Dispatches From the US Student Movement: February 15

OccupyColleges ‏@OccupyColleges

Dispatches From the US Student Movement: February 15 | The Nation http://fb.me/zykaLB5J

http://www.thenation.com/blog/172930/dispatches-us-student-movement-february-15

1. Can Students Save Mississippi’s Last Abortion Clinic?
The weekend before the fortieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, students from Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, met with campus organizers at the Feminist Majority Foundation to prepare for the arrival of extremist anti-choice protesters at Mississippi’s only abortion clinic, the Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Anti-choice legislators have targeted the JWHO with the Target Regulation of Abortion Providers, or TRAP, law, requiring abortion doctors to have admitting privileges to the local hospitals. Unfortunately the local Jackson hospital boards refuse to admit JWHO abortion doctors, making it impossible for the clinic to comply with the new regulation. While the clinic is waging a legal battle in court, the feminist group at Millsaps is working with FMF and Jackson State University student leaders to provide escorts to help clinic patients avoid harassment and to hold up pro-choice signs in support of the clinic.
—Sara Sacks

2. Walker Be Damned, Wisconsin Grad Students Haven’t Left the Table
The Teaching Assistants’ Association, the labor union for grad student workers at the University of Wisconsin that was central to the occupation of the state capitol in 2011, is initiating its most ambitious campaign since losing legal bargaining rights after Governor Scott Walker’s union-busting law. The onerous “segregated fees” that are levied on top of tuition impose an additional $1,100 burden on students per year (and rising), representing a roughly ten percent pay cut on grad workers’ already paltry yearly earnings. The TAA has entered informal bargaining to either have these fees waived or to raise salaries sufficently to offset the segregated fee burden. This is by no means an unreasonable demand, nor an undue burden on the university’s finances: With increasing segregated fee costs, increasing healthcare costs and stagnant wages, the average TA has lost nearly $1,600 in annual take-home pay since 2002.
—Michael Billeaux

3. UC’s Biological Warfare
While tuition at the University of California more than tripled since 2000, temporary state tax increases from Proposition 30 have generated additional revenue for public education, blocking the UC regents from continuing to raise tuition. However, students across the ten campuses are now fighting off new attempts to hike healthcare fees 19 to 32 percent. This hike comes despite UC student healthcare benefits remaining below national Obamacare standards, and at the same time as the top-ranked UC medical center is raking in profits of $900 million a year. UC students are organizing actions at different campuses around vital student healthcare issues—against the fee increases; to remove lifetime caps limiting healthcare; to provide free preventive care services, including reproductive health services for women; and to offer affordable healthcare for students’ dependents—as well as pushing for state legislation to remove the lifetime healthcare caps. A powerful network of student groups, including the UC Student-Workers Union UAW 2865 and UC Students Association, is working together to ensure that quality and affordable healthcareand affordable healthcare—so essential for students’ very health, wellbeing and life—is not steamrolled by the UC executive management’s attempts to quantify and profit from it as an enterprise.
—Elise Youn

4. SoCal’s Strategy
On February 16, the Southern California Education Organizing Coalition will converge for a one-year anniversary conference at Pasadena City College to answer the question: Where do we go from here as a coalition within California’s student movement? Last year, students, staff and faculty from all sectors of public education in Southern California came together to create an autonomous space to talk about common struggles and share strategies in the fight against austerity. Since that time, we have achieved the passage of state propositions and local measures that promise to re-fund the school system, pressured Governor Jerry Brown and the rest of the governing boards to declare temporary ceases in system-wide tuition hikes and won tuition fee rollbacks for students within the California State University system. But with the City College of San Francisco community still fending off the closure of its campus, University of California students struggling against healthcare fee hikes and the California State University Board of Trustees still pushing its online education agenda, it has become clear that re-funding the coffers of our system’s governing boards has not been enough to stop the attack on public education in California.
—Vanessa Lopez

(More at the link.)