Willa Needham | April 30, 2025

To celebrate May Day this year, Tobias Higbie, UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) Director and labor historian, and Victor Narro, project director at UCLA Labor Center and career organizer, joined for a conversation on the significance of May Day in Los Angeles. 

Their fascinating discussion uncovers how May Day unites diverse coalitions fighting for justice in L.A. to engage in a powerful act of collective resistance. Higbie and Narro give viewers an inside look at the process of planning major direct action campaigns and provide tips on how to maintain a sustainable career in social justice work. 

Narro shares his invaluable expertise gained through over 30 years of organizing in Los Angeles in partnership with various groups including the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA) and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF). He reflects on his involvement reviving May Day actions in Los Angeles in the early 2000s and his ensuing decades of coordinating march logistics. 

Narro and Higbie unpack how the evolving social, political and demographic landscape of Los Angeles has shaped organizing in recent decades and highlight the resilience and continuity of social change work. This conversation is especially relevant to anyone interested in movement building and Los Angeles labor history. The discussion concludes with practical advice for individuals and groups engaged in social justice work. 

Watch the full conversation below, or on our Youtube channel @UCLA-IRLE. 

Learn more about May Day here.

Speaker bios:

Tobias Higbie is the Director of the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) and a professor of labor studies and history at UCLA. Higbie is a labor historian whose research explores the intersection of work, migration, and social movement organizing in the United States. His current research (with Gaspar Rivera Salgado) focuses on new immigrants and labor unions in Los Angeles and Chicago during the 1970s and 1980s. His most recent book, Labor’s Mind: an Intellectual History of the Working Class, illuminates the world of working-class self-education and labor movement education that preceded the union upsurge of the 1930s and prefigured the rise of university-based labor scholarship. 

Victor Narro is a project director for the UCLA Labor Center and professor of labor studies and law at UCLA. Victor was formerly the Co-Executive Director of Sweatshop Watch. Prior to that, he was the Workers’ Rights Project Director for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA). Before his tenure at CHIRLA, Victor worked in the Los Angeles Regional Office of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF). Victor is the author of many law review and journal articles. His latest book publication is The Activist Spirit – Toward a Radical Solidarity (Hard Ball Press 2022).