Saba Waheed: From the UCLA Labor Center, we bring you Re:Work. I’m Saba Waheed.
Veena Hampapur: And I’m Veena Hampapur. We are approaching the 60th anniversary of the UCLA Labor Center, and we are celebrating – both how far we’ve come and where we’re going next! So in this anniversary episode, we want to reflect on that a little bit.
Saba Waheed: So let’s take it back to the beginning. The Labor Center was founded in 1964. What’s interesting is that it came into existence because it was a demand from the labor movement. We needed to have a center within the university that serves the needs of working people.
Veena Hampapur: That’s pretty cool how that interconnectedness has been there from the very start.
Saba Waheed: Yes, exactly! So the California Labor Federation made an agreement with the University of California that established the center. In it, it said that the focus would be on research and education for the labor movement. Since then, that’s exactly what our approach has been. We focus on providing timely, applied research that tells the stories of workers and what’s happening on the ground as a way to lift up conditions that are important for social and policy change. And we’ve also prioritized educational programs that build pathways into movement work.
Veena Hampapur: Jumping ahead to present day, we’re at a moment of tremendous growth. In 2020, we purchased our historic building and established a permanent home for ourselves in MacArthur Park among unions, worker centers, and the communities we seek to serve. We renamed our building the UCLA James Lawson Jr. Worker Justice Center in honor of the late Rev. Lawson – one of the civil rights movement’s most prominent leaders and a lifelong advocate of nonviolence, or as he called it, “soul force.”
Saba Waheed: And we continue to grow. Just recently, California’s budget recently included an unprecedented increase in funding to expand labor centers across the University of California. We now have 9 labor centers across the state that will continue to champion economic equity, racial and immigrant justice, worker power and solidarity.
Veena Hampapur: At the UCLA Labor Center, we believe that a public university belongs to the public, and our theme for our 60th is, “Solidarity Shines.”
Saba Waheed: In honor of our anniversary, in this episode we’re sharing insights and memories from our colleagues about their work and evolving connections to the UCLA Labor Center, which they were all introduced to as students. We end with a powerful speech by a recent UCLA Labor Studies graduate. This episode will be the first track in our 60th Anniversary mixtape coming out in September.
Veena Hampapur: So, we’re going to start off with a voice note from Dave Shukla. He was a research analyst at the Labor Center back in 2012.
Dave Shukla: Hello, my name is Dave Shukla, and really since 2005 when I cut my teeth mobilizing with the [inaduible] the short haul bridge truckers in the ports of LA and Long Beach. Really since that time I’ve utilized the Downtown Labor Center as a resource for empirics and virtues. My heart is heavy since the 2nd week of July because a month ago Rev. James Lawson passed and just this past week Jane McAlevey also passed. For as long as it feels, time is short. You know, UCLA LC is so foundational to who I am and who I try to be in this world. It’s really difficult to summarize and so many people have helped me on my way to who I want to be, [inaduible], who I thought I was and was doing organizing, being an academic, even just being a man. It’s difficult to summarize, but for the multigenerational multi ethnic kind of democratic experiment which is California, the Labor Center is one of the most vital institutions for answering the question – past and present and future – what’s really best for all of us?
Saba Waheed: Next, we share reflections from Jazmin Rivera, a UCLA Labor Studies alumni who is currently a community education specialist at the UCLA Labor Center.
Jazmin Rivera: I’m a direct product of the school to movement pathway, I was an undergraduate at UCLA, and I took my first labor studies class, and it changed my life. It opened up a door of career opportunities that I never knew existed. And from being a student at UCLA and graduating from labor studies, I now work at the Labor Center and I get to continue some of that work that I was doing as a student activist – but now as my role here at the Labor Center as a community education specialist. When I think about my time at the Labor Center, I think about the amazing women I get to work alongside with, especially at the Dream Resource Center. All of our project coordinators are women, and they have become such amazing thought partners and colleagues and friends that, you know, we share so much laughter and joy in building our fellowship programs. And I think that joy, you know, translates to the intentionality and the care that we have in our retreats for our fellowship programs. I love the staff, and I love the people that we get to work alongside with and our community partners, our friends, our colleagues. It’s such a – the labor center is such a hub of bright, amazing minds that I love working here.
Veena Hampapur: Next we hear from Deja Thomas, who started off at the Labor Center as a graduate student researcher when she was getting her master’s in urban and regional planning. She is now our program manager for the Center for Advancement of Racial Equity at Work, also known as CARE at Work.
Deja Thomas: What’s really important about the Labor Center is that it’s a space where we can really focus on workers who are ignored or marginalized or erased in broader labor conversations. And that’s really what happened with black workers, and that we know for a fact that black workers are experiencing the white jobs crisis. And the impacts of that on housing, on food insecurity – there are impacts beyond work itself. And so the labor center has been a space where we can really create and innovate and ideate solutions to solve that process – and that is what eventually created the L.A. Black Worker Center. CARE at work was created to really hold the work of thinking about how do we get black students involved in labor. Because we’re at UCLA, we hold this really cool space of being able to work with young folks who are just starting out in college who are 18 – 19, as well as grad students who are sometimes older folks just returning back to school as well as nontraditional students. So we get the full range and we really pull them into our projects and pull them also into our programming and fellowship work with the worker centers. So that by the time that they’re done with whatever, undergrad or graduate schooling, they have the experience and the skill set needed to start working in the labor field, particularly working on black worker justice issues, or at least like having that as their framework when they move forward in the world. We are always kind of moving forward and thinking about new ways to do things and new partners and not afraid to grow and expand and stretch ourselves in a way that meets the needs of both students and workers and labor – which is sometimes a complicated, kind of basket to hold but, I think we do really well at holding it and moving forward. In March of ‘23, we actually hosted kind of like a celebratory event for now state Senator Lola Cuevas that brought together folks that she had worked with at the Labor Center and at UCLA, from students to faculty and other departments to current and old labor center staff. And it was just a really great room to be in where you saw these folks that were all working on different projects, working on different aspects of the work, but were all really invested in black worker justice across California. And it was a space where you saw different aspects of the work come together, and also a celebratory one. I think the work is like great, but also sometimes really long and hard. And so to be able to celebrate the wins and then to strategize of like how to win more is always a really nice time.
Saba Waheed: Ana Luz Gonzalez Vasquez, the project director of the POWER in Workforce Development team, reflects on her connections to the Labor Center, where she also first got involved as a graduate student conducting research.
Ana Luz Gonzalez Vasquez: What’s really unique about workforce development at the labor center is that we’re redefining what workforce development means. Traditionally, it has meant that folks focus on placing people into jobs, and train them for those jobs. But what we’re doing is we’re expanding the definition of workforce development to include not just services and training for workers, and placements in jobs, but really thinking about the quality of the job and also different approaches that help improve industry standards. And that’s what’s so unique about the work that we’re doing here at the labor center. We’re including things, in the definition, like, workers rights, leadership development, coalition building, all those things that are needed in order for us to help improve low wage industries. We approach our work with a spirit of collaboration and humility; it’s so intentional, and it ensures that worker voices are at the forefront of every aspect of our work when it comes to research or evaluation. And, I think that’s really unique and it’s also really powerful because what ends up happening is that the workers then become leaders and all you do is really facilitate the process and you get to see the actual impact – and not just in terms of their growth and transformation, but also in the policies that are advanced to ensure that their lives can be better. One of the fondest memories I have of the labor center is really having the opportunity and the honor to work with my community.I think that’s something that is so important, and it means so much to me to be able to engage with workers that are just like my parents that are very similar to my family members and be able to work on projects that have an impact and that can improve their lives.
Veena Hampapur: Our next narrator is Tia Koonse, our Legal and Policy Research Manager, who first connected with the Labor Center back in 2007. At that time, she was a UCLA law student who was volunteering at a clinic for day laborers facing wage theft.
Tia Koonse: One of my favorite nights at the Labor Center was our anniversary of opening up the downtown labor Center in MacArthur Park. So in 2012, we had a big ten year celebration, and we invited a band of day laborers that works really closely with the National Day Labor Organizing Network. And they set up in front of the building and we invited alumni. We invited city council, we invited unions, we invited worker centers, all of the ecosystem that surrounds MacArthur Park, which is the epicenter of the labor movement in LA and held this big block party and it was just a joy to see – workers came from all over the city. And then folks who were just in MacArthur Park came out to celebrate as well. Another favorite memory of mine are any of the worker assemblies held by the artist formerly known as the L.A. Coalition Against Wage Theft, now the L.A. Worker Center Network. So for a period of ten years, that network has held periodic convenings of workers across industries, across race, across different parts of the city to come together to celebrate victories and then to create an agenda going forward for what we should do as a network of low wage workers to make workplaces better, to make housing more affordable, to make transportation better, to make education better. And it’s a joy to see people come together to plan for their own community. And we’re so proud to host that at the Labor Center.
I come from a gender justice background, and then I have a degree in law and also a master’s in urban planning. What I anticipated going into was housing and gentrification – fighting gentrification as part of a gender justice movement. And I get to do that at the labor center and more. I’ve been really blessed to learn about the labor movement and that feeling of solidarity. Solidarity is not something that I experienced to this extent in gender justice or in housing. To know that you will show up for your siblings in the labor movement, whether or not you live in the same neighborhood, whether or not you have the same employer or the same type of work to have that shared sense of solidarity is a really beautiful kind of foundation. So the labor center for me has become kind of a church. I come to it, and every single project that we work on may not speak to me personally, but I know it makes me a better person and I know what makes our movement stronger and ultimately this is a better place to be.
Veena Hampapur: So where does Tia see the Labor Center 60 years from now?
Tia Koonse: In 60 years, every worker in California is going to have a union or have some kind of organization in their workplace to exercise democratic power. And in that 60 years, we will provide the data and the research. We will provide leaders through our student pipeline. And ultimately, there will be a local labor center at every publicly owned university able to provide that kind of research and information to support workers in improving their lives.
Saba Waheed: We’ve shared reflections from former and current staff who all became connected to the Labor Center when they were students at UCLA. It seems only fitting to close out our 60th anniversary episode with a speech by Sherrod Session, a student speaker at this year’s UCLA Labor Studies commencement ceremony.
Sherrod Session: What a blessing it is to stand before all of you to speak on behalf of my classmates, to express the pressing matters at hand. And to pose these series of questions. Are we prepared for the changing times ahead? What does it mean to organize, to mobilize with what means and to what ends? Do we recognize the shifting balance of power and its nascent transfer of wealth? What have all of you learned at this institution that would better help you answer these questions? Since being at UCLA, I have seen the lengths to which the students and faculty in the Labor Studies program have gone, embracing their knowledge and capacity for worker oriented political dissent. I have taken part in some of these initiatives.
Before coming to UCLA, I was uncertain if I could be amongst the most talented and capable, coming from a disenfranchised family, constantly struggling to make ends meet. Now, I am full of pride, faith, and grace to stand alongside the most passionate and unflinching group of students that this country has seen. Watching the insatiable appetite for taking on the campus administration, and the contemporary geopolitical developments, and appetite that will continue to grow in proportion to this dreadful cost of living and to the lives being sacrificed at the altar of capital.
Watching our students engage with labor advocacy, alongside the UAW, and others, has provided us with a unique experience that is unmatched by any other academic program at other top universities. What I’ve witnessed is the establishment of a stronghold for labor history and class politics within the UCLA labor center and its subsidiary degree program, both of which becoming foundational pillars in maintaining working class politics within the mainstream discourse. This graduating class is honored with the burden to expand political literacy and intellectualism as it pertains to the working class. From what you have seen in our program, and the histories in which many of you have familial connections, we might ask, can there be a coming paradigm shift in the American workplace? Can the middle class be resuscitated and expanded?
In 2023, we witnessed the resurgence of a labor movement that echoes the robust organizational capacity of the 1920s and 1930s. This comes at a time when we see the American economy has become de-industrialized by the shareholder and private equity based interests. Ultimately, uprooting the viability of organized labor and domestic manufacturing. This is reflected by the wealth inequality that surpasses that of the Gilded Age, and that’s of the Great Depression. As the new generation of labor intellectuals, how do we intend to reverse this trend? How will you assist the working class in organizing itself to have greater influence in the economy over the shareholder class? The American worker has been excommunicated from this type of discussion since the 1970s. This cannot remain.
I ask you, my peers, to consider what lies ahead for the American worker if no decisive action is taken. Consider what our country will look like if we do not have the organized and skilled labor to compete in a multi nodal world. Let us for a moment, suppose that we do not consider the organization of the global supply chain and how it is being re-composed as the United States isolates itself on the world stage by egging on a third world war. In that case, if we fail to adjust, we will be left in a state of legitimate shock and scarcity, which will follow with unprecedented levels of violence. In short, your time in the Labor Studies program will determine if we can adapt to the changing global economy.
Will we allow anti worker administrations to dictate the agenda of the working class? Or will there be an initiative taken to grab a hold of this agenda into the hands of the worker, meeting the administration at its crossroads. For all of those who care about the future of your families and communities in this country, I implore you, to take the time to invest in your community and the people working in it. Take the time to engage in mutual aid to circumvent the zero sum game thrusted upon us. Finally, I leave you with these remarks as they resonate with the hope that is needed to overcome fear. For those of you coveted with much to fight for and with little to lose, blessed are the wretched for they shall inherit the earth thank you.
Veena Hampapur: You’re listening to Re:Work, which is the podcast of the UCLA Labor Center. To learn more about the Labor Center, check out our new website at labor.ucla.edu.
Saba Waheed: A special thanks to all who shared their thoughts and stories – Dave Shukla, Jasmine Rivera, Deja Thomas, Ana Luz Gonzalez Vasquez, Tia Koonse, and Sherrod Session. Thanks to Blue Veil Films and our Labor Center and IRLE communications colleagues for gathering these testimonies – Emily Jo Wharry, Maisha Kalam, Citlalli Chavez, and Lesly Ayala.
Veena Hampapur: This episode was produced by Veena Hampapur and Saba Waheed, as part of our 60th anniversary mixtape. Sound engineering and mixing by Aaron Dalton.
Veena Hampapur: Until next time, rethink, rework.
[Blooper]
Saba Waheed: Hey Veena, guess what?
Veena Hampapur: What?
Saba Waheed: It’s the 60th anniversary of the UCLA Labor Center!
Veena Hampapur: It is!
Saba Waheed: Does that make us a boomer?
Saba Waheed: I don’t think it works. Okay.