February 15th, 2020

People & Planet guest blog
'How can you uphold the human rights of others whilst studying?'

This blog has been written by People and Planet based at The Old Music Hall, 106-108 Cowley Rd, Cowley, Oxford OX4 1JE.  The views and suggestions in this blog are the authors.

It’s a big question, one that may not have crossed your mind before – but if you’re a student at a UK university then you are uniquely placed to influence the lives of others around the world. Enter People & Planet, the UK’s largest student network campaigning on world poverty and the environment. Our campaigns are specifically tailored to the university setting, maximising the impact that students can have by encouraging them to leverage their position of privilege within the higher education sector. Our demands are achievable, have a long term impact, are built on the principle of solidarity, and are democratically chosen by our student network.

People & Planet run four campaigns on campuses in the UK, two of which are focussed on climate justice, and the other two focussed on workers rights and migrant rights. Whilst all our campaigns are intrinsically linked, this Blog will focus on the two campaigns most directly working towards protecting Human Rights in the UK and further afield.

Sweatshop Free
Sweatshop Free is our campaign focused on challenging corporate power: previously this focused on the garment industry but recently moved to incorporate electronics factories into it’s remit, after it became obvious that UK universities were complicit in the use of sweatshops to produce their tech products. The UK Modern Slavery Act (2015) seeks to address slavery, forced labour and human trafficking taking place today. On 29 October 2015, the transparency in supply chains provisions of the Act (section 54) came into force. The provisions require commercial and public interest organisations, including universities, to publish a statement setting out steps the organisation has taken to ensure that slavery and human trafficking is not taking place in any of its supply chains and in any part of its own business, often referred to as an “anti-slavery statement”.

According to the International Labour Organization around 25 million men, women and children around the world are in a form of forced labour. Globally, there are 5.4 victims of modern slavery for every 1,000 people, and 1 in 4 victims of modern slavery are children. In recent years, there have been a number of troubling revelations relating to labour and human rights abuses within electronics factories, such as the Foxconn Suicides and Samsung union-busting. The global electronics industry has been identified as a high-risk industry for modern slavery.

So what are universities and colleges doing to tackle this issue? As huge purchasers of electronics, spending over £10 billion on products every year, the potential for our educational institutions to influence the electronics sector for the better is clear to see. Much of this money goes to companies with long records of human rights abuses. In terms of the electronics industry, each university generally spends between £3 million and £12 million on computers and other hardware every year.

In 2013, a coalition of workers’ rights organisations in countries producing electronics and European purchasers launched Electronics Watch. This became the first worker led organisation supporting demands for democratic unions, better pay and improved factory conditions in the electronics industry. When colleges, universities and other public institutions come together and join Electronics Watch, they can start making important requests from market leaders, including Apple, HP, Dell, Samsung and others.
They can ask where factories in their supply chains are (transparency is a crucial first step to finding out about working conditions!); what policies the companies have to protect workers; what reparations they offer when they find abuses have occurred; and for workers to participate in factory monitoring and problem-solving. Electronics Watch directly supports worker led monitoring and accountability through informal workers groups, civil society organisations and independent trade unions where workers in sweatshops are based, from Mexico to South Korea and from the Philippines to China.
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The primary goal of the Sweatshop Free campaign is to get our universities and colleges to join Electronics Watch and take their responsibility as major purchasers of electronics seriously!

Undoing Borders
People & Planets Undoing Borders campaign is part of a student movement fighting the advance of the 'hostile environment' onto university campuses. The climate crisis, alongside decades of military intervention in the Global South, has driven tens of millions from their homes. Meanwhile, the border industry, including immigration detention centres and surveillance companies, swells with the profits of this devastation.
The Home Office co-opts universities into doing their dirty work of surveilling migrants, and undercutting their rights and access to public goods. Young people with temporary immigration status and en-route to citizenship face insurmountable barriers to access higher education. Those with irregular status are denied access entirely. Migrant students and workers in the university are subjected to increasingly invasive forms of policing. While targeting migrants, these processes also erode the rights and freedoms essential to citizenship itself.
Students can reclaim universities as a site of struggle for migrant justice: People, not documents and detention centres, must have power to determine who is free to live with dignity and transform society. We are part of the long fight for these rights to be universal. To this end, we are campaigning for the Vice-Chancellors of UK universities to sign the 'Pledge Against the Hostile Environment'.
The Pledge is a public condemnation of Home Office policies that set up discriminatory barriers to entry for migrant students, turn university staff into border guards and expose students and staff to the abuses of detention and deportation. It is a commitment to prioritising the University's role as a site of critical learning and research, and its orientation to social good, over compliance with Home Office anti-immigrant policy. The Pledge has three main areas:
1. Education for all
​Applicants with ‘discretionary’ or ‘limited’ leave to remain are made to pay international fees and denied access to student finance – effectively excluding them from higher education. Some universities impose more stringent academic requirements and financial proof for students from countries that UK Visas and Immigration designates as 'high-risk'.
We are demanding that universities classify applicants with temporary immigration status as ‘home’ students for fee purposes, and to provide them with bursaries and administrative support. We are demanding that universities remove any additional academic and financial requirements for international applicants put in place to minimise visa rejection figures.
2. Stop surveillance
The Home Office co-opts teaching staff to monitor their own students’ compliance with visa requirements, to ‘catch out’ those whose status becomes irregular or who have to work without permission to support themselves. Universities develop teams of dedicated personnel, as well as training programmes to embed this surveillance across all departments.
We are demanding that universities remove all measures of monitoring that infringe on legislation protecting human rights, civil liberties and equality and to end sub-contracting of data-collection to private companies. We are demanding that training gives priority to these duties over compliance with the Home Office.
3. No detention, no deportation
Universities should offer refuge from the abuses of the detention-deportation system and ensure the freedom of association of its workers. They have previously cut off ties to students who are trapped in detention, even when their cases are ongoing. Sub-contracted corporations that manage their catering, cleaning or security services have invited immigration enforcement raids on university workers in order to crush labour organising.
We are demanding that universities take every precaution in order not to deliver students and staff into immigration detention, to support those who are detained or under threat of detention or deportation, and to intervene to ensure staff’s freedom of association.
Want to get involved with People and Planet? So, if you want to uphold the human rights of others during your time at university, one way of doing so is to launch a Sweatshop Free or Undoing Borders campaign on your campus.

Contact sweatshopfree@peopleandplanet.org and/or undoingborders@peopleandplanet.org to find out more, we have everything needed to get you started and will support you all the way!