Last Sunday (the 31st)9pm GMT, 4pm Washington DC and 1pm in LA.  25 Students from all over North America and from the United Kingdom, came together to plan an international day of action to raise awareness and pressure more universities into signing up to the WRC.

The Call which was hosted by Rod from USAS, started with quick introductions and a icebreaker, the fact that no one could see each other did not make the icebreaker any less awkward than usual.

We talked about how to create an event that the media and university would pay attention to. USAS suggested a global “naked day of action”, a picture of a previous similar action by USAS is attached, for more effect we talked about doing it during the US Labor Week or the UK Fair-trade Fortnight.

More importantly however If we want to realize our long term political aims then we need to start making links globally not just between our heads or hubs, but as a decentralized network.

If we don’t start working with our peers internationally, and break away from one centralized hub, our “movement” or network could break down long term, or atleast certinally never reach its potential.

In people and planet our hub or hubs are easy to discern, they are ones who seemingly do all the work and amazingly know everybody, in people and planet we also make these hubs semi formal. The worse case scenario is, these networks hubs, repress the development of new hubs, in the long term this can destroy the network or movement as a single hub could become overloaded or some reason disabled, it could drift from the network politically or could become perceived by the network as no longer working the way it requires.

If we want to maintain an international movement for workers rights, then we need to develop a strong network with multiple hubs, which is capable of constantly forging new connections.

It’s very empowering to be talking about international action to hold globalized corps like nike, fruit of loom to account and it is important for the long term success of our campaign that this international network develops, the next call is on  Sunday 7 February at 9pm please do sign up http://peopleandplanet.org/navid9315

Tags: Buy right, movement building, Network

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 1:31 pm and is filed under Buy Right, Campaigns, Corporate Power, Life in the Network, Trade & Economic Justice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.