Category: Photos
Photographs from the UCLA Library, community archives, and the project team.
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Daily Picket Debrief
Read more: Daily Picket DebriefThis photo was donated by Sammy Feldblum, a participant in the UC UAW Labor Summer Program who contributed to the UAW Fair UC Now 2022 Collection. As Feldblum described, the significance of the image was that it captured the challenges of trust-building and communication during the strike. As he wrote: “I chose this photo not because I am the one with the megaphone, but instead because it gestures toward one of the great difficulties of…
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March to the State Capitol
Read more: March to the State CapitolThe University of California is one of the largest public universities in the United States and the third largest employer in the state of California. As a result, when UC workers go on strike, the state government can become a crucial point of leverage. Many state legislators, particularly those who serve districts where the UC’s campuses are located, believe strongly in the university’s public mission. During the UAW Fair UC Now Campaign, academic workers sought…
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Kayak Picket Line
Read more: Kayak Picket LineThe UAW Fair UC Now 2022 Campaign began Nov. 14, when striking graduate workers formed picket lines on campuses across the state that continued for at least four weeks. But after classes concluded for the year in December, striking workers had to rethink their strategies. How can you escalate a work stoppage when that worksite is effectively closed? Working together, UAW members identified new targets and new picketing locations across the state, including the workplaces…
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Peter Olney remembers life as an organizer
Read more: Peter Olney remembers life as an organizer“So I started working for the union in, like, April of 1991, and I’ll never forget meeting with Jono [Shaffer] a couple weeks before I started. He said, “You know Peter, here at the Janitors, we expect you to mobilize probably five hundred workers every week to march.” I was like, “Say what?” You know, I worked for the furniture workers a whole year. We never mobilized more than a hundred of our members for…
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Justice for Janitors History Day
Read more: Justice for Janitors History DayIn conjunction with the 20 year anniversary of their Campaign in Century City, Justice for Janitors (now part of SEIU United Service Workers West, SEIU-USWW) formed a partnership with the IRLE to uncover, preserve, analyze, and communicate the history of their union. Our collecting efforts began in the basement of the union hall, where decades worth of membership records, research materials, and photographs and ephemera were stored, but we knew that archive was incomplete. Eager…
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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…