Striking academic workers from UC Irvine picket the seaside home of a major UC donor.
The 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? The members of UAW decided to focus their demonstrations on new targets. Working together, they identified new picketing locations across the state, including the workplaces and residences of the UC Regents and other key stakeholders. Many of these off-campus demonstrations also took novel forms, including the kayak action pictured here, when students from UC Irvine paddled their picket line towards an off-shore island where the residence of a major UC donor was located.
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.
Rank and file activist Victoria Marquez shares her personal collection of newspapers, documents, t-shirts, hats, and buttons at a history gathering day.
The members of SEIU-USWW gathered at the union hall in May 2011 to share their stories, memories, photographs, clippings, and artifacts. Long-time union member Victoria Marquez brought an extensive collection of documents, buttons, t-shirts, and other items. Later, she shared her life story with Andrew Gomez as part of a UCLA Oral History Research Center project. You can listen and read along here.
Santa Monica Living Wage – Journey Towards Justice, 2000
In 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 of Santa Monica began studying the feasibility of the proposal, opponents of the proposal led by the Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce began gathering signatures to place an alternative measure on the ballot in November which, while raising wages for some government contract workers, would have blocked efforts to increase the minimum wage for workers at private businesses, including those beachfront luxury hotels. They began circulating petitions and sent thousands of mailers to area residents alleging that their proposal (which came to be known as Proposition KK) would better protect workers and consumers in Santa Monica. SMART quickly mobilized in opposition to Proposition KK, “The Fake Living Wage,” holding a series of public demonstrations with religious leaders from CLUE (Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice) to make it clear to local voters that despite claims to the contrary, Prop. KK would not provide a true “living wage” to Santa Monica workers. Their efforts were successful—more than 78% of Santa Monica voters rejected Prop. KK — but the fight to win a living wage for workers in Santa Monica continued for years.
Pictured here is one of those demonstrations, the “Journey Towards Justice” march on April 17, 2000, in which thousands of hotel workers and their supporters marched in the rain down the Santa Monica boardwalk to St. Anne’s Church, where Father Mike Gutierrez offered blessings to the workers in their efforts to win living wages for all.
Additional images of the Santa Monica Living Wage campaign available at the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) records, UCLA Digital Library:
Dolores Huerta, Jesse Jackson support USC workers.
In 1999, UNITE HERE leader Maria Elena Durazo led workers, clergy, and activists in a fast to protest the failure of the University of Southern California (USC) to negotiate with their workers. In an editorial printed in the Los Angeles Times, Durazo compared the fast to those of United Farm Worker leader Cesar Chavez. “How could I ask others to work harder in the labor movement, to take even greater risks for their children and their co-workers, unless I was willing to fast side by side with them?” she wrote in explanation of the fast.
As the Living Wage Coalition expanded its outreach, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors announced plans to restrict eligibility to, and cut benefits for, its General Relief (or “welfare”) program in accordance with the passage of the federal Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (better known as “welfare reform”) of 1996. Coalition members, including CLUE (Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice), the Community Coalition, the Coalition to End Hunger and Homelessness, and ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), quickly mobilized to prevent cuts in services that would impact thousands of county residents. In early 1997, they organized a community meeting in which individuals gave testimony and called on Los Angeles County administrators to adopt policies that would protect, rather than restrict, access to social services for those in need. Hundreds of people joined a “Hold the Line Caravan” rally organized by the Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger and Homelessness in 1997 outside of the meeting to show their support.
Pictured here is Rev. James Lawson Jr. speaking at the “Hold the Line Caravan” rally on behalf of CLUE, as photographed by CLUE’s interfaith organizer Linda A. Lotz. The photograph was featured in an exhibition called “Faith at Work,” which was shown at several congregations and community spaces in Southern California before Lotz left Los Angeles to join the staff of the American Friends Service Committee International Programs in 1999.
