Control Arms (advice needed)
Oct 22 2006 10:14
I started at warwick uni recently and for various reasons (not least of which was giving up smoking dope) I have a lot of time & energy at the moment so I wanted to try and get a control arms campaign started at warwick.
So as a first step I wrote to the university's finance director asking for confirmation that warwick has no arm's holdings.
I got a suprisingly in depth reply which said:
i) they have no direct arms holdings
ii) they have money in the Schroder UK Alpha Plus equity fund which has no restricted investment policy but has no arms holdings in BAE Systems, Rolls Royce, GKN, Smiths Group, Cobham or VT Group
iii) it participates in four main pension schemes (the
Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS); the NHS Pension Scheme; the West Midlands
Pension Fund and the University of Warwick Pension Scheme (UWPS))
iv) the last three of these are independent and so the university is unable to provide information about their investments (is this true? i was under the impression pension funds would make available at least some idea of their investments to large investors) and she doesn't mention the first one
v) "although the University does not currently have a policy that sets out specific
guidelines in its investment practices, the University Investment Sub-Committee, in
overseeing the University’s limited investments, has due regard for issues relating
to responsible and ethical investment"
So basically as I see it the two options are either to use everyone's time & energy on a different campaign or press for an explicit ethical investment policy.
There's a lot of people who seem to be interested in this sort of campaign but I'm unsure as it's viability: a) will it actually be particularly easy to get an investment policy out of the uni b) will it be worthwhile? will it be possible to get a stringent enough policy that they'll refuse to invest in pension funds & equity funds unless they *know* they're holdings are ethical?
Anyone got any thoughs/advice/experience on this topic? It would be much appreciated 
Oct 22 2006 12:47
#2
Well I initially started thinking about this under the assumption it was quite likely that Warwick would have some investments in the big companies. In which case a well done campaign would hopefully have got them to disinvest fairly quickly, without all that much effort and made people generally feel quite good and pro-active. It also struck me as one of those issues which is going to be accessible for even the most self-consciously apolitical students once presents with some facts (subsidisation, industry-government connections etc), as well as a good hook into the possibility of a growing analysis of how these corporations are not particularly bad, they’re just following capitalist logic to its sociopathic corporate conclusion in a particular context.
I see where you’re coming from in relation the dangers of preoccupation with ethical discourse (never more clearly did I see this then when I sat through the people & planet presentation about fair trade) however I still think there’s the actual means of going about this sort of campaign is valuable because relative to other ongoing campaigns at the university (stop aids, trade justice and go green stuff) there’s actually a concrete aim with a degree of organisation and leveraging of power necessary to fulfil that aim. The impression I have of the people & planet group is that there’s a lot of very committed people but not all that much political analysis and there’s a conspicuous absence of anything that’s explicitly political (witness the amount of the society’s time & effort which seems to be taken up with promoting fair trade & organic food) but that this isn’t down to apoliticality as much as it the lack of a concrete issue to campaign politically on. I guess the question that I’m stuck on is how feasible the investment policy is and whether the effort involved is worth it for the potential effect.
But on the subject of the Student-Labor, I remember half-reading in the student paper yesterday about a load of sacked security workers including some who were sacked after being attacked by students (I think?). I think this is definitely worth me looking into.
(cheers very much for your reply btw man)
Nov 7 2006 23:35
#3
ahh, threads like these warm my cockles.
no i'm not being sacastic.
At University, I put quite alot of effort into organising a partially succesful campaign for ethical investment. I came to believe that this was a very poor use of my time, for reasons that I will explain below. But if you are committed to it, then write to Robbie at People and Planet (e-mail address on their website under About Us > Staff Team) who has a bunch of resources, contacts and experience.
Here are the problems:
a) Even if the university (and all universities) divest from the arms trade, it's not clear that this will have any impact at all on the activity of the companies. The basic argument would be that a lower market capitalisation makes it harder to borrow and expand business. But any effect in this direction is seriously minor anyway, since lenders take many other considerations into account. And the small amount of money owned by universities exarcerbates this still further (nb. only about 1% of a FTSE 100 tracker will be in arms, most universities only have £100-200 million in total, or even less - in contrast, Oxford and Cambridge have about £2 billion, and Harvard has more than $20 billion). And even if some pin-prick from the divestment did get through, it's fairly unlikely that it would outweigh other factors in the company's consideration; especially given the increasing availability of foreign investment capital in hi-tech industries.
b) It's surprisingly difficult to get dirt on individual arms companies from recent years - BAe being a notable exception - for making pointed propaganda. A lot of British arms companies make shit like engines (Smith Group) or bits of computers that become components of larger stuff. It's really, really hard to trace - see how sparse the examples are in the most recent Control Arms report (1st October), which was put together with the best of Oxfam's research efforts. (fwiw, Control Arms is the name of the (hopeless) Oxfam/IANSA/Amnesty campaign for a Global Arms Trade Treaty - and doesn't have anything to do with investment campaigning - CAAT mostly coordinates that through its Clean Investment Campaign.)
c) SRI (Socially Responsible Investment) appeals to the goodwill of the capitalists - owners. In contrast, radicals should seek to be building the power of the workers (or other systematically disadvanteged people). The campaign will fudge any sort of class analysis.
d) Because of a) and c), you inevitably get caught up in a discourse around 'ethical' behaviour - which encourages the woolly political analysis prevailing in the centre left. This is exacerbated by the remoteness of any benefit that the action might have. By campaigning on these terms, you'll end up fulfilling apolitical students' stereotypes about what politics is about.
e) There'll be hardly any way to reach beyond the confines of the 'student community', or even activist ghetto, and little prospect of building any long term power for anyone.
f) You have to grapple with a load of really fucking boring legal and financial arguments (e.g. the question of the legal obligations of trustees, and the relevance of the record of the so-called FTSE4GOOD.)
There are worthwhile things that you can do at university and since SRI campaigns are no easier to win than more radical and better ones, you're better putting your time into those. For example, on most US campuses, there will be a Student-Labor Action Project (or similar, e.g. Harvard's Progressive Student Labor Movement) which focusses on labour solidarity issues. Being at Warwick might be difficult in some ways, because you're geographically qutie isolated. But my suggestion would be to try get a small group of people to start talking to low grade (e.g. cleaning, security) staff about their jobs, their pay, their hours, how they're treated etc. Perhaps try and publicise some of the more shocking findings (there will be some) to students and staff, though be careful to situate them, and not be too hyperbolic. Hopefully in the process you'll have identified some up for it people among the staff and students, and you can take it from there - perhaps there'll be a will for a campaign on anything from wages to toilet breaks. I don't know how unionised Warwick staff are - probably hardly at all, UNISON is shit at this. But it's still worth going to talk to any union that there is at the first stage - when you're doing research. That way you can build up a relationship with them that will be helpful later; officials will be suspicious and possibly hostile if you bypass them at this stage. Feel free to ask the local trades council for help with research as well... Good things about the worker solidarity approach to campaigning are that it will involve developing relationships with people outside the activist ghetto - and orientate radicals to matters of everday life.
Hope that helps. Feel free to pm me if you want any more advice. I wish someone had told me that when I started!