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In a post titled “We’re Breaking Up,” the Student Labor Action Project announced today that three major student activist organizations have cut ties with banks implicated in predatory lending, student loan profiteering, and right-wing political activity:
- The United States Student Association has voted to close its accounts at Wells Fargo, the nation’s second largest private student lender (and the only major US bank to engage in predatory “payday loan” activity.) Wells Fargo’s student loan interest rates range as high as 14.21%.
- The United Council of University of Wisconsin Students has pulled its money from M&I Bank, which contributed more than $46,000 to the campaign of Wisconsin’s notorious governor, Scott Walker.
- And the University of California Student Association has broken ties with major student lender US Bank in the wake of its “lack of willingness to engage in good-faith efforts to negotiate sustainable permanent mortgage modifications.”
That’s three major student organizations in just a few weeks. More to come?
In the last few weeks Ivy League students have mounted Occupy actions aimed at recruiting sessions for major financial institutions on their campuses — the 1% occupying the 1%. Inside Higher Ed has an interesting article up on the phenomenon, complete with (full disclosure) a couple of thoughts from me.
I haven’t posted much about the Russell Athletic story this last while, but I got an email yesterday from United Students Against Sweatshops that demonstrates that their work has really been moving forward.
When I posted last, in early May, USAS had won fifty-seven campus disaffiliations from Russell over the course of the spring semester in protest of the apparel company’s labor policies in Honduras, specifically its decision to close a newly-unionized factory Jerzees de Honduras factory in the wake of its unionization.
Since then, nearly thirty more campuses have joined the Russell boycott, bringing the total to eighty-four. New recruits to the cause include merchandising bigwigs the University of Arizona, Brown, Louisville, the University of Florida, and North Carolina State. USAS is now calling this “the largest collegiate boycott of an apparel company in history.”
You can follow the story as it develops at USAS’s Boycott Russell Athletic blog, which I’ve added to our blogroll today.
United Students Against Sweatshops has extended its remarkable string of victories against clothing-maker Russell Athletic.
This week Boston College and the entire University of California system announced their intention to terminate contracts with RA, bringing to fifty-seven the number of colleges and universities that have disaffiliated so far this year.
The campaign against Russell Athletic stems from the company’s history of anti-labor activity in Honduras, specifically its closing of the Jerzees de Honduras factory in the wake of its unionization.
Last week a campus political party at the University of Maryland College Park defied their administration and some state legislators and screened about half an hour’s worth of a hardcore porn movie as part of a free-speech forum.
So what’s happened since?
Well, legislators backed off of their threat to immediately axe UMD’s state funding over the screening, but they’re planning to revisit the issue in the fall. The state legislature directed the university to establish a policy on porn on campus before September 1, and at their Friday meeting the university’s regents told the UMD chancellor to present them with a set of recommendations for such a policy by summer.
In other news, the UMD College Park president, uninterested in picking any new fights with right-wing politicians, has overriden a vote of the university senate to drop the opening prayer from the university’s commencement ceremonies. The senate had voted 32-14 to abandon the prayer, with all of the senate’s student members voting with the majority.
The UMD College Park Student Power Party, the campus activists who staged the porn-screening-slash-free-speech-forum, have apparently seen all their candidates go down to defeat in the student government’s executive board elections. Election results aren’t official yet, though, as one of the other slates has charges of campaign violations pending.
Finally, the university’s student government voted unanimously on Thursday to oppose UMD’s contract with apparel-maker Russell Athletic. More than two dozen colleges and universities have dumped RA since the beginning of the year, in response to findings of labor violations at one of RA’s Honduras factories.
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