Category: Photos

Photographs from the UCLA Library, community archives, and the project team.

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May Day Los Angeles, 2003

Black and white image taken at a May Day march. Two garment workers are carrying a large banner from the Garment Workers Center, the only word fully visible is "Trabajador." other people in the image are carrying picket signs, one that says "immigrant bashing" that is crossed over. and another is shaped like a dove and reads "no war"

The 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 groups committed themselves “to the struggle for dignity, justice, and the human rights of immigrant workers and all peoples,” through sharing strategies and information, fostering interethnic and interracial solidarity, and promoting political consciousness and civic engagement among low-wage workers in Los Angeles.

MIWON campaigned for the passage of the “Immigrant Workers Bill of Human Rights” at the Los Angeles City Council in 2001, and to expand undocumented immigrants’ access to drivers’ licenses and government-issued identification. But perhaps their most enduring tactic was their annual commemoration of May Day (International Workers Day), marches that promoted solidarity among multiethnic and immigrant workers in Los Angeles and beyond. 

Pictured here: a scene from MIWON’s May Day march in 2003, where protestors connected “immigrant bashing” in Los Angeles and the United States government’s invasion of Iraq weeks earlier. 

View more images from the 2003 May Day march here.

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Day of Conscience Against Sweatshops

An older woman in a UNITE! t-shirt holds a big sign that reads: "This is a bill for your DIRTY LAUNDRY from: Workers and Community Cleaning up the Garment Industry -- to: Made in the Shade hardstyle International, 110 E. 9th St., L.A. - Wage and hour Violations - by: Department of Labor." In her hand is a soda can sealed with duck tape, likely a home made noise maker.

A 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’ rights in Los Angeles and around the world. 

Photograph by Linda A. Lotz, CLUE records (LSC.2441), UCLA Library Special Collections Collection Information: https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8g167r7/

View more of Lotz’ photos from the CLUE collection here.

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Boycott Forever 21

Image from a demonstration on the Santa Monica 3rd street promenade. Two protestors hold a larger banner reading "Boycott" with Christmas holiday symbols. Behind them looms a large, handmade puppet being held up by other protestors. On the right side of the march, a woman directing the protestors wears an orange safety vest.

In 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. But soon after they opened, the GWC’s small organizing staff began to notice that many of the workers seeking their support were coming from the same shops. And some additional research revealed that those shops were producing garments for the same company: fast fashion retailer Forever 21.  

The GWC launched its multi-pronged campaign against Forever 21 in 2001. With support from the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, they filed a lawsuit on behalf of thirty-three workers alleging wage theft and dangerous working conditions. They organized picket lines at Forever 21’s subcontractors across the city and at its various retail stores, and even demonstrations outside the homes of the company’s owners. And they organized a nationwide boycott campaign calling on their fellow workers and allies to join through loud and colorful public demonstrations like this one. Pictured here: María Pineda, one of the thirty-three workers who filed the lawsuit, and GWC Director Kimi Lee (in the orange vest). 

Check out more photos from the GWC’s campaign against Forever 21 here.

Watch the 2007 documentary about the Forever 21 campaign, Made in L.A. at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juvhOO2RdgA

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Daily Picket Debrief

UAW strike leader Sammy Feldblum addresses picketers in front of UCLA’s Bunche Hall. A blue and gold banner demanding “Livable WAGES” hangs from the window in the teaching assistants’ office.

This 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 in capturing the challenges of trust-building and communication. 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 union democracy: the ability to convey evolving information between rank-and-file and leadership, to effectively channel the union’s collective will. Our strike spanned nine campuses, and included some 48,000 workers: collective action comprised both organizing our particular corners of campus and coordination across campuses and the state. This picture, by UCLA anthropologist Nicole Smith, shows an end-of-day consultation within our picket line, in which we considered strategy and mood. By strike’s end, a congress of leaders from each department gathered to facilitate information sharing from the picket line to the bargaining table and back; before that, though, difficulties in communication were felt at times as a lack of attentiveness to rank-and-file priorities.”

“Union democracy is a dynamic thing: the strength of this strike depended on the widespread mobilization of membership cultivated by actions in the preceding years, and the strike in turn proffered new experiences, activations, and insights to inform the struggles ahead. Perhaps my holding the microphone is then in fact illustrative: far from a seasoned unionist before the strike, I, like so many others, found myself newly thrust into vexed situations with material stakes and unclear outcomes, and nothing to do about it but think hard with my comrades about how to proceed as the tides roiled all around us.”

Photos from this picket line, as well as many others, are part of the UAW Fair UC Now 2022 Campaign Collection, part of the Wayne State Reuther Library.

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March to the State Capitol

Striking academic workers march on the California capitol building in Sacramento during the 2022-23 strike.

The University of California is one of the largest public universities in the United States and the third largest employer in the state. 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 to challenge the notion that the UC was living up to that public mission in multiple ways as a means to win support from those legislators for their bargaining demands. They sent letters and petitions to legislative offices, lobbied for increased workplace protections, and as captured here, marched on the capitol itself. On Dec. 5, UAW members from UC Davis and other campuses descended on the state capitol building in Sacramento, continuing their march to the Offices of the UC President nearby. They called on state legislators to use their influence to ensure that the UC bargain in good faith and pay all of its employees a livable wage.

Photos from this action, as well as many others, are part of the UAW Fair UC Now 2022 Campaign Collection, part of the Wayne State Reuther Library.