“The Life of a Student Activist”

The first year of university went very slowly for me. Despite making some great friends and settling in to my course, I was never sure whether I should really be there. Second year, however, was a turning point where my social and political views came together and I started to feel a need to make a difference in the world.

Autumn 2010

Over the summer, after spending time as part of my local Fairtrade group and discussing political issues with friends, I realised that to be happy I needed to make the most of my university experience. I needed to get involved in a charity or organisation with people who shared my interests. After seeing a People & Planet society stall at the Freshers Fayre, and realising how dedicated the network was to defending human rights, ending world poverty and protecting the planet, I got involved immediately. At the first meeting I felt really enthusiastic about ethical and environmental issues and was so delighted to realise that I was surrounded by others who shared my passion. I also became more involved in the Green Party and met activists who had campaigned for more to be done around climate change, and felt keen to make an impact myself. At the start of the term I went to a talk from a speaker for the Global Poverty Project and it really inspired me to try and help others. The words I heard and the images I saw that evening triggered something in me and life started to change.

My first encounter with my activism having an effect on people directly was at a Barclays Graduate training scheme talk. Along with some friends I interrogated the Barclays ambassadors on their ethical and environmental policies – or lack of – which resulted in a lot of resentment from the workers, and some very interesting discussions with other students.

As news spread of Nick Clegg’s betrayal of his policies, the student movement began and I was eager to join the campaigning against the rise in tuition fees. The student demo in London inspired me to stand up for what I believed. The anger at the MPs who had gone back on their word was prominent that day and there was a worry that Thatcher Tory days were returning. Despite the small amount of violence that day, there was a sense of unity amongst the campaigners and I felt like a student from the 70s – determined to start a movement and give a voice to the unheard. My family were reluctant about my involvement in such controversial issues, and in some respects my Dad has continued to disapprove of my outspoken, direct action ever since, but my Mum was proud that I was standing up for what I believed in. My lecturer was also very supportive and allowed me to miss a lecture to take part, meaning I felt even more empowered to stand up for future students. The beginning of the student movement was quite special. Many students felt passionate about the cause, there was hope that we could win this and prevent tuition fees rising. As the months drew on, the public’s spirit seemed to dwell and societies’ reaction to who I had become as a person was changing.

Winter 2010

The initial passion of protest had worn off for the majority of those at the original tuition fees demo as snow appeared on the doorstep of Cardiff students, but there were still some dedicated souls ready to keep me fighting for a cause I believed in. As part of “Action Against the Cuts Cardiff” I took part in the occupation of a lecture theatre and organised demonstrations throughout the city centre which gained lots of Welsh coverage and achieved great things. However, the London protest on the day of the national vote, was different. The violence I saw that day from police and students frightened me, but I was defiant that we were campaigning for a serious and important cause and that my activism would not stop. My involvement in such edgy issues and contact with the police after being traditionally a well behaved, suburban A grade student came as a shock to some friends back home as my fiery nature shone through.

UKUncut action in Cardiff

The student protests built momentum for the rest of society to stand up against the cuts and movements like UK Uncut began. Occupying stores like Vodafone and Topshop was becoming a more prominent part of my day to day life as the tax avoiders were targeted. I knew that when I came back after Christmas, I could not go back to my old self and that I had developed a passion for activism, for devoting myself to worthwhile causes.

Spring 2011

The beginning of the Arab Revolution last spring gave hope to so many individuals across the world. I can remember my Dad saying “When did protest ever achieve anything?” just before Egypt‘s old president Mubarak stood down. It was a turning point in how my father saw my actions and to students and academics across the globe. Being involved in the larger community in Cardiff by now, I felt keen to stand up against the cuts affecting all individuals, and protested against pension cuts and the NHS. In times of need, it was comforting to see society come together and shout for each other’s livelihoods.

Striving for equality is also a continuing theme in my Sociology degree and has meant that my feminist belief has grown significantly since first year. After reading about “Slutwalk”, I took part in a Cardiff demonstration which was empowering but at the same time controversial for the wrong reasons. It made me feel that as a fiery young woman, life was still very different to how it is for a man. Women are treated differently even in issues of activism where we are campaigning for equality. At the student protests, the police were definitely more lenient to frightened young women than to the frightened men. This has only fuelled my desire to fight for equality even more.

In 2011 my participation with the Green Party increased significantly as I volunteered to undertake a media internship. As I learnt more about how we need to change our reliance on fossil fuels and take more drastic action to prevent runaway climate change, my every day life was altered a little. Already being vegetarian, I strived to do more simple things to look after my planet, such as recycling and cycling instead of driving. However, the way I perceive TV shows, individuals and the actions of companies changed significantly as I realised how little others think about their impact on society and our future planet. Being so concerned changes the way I see others, which made me question whether people have changed the way they see me? But my political involvement has become an active part of my lifestyle and I hope it continues that way for the rest of my life.

Year Three

This year I hope to become part of the Student Council and fight for our university to become more ethical and environmentally friendly. I will be campaigning against the Tar Sands in Alberta, attending a demo in London to ban public sector clothes being made in sweatshops and perhaps occupying an oil or gas head-quarters to try and stop the UK’s dependency on unsustainable fuels. I will also be supporting Oxfam and the Global Poverty Project on issues such as Fairtrade and food shortages. This of course will be done alongside campaigning against the cuts to our society.

Being an activist means leading a busy lifestyle and campaigning becomes a priority, but not behind trying to have fun with friends, family and my boyfriend. I have learnt not to preach my views but just to let people know that I will live my life focused on trying to make a small difference to the lives of some individuals somewhere in the world. Life seems very merry when you know you are being the best you can be while living life to the full as a university student in one of the best cities for fun and education in the UK.

by Marie, who is currently investigating garment factories in Bangladesh.

After my first three weeks as a project manager of a project to improve the social labour conditions for female line-operators in the garment industry in Bangladesh by providing them with free training and skills-upgrading to become supervisors and move up the hierarchical gendered ladder of highly exploitative factory work, I have been faced with both ups and downs.

So far we have 50 factories officially on board and in agreement to let us provide training to and interview their female workers, however sweet-talk words exchanged through diplomatic performance and acting in shiny factory director offices as well as warm receptions pampering us with cake, chai, factory-gifts, restaurant visits and hummer rides, do not always amount to concrete action, and still 30 out of the 50 factories haven’t signed and returned the memorandums of understanding we have handed them.  The sad reality I have come to realize is that there is a never-ending amount of layers to go through to really get a chance at revealing and changing what goes on behind the scenes in the garment factories.

One of the by far most 'decent' looking of Bangladeshi garment factories I've seen so far. Yet, these workers had no air conditioning.

The overwhelming princess treatment I have received as a ‘white woman’ has been the hardest challenge and has been a real distraction in my attempt to have a formal meeting about a serious issue at social compliance and workers’ rights.

In the middle of conversations, factory directors interrupt me to ask if I am single, where I live, or ask me what if I’m free to meet for a drink later. After meetings they often invite me for lunch/dinner at their fancy restaurants, or offered to give me a ride home in their Hummer cars. One factory director even insisted on giving me a pair of factory produced jeans as a gift – and before I had the change to refuse he snatched his fingers to get one of the female workers to come and take my measurements and within 15min she returned with a shiny new pair of quality jeans. I’ve never felt so embarrassed and awkward in my life. By having to negotiate with these directors I’m trapped in their terms having to accept their fake hospitality for me and therefore implicitly their maltreatment and disrespect of their workers.  One of the things that has hit me the worst on a personal level is that because I hand them over my business card with my mobile number on it, many of them give me sleazy prank calls and text messages with compliments and sexual innuendos. Under these circumstances, keeping up the ‘business etiquette’ mask is tough, and the directors behaviour feels like such a smooth side-track maneuvre when my research team’s sole intention is asking them to commit to training and promoting their female line-operators.

One of the most unexpected experiences I had was probably a meeting I had with a rich french guy, who at the age of 24 is now the director of one of the big garment factories over here due to his noble family connections. The most memorable comment he made during our meeting what when he boasted that “It’s a tough job trying to control my workers here sometimes, they are all connected to the mafia and talk like ‘des petits nègres’ (little negros), without me in charge they would be lost”. After that statement, I simply had no words.

On the other hand, I’ve also had a lot of golden moments of visiting factories highly committed to ensuring the social welfare of their workers. I’ve had meetings with Directors who introduced me to their FEMALE Social Compliance Managers, who were strongly committed to workers’ rights and told me stories about their different workers backgrounds and some of the social difficulties they face in Dhaka and what social benefits they provide them to cope with these.

One of the most inspiring meetings I have had was with a garment factory who had received an award for the best Corporate Social Responsibility practicing firm in Bangladesh in 2008 after receiving the very same training program which my team is now trying to introduce to 96 other factories. This factory had each floor of the factory named after a Bangladeshi freedom fighter to teach his workers about history while they work. They also provide their workers with English lessons, disease-prevention courses on anything from Tuberculosis to AIDs/HIV, free health care and dental care vouchers, maternity leave benefits and ‘newborn’ baby prices. They arrange monthly workers’ sports tournament and cultural festivals where workers’ perform. The director has founded a free school for his workers kids next to the factory. They even had a ‘ladies club’ and a hair and beauty salon for their female workers.  Most remarkably, the factory had implemented rigorous sexual harassment measurements and awareness courses – introducing male/female separated exits, staircases and canteens. At first when I was given a tour of that factory and shown their portfolio of all the seemingly impressive things they do for their workers I was in awe. However, a head of social compliance at a large supermarket firm, he informed me that a lot of these ‘big achievements and social commitments’ are mostly for show for when foreigners come to visit and that there is still a lot of labour exploitation going on behind closed doors, which only local staff working in this field will realise. Alas, my Scandinavian naïveté fooling me again.

Another contradiction I was exposed to was when visiting another factory that had received training two years ago and now demonstrated me that they had 50 % female supervisors and even some female line production chiefs – they even gave me the whole tour of the floor and allowed me to take photos of them (see pictures below). Yet, all my respect for them and their commitments to women’s empowerment was lost when the director slapped and shouted at a female worker who ran up to him crying because she had injured her foot on one of the machines on one of the floor I was shown around on. Horrific.

More generally, there is a lot of mismatching and deceiving information going around both regarding social welfare standards at factories and the CSR of the major international retailers. Some factory directors supplying for a major brand big them up saying how committed a brand they are to training their workers and ensuring high environmental and social standards. However, one of my friends here who is engaged to a man who has  senior position at a garment producing  office in Dhaka told me that it is common knowledge within the garment business in Bangladesh and amongst retailers that the brand are by far the worst at exploiting their factory workers and not living up to social compliance standards – often not even respecting the ban on child labour.

The garment industry over here simply is a jungle and impossible to get your head around – still I’ll keep trying!

The other day I had a conversation with my mum where she admitted that, given the state of the world, she almost regrets bringing my sister and me into it. I was taken aback because I had never heard her talk like that before. No, I insisted, it’s not all bad.

People & Planet students protest against climate destruction, Rich Lott

Granted, a lot of it is - climate change threatens the world with intense storms, increased flooding and droughts, reduced food production, water scarcity, higher rates of disease, and millions of refugees fleeing from these problems. But crisis brings with it opportunity. It may be daunting that it is up to our generation to save the world, but it is also hugely exciting (although admittedly, I would rather that everything was all okay in the first place). Necessity will give us the opportunity to create a new society, and if you want one that is moulded to your own values and beliefs you had better sit up and start paying attention.

But people will never change, my mum told me, they are just too used to being told what to do. I’ll concede the latter; blame whoever you want – the state, mass media, consumerism, the parents – people are used to being lazy, apathetic and self-centred, and this needs to change now if we as a species are to survive the next few centuries. But I don’t think that the problem is down to human nature.

The problem is down to hope, or rather, the lack of any. People have been told what to do (or had their choices narrowed down for them by what is considered acceptable or achievable) for so long that they no longer believe that they are in control of their own lives. We are incapable of thinking outside the box, and no, the irony of using such a horribly cliched phrase to express this is not lost on me.

Lifestyle choices for graduates have been narrowed down to a ‘choice’ between law, the civil service and finance (the credit crunch has not done much to alter this). People feel tied down by their mortgage (ditto) and unable to take risks. Though most importantly, people feel helpless and hopeless in the face of the world’s problems. We seem to lack the imagination to envisage a world in which we matter, in which each of us can make a difference, but if we all stopped moaning and started acting on our beliefs the world would change. I honestly believe that. I believe that you can make a difference, and you should too, or else what kind of life are you going to lead? You can do anything you want to do, as long as you never give up. In the words of Rebecca Solnit, ‘It is always too early to go home.’

History shows us the difference that individuals can make: Mahatma Gandhi, Emmeline Pankhurst, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela… the list is endless. So don’t just strive for that big promotion, a new car, the deposit on a house; you deserve better than that. Aim high and help create the world in which you would like to live. And never give up.

Every time I come home for the holidays, or for a special occasion, or just because I need to, mortality and the fragility of life seem to become more and more apparent. In the last year there have been family and friends deaths that have shocked, the bloodiest month of the war in Afghanistan, the sale of our family business, my God Mother turning 70, the culling of analogue TV (joke) and the death of legends such as Michael Jackson and John Dankworth.

I’m lucky to live in the same town as most of my close family, my Granny lives just next door. For as long as I’ve noticed she has been hailed as ‘remarkable’ for her age-still driving, still bright eyed and quick witted, still going on holiday, and still making jewellery at 93. I.e. she is still passing comment on what I wear with a designer’s eye, winking at…everyone, snorting into her whiskey etc.

We also have a pretty cool dog, a beautiful striped greyhound that always seemed to me to be able to run faster than a cheetah. We have had her since she was 2 years old, I was 11 when she joined the family. Now that I’ve reached 20, I can see her legs failing, her laps of the beach getting slower and fewer, and eyes going murky.

Just like the dog, every time I return home, Granny seems to take a step closer to death.

She no longer has ‘interesting conversation’ because all she wants to tell me about is this bruise and this ache and this pill and this life that she no longer wants for herself. Her tenacity to not wear beige like the rest of the retired population of this town has been transferred to threatening me with her walking off the harbour wall and beating the demons that haunt in her in her old age rather than feeding the aspects of her life that warded them off in the first place.

Would frivolity lessen the pain of facing death?

Would a trip to the other side of the world shroud her aches and pains in cultural diversity and distraction?

Would drinking herself to oblivion make her remember better times so as to override and smother the current ones?

Well apparently not.

I have suggested all of these things, and apart from the latter, which she has always done anyway (she doesn’t like water) the cons of her life always win over.

What is the psychology behind this? What are her motivations?

From the outside it is hard to see past how annoying it has become, your sympathy is marred by her selfishness in focusing on it, it should be easy to be frivolous, but if I put myself in her place I cannot think I would be much different. I’m sure, being a do-er, that I would feel like enjoying myself and throwing caution to the wind all the more if I could walk properly, if I could do it all without wincing in pain and having to drag a scarily purple leg around with me to see the sites of the world. To do it anyway requires a lot of money and a lot of organisation to make up for your lack of capacity; thus my efforts day in and day out to reduce that pain, to solve the problem, to replace my teeth, are all the efforts of a compos mentis human who still has pride in themselves, and still has the sense of self to be embarrassed by the slow unravelling of what you know about yourself, with the ultimate knowledge that death is the only outcome.

To desire to put it off, to remedy your ills so that you can enjoy life more, has got to be an indication that the capacity to enjoy life, and to hang onto it, remains within.

Recently I have noticed that countries of the world can suffer from this too. I hate to mention it so close to Granny (the other day she said to me “it’s all very well saving the planet but if you can’t save your Grandmother….”) but in the UNFCCC process, i.e. the UN Climate Change Negotiations, those countries who sit in plenary at the negotiations brazenly telling the world they are going under water or being starved to death by the climatic changes their country is facing betrays the same thinking as Granny.

Obviously every human knows that death is their final destination, and that it’s what comes in between now and death that counts. But, if you see death every day, in the colour of your leg, your teeth falling out, in the tides lapping on your doorstep, or the face of your child who you can’t feed because the crops have failed and it’s your only source of income, it is no longer an issue of deciding how to best use your in-between time, it is survival.

As the youth emphasised in Poznan in 2008, survival is not negotiable.

That fear of death, that reflex for survival is surely what drives the brazen please in plenary to commit to 350 parts per million, and agree on 1.5 degrees maximum temperature rise without compromise-it is not a matter of choice but necessity.

Similarly it is my lack of proximity to death that makes me unable to empathise with my Granny when she just doesn’t shut up (I am sympathetic though), and equally the Saudi Arabians who follow Tuvalu’s pleas for survival with excuses of loss of crops and profits from oil as a reason to commit comes down to a lack of empathy and concern because it is not happening to them. If they were fighting for survival, oil profits would be the least of their worries, but they are not.

Countries with the money to get themselves out of any fixes they come across, are the fully endowed frivolous people, they are the ones who no matter what nature throws at them, they believe they can throw money back at it in equal weight and see a solution without compromising anything of what they do.

The SIDS (Small Island Developing Nations) and African countries are those with immense national pride and culture but who are already seeing the worst effects of nature’s aging and unravelling, thus they are ones who need to reduce the pain, plug the gaps, and get help. They are the 93 year olds in this process, the ones who cannot consider frivolity until they have solved the ills that they already have, a lot of which happen to be caused by a changing climate.

The developed countries, who have the funds, and already feel the impacts of climate change, such as Australia and New Zealand are the 93 year olds who are the same as my Granny, but they have the money to throw at the situation, so that instead of changing their reality, they simply become frivolous to cover it up.

The developed countries who aren’t yet in that position, like the UK and most of Europe, are something like my God Mother who has just reached 70 and is, as of yet, vehemently without aches and ailments that need servicing, so she can be frivolous with her time and focus in any which way pleases her-after all, the pain isn’t imminent, it is merely something we all accept as a future possibility, and one which we could take vitamins for today, but really, are we convinced it will make the difference in the long term?

I draw two lessons from this; firstly that life is precious, in all its forms, in all its pains and in all its beauty. Secondly, it is this inspiration and pride in one’s life and lands that will keep international negotiations and agreements alive in the coming years.  As long as we have headstrong countries like Grenada and Tuvalu, Kenya and Bolivia clinging onto survival because they love their country and their life, we have a reason to negotiate.

To apply the question I ask of Granny, would frivolity lessen the pain of facing death?

I would answer no.

Frivolity in the face of death makes everything more acute.

When you know what the frivolity is masking, what it is really trying to achieve, rather than add pleasure to a dying life it creates an excuse for inaction, it is disturbing to witness and sickening to face because you know that death came unhindered and without fear of a challenge.

The day we give up on life and the future, the day we stop campaigning and lobbying our MP’s and Governments to solve the pains and ailments of our earth, is the day we become frivolous with ourselves and our children’s futures, and thanks to globalisation, this is not acceptable on more than a merely personal level because we are not only carving out a future for ourselves but a reality for the SIDS and African countries today.

This weekend, I’m leaving my cold student house in Leicester, and heading up to my favourite city Manchester for People & Planet’s annual conference Shared Planet. My parents live near Manchester, and some of my friends are studying there so I tend to be in the City at least once a month, although usually for shopping and drinking rather than attending talks and MP panel debates! (more…)

On the to do list: call the press, paint the banner, check up on legal stuff, scout out the area, fire off the call-out facebook reminders, assemble the costumes, prepare the spiel – all in a day’s work for the RBS AGM action in London in April this year. (more…)

My last Activist Winds post told of the Edinburgh uni Occupation for Gaza. Well since then the hurricane has continued to spread like that hilarious super-storm in the Day After Tomorrow, with further occupations and protests in St. Andrews, York and Aberdeen.  So we can see which way the wind is blowing: a lot of students are p*ssed off and want militancy and corporate power off campus. (more…)