Campus Compact
Campus Compact is a campaign being run by SLAP chapters around the country. The Compact was built through the success of student organizing over the past decade – from living wages, to students controlling committees that decide business partners, the right to unionize and acknowledging the power our campuses have as the labor standard setters.
Students work with university administrators to pass these Campus Compacts to ensure workers are treated fairly (living wage), create mechanisms that allow an easier process for unionization with protections for workers on the campus (regardless of contract status with the university), and build student power in a way that allows the students that make the university work, work for them. The key points of the Compact are:
- Student and worker voices in decisions that raise fees, tuition and other costs that prohibit working families from attending colleges and universities
- Living wage for all workers on campus
- University will respect the rights of employees to vote for union representation
- Addresses the need to adjust salaries to prevent tuition increases, compression and layoffs
- Majority of students composing campus Request for Proposals (RFP) committees and contract renegotiation regarding non-university contracts.
- Create representative assessment body from equal numbers students, workers, administrators, faculty, faith leaders, etc. tasked with monitoring and advising on the future of the compact.
This compact serves a larger vision of creating universities that operate as “community wealth builders,” able to create good jobs in an industry that can’t be outsourced.When universities make this commitment, we see lives of not only campus and student workers improve but of all workers in our communities by using our large employment power to raise floors for all workers.
Campus Compact allows students to have a say in how our campuses operate in a long-term vision, empowers and protects students and workers, and builds a strong community influenced by solidarity for one each others struggle.
