First Big Success for the Worker Rights Consortium in the UK

Birmingham Guild Passes Buy Right motion

Honduran trade unionist

Birmingham P&P group are still forging ahead with the Buy Right campaign. Here, Edd Bauer tells us how they’ve had the first success in their campaign to get Birmingham University to join the Worker Rights Consortium and Buy Right.

Just before Christmas Birmingham students union became the first student union to pass a motion in favour of affiliating to the Worker Rights Consortium as part of People and Planet’s new campaign “Buy Right”. The motion commits the Guild of Students, an organization that represents 28,000 students and with an annual turnover of 5.5 million pounds, to bring about progressive changes to its procurement practices.

The Guild has also signed People & Planet’s Buy Right pledge which is available online on the Buy Right resources page and the President has written a letter to the Vice Chancellor asking the university to do likewise. This pledge has been incorporated into the overarching aims of the Guild of Student’s ethical policy.

The guild has now started lobbying the university with Birmingham People & Planet society on several levels to sign up to the Worker Rights Consortium. The motion will soon be online, and if you would like advice about submitting a motion to your students union please do not hesitate to contact me via my blog or Jim at the support office in Oxford.