would have won already. We wouldn’t be here, with 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial global temperatures, record inequality, and a massive debt crisis. The adults have not won a better future for us. Only we can do that.
Student Labor Power
The world of student labor unions grows every day. We model ourselves after the groundbreaking work of unions that have won massive community benefits — like affordable housing, climate justice, and immigration protections — in addition to huge pay raises and workplace benefits. We must teach ourselves to organize now so that we can thoroughly revolutionize the landscape of student protest — and so that we can go out and unionize the rest of the American economy as soon as we graduate.
Whether your personal theory of change skews moderate or radical, student unionism has a history of accommodating both. Look at the Chilean student federations, who took power in government this past decade after dominating the national movement against austerity. Look at the Quebecois student unions who use strikes as a weapon. We need to become powerful enough to rewrite our constitution, to get into government without having to compromise our values, and to reshape the way power falls in this country.
Unions for All
ICYMI, student protest matters a lot. But what matters more is student protest that wins. Power is not about “having a voice”: it’s about being able to get institutions to do what you need them to do and abolishing the worst institutions entirely. If you want to learn reliable methods to win your campaigns — because yes, there is a science and art to it — then unionize your school, unionize your building, unionize your workplace.
Every time we win, we gain power. Every time we lose, our opponents criminalize, police, and assault us. We can no longer afford to lose.
Email the Student Worker Alliance Network at [email protected]. We’re excited to meet you.
