USE YOUR VOTE! Vote Option 2: A Better Way Forward

VOTE OPTION 2: A BETTER WAY FORWARD FOR SHEFFIELD UNION

Alongside the Union elections taking place from Tuesday 4th – Thursday 6th March, a referendum on changing the roles of Union Officers will take place.

Option 2 was proposed by a petition signed by over 1100 students, and makes the following proposals:

Save the Sports Officer and Activities Officer: Option 1 proposes merging the two positions into one, leading to a damaging loss of support and representation for thousands of students involved in sports clubs and societies. Option 2 keeps the Officers separate so ensuring that proper representation and advice continue.

For REAL action on Ethical and Environmental responsibility: Option 2 creates the position of Finance, Ethical & Environmental Officer. This Officer would have a range of new responsibilities, including improving recycling provision in the Union, ensuring the provision of fair-trade and ethical products, overseeing the Union’s ethical policies and reducing the Union’s carbon footprint.

Defend Women’s Representation: Option 1 would abolish the position of Women’s Officer. This would threaten vital services, such as the women’s safety bus, safety alarms, and Biteback – the eating disorders self-help group. It would also undermine campaigns for equality, such as for equal pay and improving women’s representation, and would lead to a loss of support and advice for women students.

Strengthen support for student accommodation: Option 2 creates the position of Welfare & Accommodation Officer, with new far-reaching responsibilities for supporting students on accommodation issues. The Officer would have responsibility for university residences, including catering provision, rent levels, recreational facilities and much more. They would also oversee support for students living in private accommodation.

Vote for OPTION 2: A Better Way Forward for Sheffield Union.

Stop Violence Against Women

November 25th is the International Day Against Violence Against Women. Violence against women is a problem in every country in the world. In Britain, one in four women have experienced domestic violence, and every week two women are killed by their current or former partner. Every minute the police receive a call reporting domestic violence, but it’s estimated that less than half of all domestic violence is even reported.

Women’s Aid are holding a ’16 days of action’ campaign this year, which was launched on November 25th and continues until December 10th. The aim is to encourage everyone to take a stand against domestic violence. There are 16 ways to help – I won’t list them all here as you can find that information on the website, but here are a few ideas:

• Most obviously, you can donate money. You can donate £3 through your mobile bill by texting the word ‘ACT’ to 84424 or you can visit this section of the website for other ways to donate money.
• Check out the ‘Buy and Donate’ options on the Women’s Aid website. You can purchase everything from CDs and DVDs to Christmas cards and lip-gloss, and raise money for Women’s Aid at no cost to yourself.
• Recycle your old mobile phone or printer cartridge and raise funds for Women’s Aid

Please consider supporting Women’s Aid through one of these options. They help over 250,000 women every year, through their free helpline, the provision of refuge accommodation for women escaping domestic violence, and providing counselling and other support for women.

Biteback Relaunch

My main focus this week has been the re-launch of Biteback, the Union’s self-help group for people with eating disorders. I’ve been working with Women’s Committee to run stalls in the Union all week to raise awareness of Biteback, including through handing out free fruit, recipe cards and Biteback flyers.

Biteback is run by a fantastic student volunteer and provides a friendly, comfortable and confidential environment for people with eating disorders to meet and talk to others in a similar situation.

Over a million people in Britain are affected by eating disorders, and all the evidence shows that students and young women are most likely to be affected. Biteback is a really important source of help and support for students affected by eating disorders.

The group meets on alternate Tuesday evenings at 6pm in Hicks Building Room F30 (though this room changes to the Dales next semester). The next meetings this semester are on December 4th and December 18th. To find our more about Biteback from the group coordinator you can email biteback@sheffield.ac.uk

For information on other sources of advice and support about eating disorders please check out my section of the website – (http://www.shef.ac.uk/union/advice/support-groups/eating-disorders.php­)

Next semester I’m planning to run a fundraising campaign for South Yorkshire Eating Disorders Association (SYEDA). SYEDA provide a huge range of support services for people with eating disorders, but they rely heavily on donations to keep these services running. If you’d like to help with fundraising for them please get in touch, or come along to a women’s committee meeting.

Also this week I’ve represented the Union at NUS National Council – the group which oversees NUS’ work in between annual conferences. I’ve also continued working on the Union’s environmental policy, and I’ve worked with E&E Committee to arrange a coach to the national climate change march on December 8th. Coach tickets are on sale at Box Office now and cost just £7.50.

Women's Party, Abortion Rights & Environment

Firstly – don’t forget the Women’s Party, this Sunday 18th November at 7pm in the Fusion. The event is for women only and is alcohol free. We’ll have a veggie food buffet, fabulous DJs, dance performances, the chance to check out our women’s library, henna tattoos, and stalls with information about other women’s groups in Sheffield. Hope to see you all there.

And now on to an update on my week… I’ve continued planning for Equality Week, including meeting with various representative committees to plan our activities, and writing up lots of information leaflets and publicity for the week. Equality Week takes place in week 9, that’s beginning November 26th so please look out for our events in that week.

I’ve also had several meetings about our Environment objective. Our Union is entering the Sound Impact awards, which are designed to evaluate the environmental performance of students’ unions, so we’ve been working on evaluating our current performance. I also met with the University’s energy and environment team to discuss how we can work together to address the union and university’s environmental impact.

On Tuesday we had our first women’s committee social, which is always a nice opportunity to get to know each other away from ‘work’. Women’s Committee meets every Wednesday at 4pm in the Pennines so if you’re interested in finding out more about what we do or how you could get involved please come along.

This week I also spent time contacting MPs asking their views about abortion rights, and trying to arrange meetings so we can discuss the subject in more detail. Early next year MPs will be debating a bill which threatens to restrict women’s access to abortion so it’s an important time to speak to MPs and ensure they are aware of the importance of safe, legal abortion for women’s equality.

Equality Week, Women's Party, Education Funding and More!

My week started off with a trip to Manchester to represent the Union at NUS Regional Conference. I then rushed back to Sheffield in the evening to speak in a debate organised by Sheffield Debating on the motion “This house believes all doctors should advise on abortion”. I’m happy to say the motion passed overwhelmingly, showing that people recognise the important of ensuring women can access impartial, accurate and confidential advice about abortion.

Throughout the week I’ve spent time planning the Women’s Party which is taking place on Sunday November 18th. If you’re free and fancy a fun chilled-out party evening then please come along. There’ll be a veggie food buffet and non-alcoholic drinks, as well as dance performances, henna tattoos and DJs willing to play all your requests.

Wednesday saw the first meeting of the Ethical & Environmental Week organising committee. This brings together all the political and campaigning societies to organise a fantastic week raising awareness of E&E issues and encouraging students to take action. It’s not until February so if you’re interested in getting involved please email me for more information.

Thursday involved even more planning meetings! This time for Equality Week, which begins on November 26th. This brings together all of our representative committees (which includes Women’s Committee, Black Students Committee, Disabled and Dyslexic Students’ Forum and LGBT Committee) to highlight the inequality the students they represent face, and to highlight the work they do both in supporting individual students and campaigning for equality. Again to get involved please email me.

This week I’ve also been working on plans for Palestine Solidarity Day, which our Union is required to commemorate as part of our “End Israeli Occupation” policy. We’ll be holding a debate on Thursday 29th November which is a good chance for students to learn about the situation in Palestine, and there’ll be a ‘mock checkpoint’ and stall out on the concourse where students can pick up information and ask questions.

Thursday was of course interrupted by the university-wide powercut. The union still wasn’t up and running by Friday morning so I took the opportunity to go down to Hallam Union and meet with students and officers from Hallam and Sheffield College to discuss how we can work together to run a campaign on education funding.

Student debt is a huge problem for all students, and it’s especially significant for women students. With debt set to increase to between £20,000 and £30,000 following the introduction of top-up fees, pay discrimination means women graduates will take an average of 19.5 years to repay their debt compared to 15 years for male graduates.

With a government review of higher education funding due to report in 2009, it is vital that we lead a strong campaign which explains why the current system - which has led to rising levels of student debt and continued underfunding of universities - has failed both students and universities.

The meeting at Hallam suggested some exciting plans – including the possibility of holding a Sheffield demonstration next year, and organising a debate on top-up fees. Watch this space for more information or email me if you want to get involved.

No Pay Day

Women earn an average of 17% less than men – for women on the average wage this means being £4,000 a year less than a man. It’s the equivalent of women only being paid until October 30th while men are paid until the end of the year.

Women graduates are also affected by unequal pay. Within five years of leaving university women graduates earn 15% less than male graduates. With student debt predicted to rise to between £20,000 and £30,000 following the introduction of top-up fees, this will mean women take an average of 19.5 years to repay their student debt, compared to just 15 years for male graduates.

This week we held a ‘No Pay Day’ campaign, as part of a national initiative organised by the Fawcett Society. We held a stall outside the University’s careers fair where we handed out leaflets educating women students about unequal pay, and encouraging them to ask employers at the careers fair what steps they were taking to address pay discrimination in their companies.

Women’s committee also spoke to a number of employers asking them what steps they had taken to ensure equal pay. Unfortunately the most common response was ‘I don’t know…I’m sure we’re doing something though...’ but still better than one employer who suggested that as his company didn’t employ many women graduates there was no need to address the issue of unequal pay!

With attitudes like that it’s no wonder that progress on closing the pay gap has stalled – meaning that stronger government action is needed to ensure that this discrimination against women is challenged. The pay gap isn’t inevitable – many European countries have made far more rapid progress than Britain in reducing the pay gap, so now is the time to lobby the government to take meaningful action to end unequal pay.
Fawcett have created an online petition to the Prime Minister calling for stronger action to be taken to end the pay gap. Please take two minutes to sign the petition at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/paygap/ and email it around to your friends to sign.

Pro-choice week of action

This month is the 40th anniversary of the legislation which partly legalised abortion in Britain. This legislation was a crucial step towards women’s equality – a recent study by the London School of Economics found that access to safe, legal abortion and contraception has been more effective in advancing women’s equality than any other equalities legislation.

I worked with women’s committee to run a week-long campaign to make students aware of this, and to encourage them to sign a card to their MP expressing support for defending and extending abortion rights in Britain. As well as holding stalls in the Union foyer and out on the concourse, we also visited halls of residence where we gave out hundreds of ‘pro-choice fact cards’ to educate people about abortion rights in Britain.

Our pro-choice cards to MPs were signed by hundreds of students and we’re now planning to go to MPs offices in order to deliver the cards and speak to our local MPs about their views on abortion. With Parliament expected to discuss legislation which could threaten to restrict abortion rights, now is an important time to make MPs aware of the importance of abortion rights and the fact that 83% of people in Britain support a woman’s right to choose.

To find out when we’re visiting MPs or to get involved in future pro-choice campaigning please email me – bryony.shanks@sheffield.ac.uk

Also this week I’ve worked with the University Counselling Service to run a relaxation workshop for women students. (You can find more information on other workshops and groups run by the Counselling Service here.) I’ve also continued planning the women’s party, worked with the environment team on our Union’s Sound Impact awards entry, held meetings on the Union’s equality strategy, and done two interviews with Radio Sheffield about the 40th anniversary of the Abortion Act. And how could I forget the polling duty and vote counting for the Students’ Union Council elections – congratulations to all those elected, look forward to meeting you at our first Council meeting!