Student unions: worth defending

When students first start university, they are not quite sure what a student association is, or what is actually does.

University students’ associations are responsible for organising events and gigs, such as the Orientation Week shows. They provide students with a wide range of support, such as counseling, mediation, and tutorials. In Otago, OUSA owns the University Book Shop, the only store in town to stock specialist text books. It helps to run UNIPOL (the local student gym), the university rowing club, and Clubs and Societies Centre, where students can participate in a wide range of activities, such as Italian cooking, learning Spanish, wine-tasting, karate, chess, even dungeons and dragons. AUSA in Auckland owns the book shop, bFM, the main Café and more. AUSA boasts that it is the only voluntary union in the country and claims to be free to join. However, its website admits it is funded by the university (to which students pay fees) and is only able to offer so many services because it “predominantly survives off money from its businesses that have been built up over the past”. Student associations are living proof of the power of collective bargaining. By paying the union dues you get access not only to the benefit of belonging to a collective but also to all of the resources that have been built up over the past century. All of this could be lost if Roger’s bill becomes law.
Experience from Australia suggests that this is the case. A 2007 study by Australian University Sport (AUS) and the Australasian Campus Union Managers’ Association (ACUMA) found that 1000 jobs were slashed. Funding for sports was slashed by 40%. Perhaps most ironically, “[p]rices charged to students for use of services and facilities have in general increased materially since on-set of VSU”.

Freedom of Choice?

But what about freedom of choice? For fanatical neoliberals such as Rodger Douglas, it is important that individuals are able to select what type of organisations that they belong to. Yet we should not be deluded that there is anything progressive about voluntary student association. This bill will make campus life much worse.
Roger Douglas and his cronies instituted a harsh neo-liberal regime in New Zealand in the 1980s. Many workers were forced to join unions, until a law change made it optional for everyone. As a result, union membership plummeted from around 50%, to around 25% today. Workers who believed that they would be better off with voluntary unionism were naïve. The unions in New Zealand are much weaker today than they should be. Wages have declined or stagnated for the majority of workers over last 25 years. As individuals, workers and students are weak. Yet together, they have the strength to take on the system to achieve real wins.
Furthermore, all members of society are forced to pay for things that they do not wish to. As Dom Knight wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald “No-one seriously objects to the government funding Olympic athletes, or running an art gallery, or paying for community centers, so why is it any worse when a university or a student union does it? The notion that this is somehow unfair, because some of the money invested theoretically comes out of other students' pockets, is very shortsighted.”

What can you do?

If you are a worker or a student, you can help to shut down this bill. Talk to your friends and your flatmates about why VSM will be a disaster. If you want a campus in which has more to offer than a lecture theatre, then you have to be prepared to fight for it. Don’t let neoliberals like those in the ACT party make our lives more difficult. Best of all, use the student association as an organizing centre – write letters or articles on VSM for your student magazine, encourage your elected representatives to take action, build an education action group on your campus to spread the word and take protest action.

 Reece W