Citlalli Chávez-Nava and Lesly Ayala | May 30, 2024

UCLA labor studies undergraduates presented a wide variety of labor research projects at the Labor@UCLA Research Showcase, a virtual exhibit hosted by the interdepartmental program on May 24. Project topics ranged from analyzing how Los Angeles Airport’s complex organizational structure affects worker power to investigating accessibility and support for nonfiction media makers with disabilities. 

The second annual showcase formed part of UCLA’s Research Week, a week-long presentation where undergraduate students share their innovative and impactful research and creative inquiry, held May 20-24. 

Selected labor studies students presented past or current work developed for a capstone, honors theses or other Labor Studies and related classes. 

“I am so proud of our students today. Each of their projects demonstrated their commitment to lifting the voices of the most marginalized and vulnerable workers in our society,” said Caroline Luce, the labor studies student research faculty advisor and the event’s moderator. “These past few weeks have been an incredibly difficult, emotional, and turbulent time for all of us and they showed such poise and determination amidst this moment of crisis made their presentations all the more powerful and inspiring. Their projects are such beautiful examples of putting our Labor Studies’ programs values of community engagement and research justice into practice,” she added. 

UCLA Labor Studies is an interdisciplinary field of study and public engagement that explores work, working-class communities, and the political economy of labor as intersectional and multi-dimensional sites of study. The program seeks to understand and communicate the many ways inequality operates in the world of work, but also to discover effective ways to address inequality and promote healthy, democratic communities.

“We commit ourselves to research justice, aiming to challenge traditional views of expertise, particularly narratives that exclude and dismiss community members as experts, by recognizing diverse knowledge sets, forging research processes grounded in respectful and reciprocal collaboration, and working toward mutually-beneficial outcomes,” said Luce. 

Learn about the labor studies student research projects below by reviewing this year’s research abstracts.  

Micaela Aragón ‘24, Labor Studies major 

Research Title:  “Who’s the boss? Understanding Effects of Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) Organizational Structure on Service Employees”

Airports employ nearly 7% of all Americans, supporting over ten million jobs in different sectors. Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) is the third busiest airport in the world and second in the United States. Over the decades, LAX has seen its labor force grow continuously more fragmented as subcontracting has taken over the industry. Partially owned by the city government as a public entity and in part managed by private interests, the Los Angeles International Airport has adopted a rather complicated structure of organizational leadership. 

In response to this, many of the workers who keep the airport running, defined as service employees, struggle to find workplace mobility, build solidarity, and more. Sometimes struggling to even identify who their direct supervisors are, these employees who work in custodial, luggage handling, and cart driving among other similar positions often face a unique set of difficulties as a direct result of the complicated nature of their workplace. This research was conducted from a community-engaged framework in collaboration with Building Skills Partnership, a nonprofit organization dedicated to serving service workers in low-wage sectors. 

Through qualitative interviews with members of airport leadership and service workers themselves, this project aims to demystify the airport’s structural organization and identify the implications of this on workers via key issues to tangibly tackle and continue investigating.

Sean Ferdinand Clenista ‘25, Labor Studies major 

Research Title: Transcending the Barriers of Gender: The Labor and Discrimination towards Transgender Women in the Workplace

An itch that cannot be satisfied on top of skin that doesn’t feel like your own. For transgender women, being born in the wrong body is a battle within itself, however the difficulty of this battle is amplified by the discriminatory practices in their day to day lives; one aspect of life being the workplace. Across the United States and now more than ever, transgender women are experiencing more discrimination in their workplace environments. Microaggressions, such as misgendering employees, using incorrect pronouns, and policing bathrooms, all combine together to alienate transgender women from society. This not only isolates transgender women from their identity, but it also isolates them from basic protections and rights in their lives. 

Thus, contributing to a larger issue, which is the increasing rates of homicide towards transgender women, particularly trans women of color facing four times more violence than their cisgendered counterparts. Furthermore, the false narrative of transgender topics in the media form misleading headlines of the anti-trans hysteria happening in the U.S. right now. This amplified existing prejudice and consequently-created unsafe workplace environments for these women and other LGBTQIA+ workers. Through anti-trans legislation, these attacks in the media and in person are now normalized in workplace environments.

Labor Studies tends to leave out the narrative of transgender women. Their experience is a missing gap in the existing literature and content covered in classrooms. My project aims to pull the gap closer together and inform people of the different policies that actively commit to the discrimination transgender women face in the workplace.

Benjamin Collier ‘24, Labor Studies major; Madison Gross ‘25, Labor Studies Major 

Research Title: Labor Justice for Disabled Documentary Filmmakers: The Nonfiction Access Initiative Report 2024

Through our internship with the International Documentary Association, we conducted both quantitative and qualitative data analysis for the Nonfiction Access Initiative. Specifically, our work targeted disabled filmmakers and focused on generating more accommodations, accessibility, and funding for disabled individuals within the industry. This report aims to essentially enhance accessibility and support for disabled nonfiction media makers. 

This project is a first-of-its-kind study on disabled filmmakers which used 206 surveys distributed between April to September of 2023. It was completed by disabled filmmakers from around the world. Its objective was to discover the changes disabled filmmakers wanted to see in the film industry, including funding for film projects, and to learn more about their challenges in the industry at large. Our findings highlight difficulties faced by workers in the aim to better fund disabled filmmakers through the Ford Foundation and to provide future guidance on how to generate more accessibility for disabled filmmakers and more research on disabled filmmakers’ experiences in the industry. 

Additionally, through our research, we have been able to come up with several “Do’s” and “Don’ts” pertaining to application processes. This list will not only impact future surveys but will also create more accessibility and accommodation within the approach researchers take when surveying disabled individuals. Our findings are sorted into several categories, including:  Essential Areas of Change, Barriers to Entry, Navigating Financial Challenges, Intersectionality, Expanding Knowledge, and Prompts for Future Research. 

We also created several general and financially aimed recommendations and answered specific and important questions.

Noa Martinez Garcia, ‘26, Pre-Global Studies major; Karla Perez, ‘26, Community Engagement and Social Change and Central American Studies; Yasmin Jafar, ‘25, Global Studies major

Research Title: How are the maquiladoras an example of labor exploitation and gender roles permeating US-Mexico relations?

The research focuses on the story behind the Maquiladoras, a particular, and a peculiar type of garment factories settled in the cities along the US-Mexican border. It presents a chronologically organized narrative about how the Maquiladoras were settled in the border cities and why. The starting point is the dynamics in trade relations between the U.S. and Mexico that led to the establishment of those factories in those particular cities, that being Mexico being perceived as the producer of cheap commodities for the US market. 

Moving forward, the research analyzes how those factories used women as laborers, as their smaller hands and their so-called “natural” attributes (like being more careful of details), made them the perfect fit for the job. The attention here will be drawn to the exploitation, mistreatment, and eventual murder of those women who were employed in the Maquiladoras and how these dreadful events ignited a revolt led by women, who refused to settle while they were being killed by the Maquiladoras, figuratively and literally. Moreover, the research also highlights how impactful this movement might have been, in terms of social, economic, and legislative repercussions.

It is key to understand how labor movements emerge, how women’s agency impacts the emergence of those; and more importantly, the broader impact of those labor movements on the functioning of society as a whole.