Author: Caroline Luce
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Hotel Workers Civil Disobedience
Read more: Hotel Workers Civil DisobedienceIn 2004, UNITE-HERE Local 11 launched a campaign to win a contract with employers represented by the Los Angeles Hotel Employers Council. Building on the union’s rank-and-file strategy, hotel workers organized repeated delegations to articulate their demands to hotel management and mobilized community allies and the labor movement in disruptive public demonstrations. The campaign in Los Angeles was part of a “Ten Cities” campaign mounted simultaneously in the U.S. and Canada to win higher standards…
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Boycott Forever 21
Read more: Boycott Forever 21In 2001, the coalition of organizations that had come together to support the Thai Workers in El Monte pooled their funds to establish the Garment Worker Center (GWC), as a legal clinic to support workers in filing wage claims under the new procedures established by AB633. They hired three young Asian American women to run the GWC, including Kimi Lee as director, a lawyer who had previously worked on wage theft cases at the ACLU.…
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Grocery Workers Justice Pilgrimage
Read more: Grocery Workers Justice PilgrimageIn the fall of 2003, grocery workers at Albertson’s stores in Southern California went on strike. Arguing that they faced increased competition from Wal-Mart, who was expanding their operations in California, the supermarket chains had taken a hard line in their negotiations with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), proposing to slash employer contributions to their health care and pension benefits. When workers at Albertson’s stores went out on strike, stores owned by Ralphs…
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Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride
Read more: Immigrant Workers Freedom RideIn September 2003, immigrant workers from across the country joined a mass mobilization called the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride. For twelve days, delegations from 10 cities travelled on buses across the country, making nearly 100 stops along the way, including in Washington D.C. where the Freedom Riders met with Congressional leaders to advocate for immigration reform. The mass mobilization drew its inspiration from the Black freedom struggle, when in 1961, Black and White civil rights…
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May Day Los Angeles
Read more: May Day Los AngelesThe Multi-Ethnic Immigrant Workers Organizing Network (MIWON) formed in the year 2000 to support immigrant and undocumented immigrant labor rights across Los Angeles. The coalition brought together the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), Instituto de Educación Popular del Sur de California (Institute for Popular Education of Southern California, IDEPSCA), Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA), the Pilipino Worker Center (PWC), and later the Garment Worker Center (GWC), among other organizations. Throughout its ten years, these…
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“To build a broad-based movement for social and economic justice”
Read more: “To build a broad-based movement for social and economic justice”In August 2000, the Democratic National Committee held their convention at the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles. The convention came amidst grassroots insurgency and popular discontent with the Clinton-era model of neoliberal governance at home and abroad. In November 1999, labor unions, environmentalists, faith leaders, and students mobilized in Seattle at the World Trade Organization meeting to protest the new global regime of “free trade” that the Clinton administration helped to enact. Their often…
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Santa Monica Living Wage – Journey For Justice
Read more: Santa Monica Living Wage – Journey For JusticeIn 1999, hospitality workers and their allies formed a new coalition to expand Los Angeles’ living wage ordinance to neighboring Santa Monica. Calling themselves SMART (Santa Monicans Allied for Responsible Tourism), they advanced a proposal to increase the minimum wage for the estimated 3,000 housekeepers, valet drivers, restaurant workers, and security guards who worked in the beachfront hotel district to $10.69 an hour and to require their employers to provide health insurance. As the City…
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Civil Disobedience in Westwood
Read more: Civil Disobedience in WestwoodIn the year 2000, Justice for Janitors mobilized its most ambitious campaign to date: a two-week long strike across the city of Los Angeles. Under the slogan “One Industry,” they sought to align contracts they had won in various parts of Los Angeles (downtown, Century City, LAX, etc.) to raise wages and working conditions for all janitorial workers in the city. The Year 2000 Strike included a series of dramatic actions, including a nearly 10-mile…
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Fighting for Joint Liability
Read more: Fighting for Joint LiabilityWhile many recognize the 1990s as a time of the labor movement’s resurgence in Los Angeles, for garment workers, it was a time of existential crisis. Facing new competition from imported goods, local manufacturers returned to old ways of doing business, hiring mainly undocumented immigrants, firing union activists, and severing long-standing contracts. A raid on an apartment complex in El Monte revealed how dangerous the exploitation had become: the CA Department of Industrial Relations found…
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Day of Conscience Against Sweatshops
Read more: Day of Conscience Against SweatshopsA garment worker carries a “Bill For Your Dirty Laundry” at a “Day of Conscience to End Sweatshops” rally and march in Los Angeles’ garment district on October 4, 1997. Organized by UNITE and its allies as part of their campaign against Guess? Jeans, the event was part of a national day of action that aimed to pressure the Presidential Task Force on Apparel Manufacturing to enforce a strong accord that would protect garment workers’…