United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), Teach for America’s worst nightmare
This is an amazing group.
From their website:
United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) is the nation’s largest youth-led, student labor campaign organization, with affiliated locals on over 150 campuses. USAS affiliates run both local and nationally-coordinated campaigns for economic justice in partnership with worker and community organizations. Since 1997, USAS has won precedent-setting campaigns, educated students about the growing dominance of corporations in the globalized economy, as well as the intersectionality of identity and social justice issues with the labor movement, and has trained tens of thousands of young activists to become skilled organizers, researchers, and campaigners in labor and social justice organizations.
Public education is under attack. Corporate-backed behemoths like the Walton (Walmart) and Fisher (Gap Inc) foundations are pouring millions into manufacturing a new pro-corporate education reform consensus on our campuses, propping up groups like Teach for America, Students for Education Reform, and countless sponsored academic research programs. Their goal? To privatize our public education system, turning over a major public good into private hands, in the process smashing the only organized force that has dared to stand up to them: teachers’ unions.
Our teachers have been beating back the corporate attack alone for a long time now. But that’s about to change.
USAS is launching a new campaign to fight back against the corporate robber barons that are dominating the education debate on our campuses, sidelining teachers and education professionals as collateral damage in their take-no-prisoners war against unions. We think it’s about time for corporate-backed groups on our campuses to be called out for what they are and stop getting a free pass when they peddle anti-union trash as grassroots charm.
It’s not that hard to unmask them. Teach for America, for example, partners with Goldman Sachs, the massive investment bank that drove our economy into the ditch and sent hundreds of thousands of homes into unjust foreclosure. Meanwhile, the Walton Foundation gave a quarter million dollars to Students for Education Reform and over $22 million to at least 48 different colleges and universities around the country in 2012 alone.
