BANANA LINK – THE NORWICH ORGANISATION DEFENDING BANANA WORKERS’ RIGHTS

Posted on February 8, 2019 by Norwich Radical in Community, Inter|national and tagged activism, advocacy, Africa, agriculture, agrochemicals, Banana Link, bananas, Cameroon, Compagnie Fruitière, costa rica, education, environment, featured, Freedom and fairness for Fyffes workers, fruit, gender equity, ghana, health, Honduras, International Union of Foodworkers, Latin America, living wage, maternity rights, norwich, trade unions, worker solidarity, workers rights, World Banana Forum.

By Paul Lievens, Banana Link Communications Officer

Bananas have been part of our diet for thousands of years, and are the most popular fruit in the world, with over 100 billion bananas eaten around the world every year. In the UK, each of us eats on average around 10 kg, or 100 bananas, per year. Grown across the tropical regions of the world, banana export production provides an essential source of income for hundreds of thousands of rural households in developing countries. However, many of the plantation workers who produce our bananas fail to earn a living wage and do not have their labour rights respected, while the intensive use of agrochemicals harms the health of workers and the surrounding environment.

JUSTICE FOR CLEANERS AT KING’S COLLEGE LONDON

Posted on September 15, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged abuse, academic staff, accountability, Bush House, campaigning, cleaning, deportation, direct action, discrimination, economic discrimination, exploitation, featured, gendered labour, health and safety, homophobia, immigration, immigration raid, IWGB, Justice for Daniel, KCL J4C, King's College London, LSE, LSE J4C, migrant labour, migrant rights, neoliberalism, occupation, outsourcing, pensions, racialised labour, Servest, sexual harassment, SOAS, SOAS J4C, SOAS nine, solidarity, students, trade unions, UCU, UCU strike, UKVI, Unison, university management, University of London, university staff, UVW, workers, workers rights.

By KCL Justice for Cleaners Campaign

Content warning: mentions sexual harassment, homophobic abuse

This week, the KCL Justice for Cleaners Campaign released a short film revealing the struggles of migrant cleaners at King’s College London, a day before management made a recommendation to the College Council as to whether to end the outsourcing of cleaning. Through the film, cleaners speak in their own words about the violence of the outsourcing model and how mistreatment at KCL is normalised.

FUCK FUTURE FINANCE – THE FRIGHTENING REALITY OF PRIVATE STUDENT LOANS

Posted on August 3, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged academics, advertising, campaigning, casualisation, corporations, cost of living, cycle of debt, featured, finance, Future Finance, government, higher education, interest rates, loan sharks, maintenance, marketisation, mental health, morality, NCAFC, payday loans, predatory loans, private landlords, private student loans, rent hikes, student activism, student debt, student finance, student loans, suicide, trade unions, tuition fees, UCU, UCU strike, unethical, university, working class.

By Lewis Martin

CW: mentions suicide.

Sometimes targeted adverts reveal to you more than you wanted to know. I’ve recently been experiencing facebook ads for Future Finance, a company that offers loans of up to £40,000 to students, with an interest rate of 17.45% APR for all the time that you’re studying. To put that in perspective, if you borrowed £7000 over 5 years, you’d have repaid a stonking £11,223 by the time you’ve paid it off. This eye watering example reveals both the current state of Higher Education financing and a frightening future that is increasingly intruding on the present.

THE FUTURE OF STUDENTS’ UNIONS – BEYOND TUITION FEES #4

Posted on April 22, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged activism, Arts SU, Beyond Tuition Fees, block grants, bureaucracy, Charities Act 2011, Charities Commission, charity law, checks and balances, co-operatives, consumer culture, consumerism, corbyn, democracy, Education Act 1994, Free Education, grassroots, hierarchy, higher education, Labour, legislation, Lincoln SU, NUS, online voting, Parliament, policy, politics, representation, sabbatical officers, Sahaya James, Stop the Elephant Development, student activism, students' unions, SU finance, trade unions, transparency, trustees, tuition fees, UAL, uk, union bars, university management.

By Bradley Allsop and Calum Watt

It is a time of extraordinary potential for change in UK Higher Education. Labour’s promise to end tuition fees has defied the critics and united many behind Corbyn’s political project. But what will the implications for universities be if this comes to pass? And what can we do to leverage this progress? In this series, the Norwich Radical and Bright Green are bringing together perspectives from across the sector to explore these questions.

Students’ Unions are meant to defend students’ rights, fighting with and for them during their time at university and beyond. However, modern SUs are often dominated by corporate thinking, consumer culture and cosy collusion with university management. Radical, grassroots democracy is often muted or discouraged, channelled instead into more temperate, gradual and piecemeal avenues by Unions centralised in their functioning and timid in their approach.

HIGHER EDUCATION IN A POST-FEES WORLD – BEYOND TUITION FEES #1

Posted on April 6, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged academics, activists, Beyond Tuition Fees, Bright Green, consumerism, cost of living, democracy, diversity, education, employability, featured, Free Education, future, government, HE policy, higher education, jeremy corbyn, Labour, Lib Dems, marketisation, mental health, NUS, postgraduate tutors, progressives, representation, sexual harassment, social justice, social mobility, strike action, student activism, student debt, student experience, student life, students, students' unions, Tories, trade unions, tuition fees, UCU strike, uk, universities, university staff, utopianism, welfare.

By Bradley Allsop and Calum Watt

It is a time of extraordinary potential for change in UK Higher Education. Labour’s promise to end tuition fees has defied the critics and united many behind Corbyn’s political project. But what will the implications for universities be if this comes to pass? And what can we do to leverage this progress? In this new series, the Norwich Radical and Bright Green are bringing together perspectives from across the sector to explore these questions.

Politics is in a very different place than a few years ago. Radical change feels possible, tangible, close. The Labour Party’s pledge to scrap tuition fees is one of many signs of this – welcome, and necessary to salvage higher education from the marketised juggernaut it has become. But just abolishing fees is not enough to fix all of higher education’s problems.

UCU STRIKE TO PROTECT PENSIONS

Posted on February 12, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged academic staff, academics, direct action, education, featured, investment, KEF, lecturers, NUS, office for students, pensions, REF, solidarity, strike, tef, trade unions, tuition fees, UCU, UEA, UEA SU, university staff, USS.

The much-reported Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) strike in protest of cynical changes to university staff pension arrangements begins next week. The UEA branch of UCU and UEA Students’ Union have produced this statement for The Norwich Radical, to offer an introduction to the issues surrounding the strike. The Radical encourages all students, in Norwich and elsewhere, to stand in solidarity with the strikers by not attending classes on the dates of the strikes, and by sharing their message with your peers.

REVIVING CAMPUS ACTIVISM – A ROADMAP

Posted on July 6, 2017 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged academia, academic culture, academics, access, accessible academia, accountability, alliances, Apartheid, austerity, awareness, awareness raising, British political history, Campaign for Lincoln Democracy, campaign strategy, campaigning, campus culture, co-operation, co-operative university, collective action, communication, Community, culture, curricula, curriculum reform, decision making, democracy, democratic higher education, depoliticised unions, direct action, diversity, economics, economics education, elections, employment rights, escalation, experts, GE17, government, grassroots, higher education, hubris, international organising, investigative journalism, Lincoln SU, Lincoln University, listicles, lobbying, local media, manchester, media, neoliberalism, occupation, organising, petitions, pluralism, politics, Post-Crash Economics Society, postgraduate tutors, Queen's University Belfast Students' Union, Queens' University Belfast, radical media, referendum, Rethinking Economics, senior management, Social Science Centre Lincoln, startup media, strategy, student activism, student democracy, student elections, student experience scores, student life, student media, student societies, students, students' unions, teaching, teaching staff, trade unions, uk, uk politics, universities, university staff, War of Words, Warwick Anti-Casualisation, Warwick University, workers, workers rights, working conditions, WOW 2016, young people, youth turnout.

by Bradley Allsop

We live in turbulent times. The political establishment has been rocked again and again this last year. The government is embattled in a way it hasn’t been for 7 years and that rarest of things in British politics, change, is peeking its head above the parapet. What’s more, for the first time in my lifetime, it seems my generation is willing to be an active participant in all this. June’s election saw the highest rise in youth turnout in British political history – it reached its highest absolute level since 1992. It falls to those of us already engaged to fan this flame and help it spread beyond the ballot box, building the political courage and competencies of our fellows. Nowhere offers a better opportunity for us to do this than on university campuses.

trade unions

BANANA LINK – THE NORWICH ORGANISATION DEFENDING BANANA WORKERS’ RIGHTS

JUSTICE FOR CLEANERS AT KING’S COLLEGE LONDON

FUCK FUTURE FINANCE – THE FRIGHTENING REALITY OF PRIVATE STUDENT LOANS

THE FUTURE OF STUDENTS’ UNIONS – BEYOND TUITION FEES #4

UCU STRIKE TO PROTECT PENSIONS

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