Labor Studies Now - The U.S. Labor Movement in the 2020's: Achievements and Challenges
2026-01-29 12:00 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Haines Hall 130
Ruth Milkman is one of the world’s foremost sociologists of labor and labor movements, having written extensively on various topics related to work and organized labor in the United States, past and present. Her most recent books are Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat (Polity, 2020) and On Gender, Labor and Inequality (Illinois, 2016).
She was the 2016 President of the American Sociological Association and director of the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment from 2001 to 2008, when she was on the faculty in the Department of Sociology. She is currently Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center and at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, where she chairs the Labor Studies Department.
Date: January 29 , 2026
Time: 12 – 1:30 pm
Location: Haines Hall 130
RVSP HERE!

Immigrant Rights & Community Care Teach-In
2026-02-18 11:00 - 12:30 | Zoom
Join Labor Studies for an Immigration Know Your Rights Teach-In focused on supporting immigrant students and communities during a rapidly changing political time.
This teach-in will provide a Know Your Rights overview, share recent developments in local and state policy, and offer updates on immigrant justice efforts in California, including the ICE Out of California coalition. Participants will have space to ask questions and explore how students, faculty, and staff can show up in meaningful ways.
Date: February 18
Time: 11:00 AM–12:30 PM
Location: Zoom
RSVP HERE!

Cancelled - Ace Your Interview Workshop
2026-02-25 12:00 - 13:00 | UCLA Career Center Studio
Ace Your Interview is an interactive workshop co-hosted by the UCLA Labor Studies Department and the UCLA Career Center designed to help Labor Studies students feel confident and prepared for their next interview. Participants will learn how to effectively communicate their skills and experiences, answer common interview questions, and make a strong impression on employers.
Whether you’re interviewing for internships, jobs, or graduate programs, this workshop will offer practical tips and strategies to help you stand out.
💵 All attendees will be entered into a raffle for a $25 gift card. Please note that the gift card will be distributed a few weeks after the event.
Date: February 25th
Time: 12 – 1 PM
Location: UCLA Career Center Studio
RSVP HERE!

Labor Studies Now - Frame Backfire: The Trouble with Civil Rights Appeals in the Contemporary United States
2026-03-05 12:00 - 13:30 | Rolfe Hall 2125
Frame Backfire: The Trouble with Civil Rights Appeals in the Contemporary United States
While many scholars and activists consider civil rights to be a powerful, effective way to frame diverse causes in the United States, little is known about the contemporary resonance of civil rights appeals. In this talk, I will argue that civil rights can be understood in three non-mutually exclusive ways: as a “master” frame that appeals to core American ideals, as a reference to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and as racialized messaging. Drawing on survey experiments conducted at two different points in time, I will show that respondents express highly positive views of civil rights and broad agreement that civil rights are about equal rights. Yet, framing a person’s contemporary problems—including unequal treatment at work—as civil rights violations reduces support for government intervention. Civil rights framing is counterproductive across diverse issues, beneficiaries, and audiences. These findings complicate dominant assumptions about frame resonance, cannot be adequately explained through a racialized backlash account, and carry implications for collective memory scholars and activists. In closing, I will reflect on why the public responds negatively to civil rights appeals despite positive sentiment toward the abstract idea.
Speaker biography: Kim Voss is professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in the study of labor, social movements, inequality, and higher education. In addition to publishing in academic journals in sociology, political science, and demography, she has written or edited six books, including Rallying for Immigrant Rights (2011, with I. Bloemraad), Hard Work: Remaking the American Labor Movement (2006, with R. Fantasia), Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth (1996, with five Berkeley colleagues), and The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century (1993). She is currently working on a book about immigration and social movements.
Date: March 5 , 2026
Time: 12 – 1:30 pm
Location: Rolfe Hall 2125
RSVP HERE!

UCLA Industry Power Research Bootcamp
2026-03-16 - 2026-03-20
Industry Power Research Bootcamp
Convened by the UCLA Strategic Research Lab
Join the labor and other social movement researchers from around the country to learn the best ways to approach industry-based research and apply your findings to build industry-wide power.
As the NLRB continues to come under attack, unions and other labor groups that organize are increasingly looking at industries, not companies. To succeed, we need to understand how industries work and what powers and limitations come with a sectoral approach to campaigning.
In this five-day training, you will learn the basics of how to research an industry and explain your findings to members and other staff. We will bring expert campaigners to discuss key aspects of sectoral research, including:

Bounding your industry and understanding the product
How to think about supply chains
Spatial concentration and its effects on bosses and workers
Intersections between your industry and government regulators and policymakers
Considerations behind sectoral standards campaigns

The camp is designed for any movement researchers, strategic campaigners, activists, or organizers wanting to better understand how to think about sector-wide strategies.
The 2026 Industry Research Power Bootcamp applications window has closed. Stay tuned for information about future camps offered by the UCLA Strategic Research Lab and our annual Strategic Labor Research Conference!

About The UCLA Strategic Research Lab:
The UCLA Strategic Research Lab is a capacity-building training hub and network for researchers from labor and community-based organizations. As a research unit of a public university, the SRL seeks to train strategic researchers for the common good. Besides the Coding Camp for Union Research, the Strategic Research Lab also holds its annual Strategic Labor Research Conference, one of the largest annual convenings of labor and movement researchers in the nation.
Sign up for email updates for other Strategic Research Lab events and trainings here.

Book Talk: Steven W. Thrasher on The Overseer Class, In Conversation with Robin D.G. Kelley
2026-04-23 16:00 - 17:30 | Royce Hall 314
Date: April 23, 2026
Time: 4 P.M.
Location: Royce Hall 314
Steven W. Thrasher, PhD, will talk about his new book The Overseer Class (Amistad/HarperCollins, 2025). Based upon his reporting on the Black Lives Matter movement since he was covering Ferguson in 2014, Thrasher writes of observing an “overseer class” of Black cops, gay prosecutors, and people from marginalized background who amass their power by cracking the skulls of their own.

May Day Teach-In and Poster Session
2026-04-27 16:00 - 19:00
The UCLA Labor Studies Department is excited to facilitate the attendance of UCLA students to MAY DAY in Los Angeles!!!! May Day is the international celebration dedicated to workers. Occurring on May 1st, Los Angeles not only dedicates this day to honor the struggles of workers, but it also recognizes other social issues associated with the working class, particularly immigration. Each year May Day Coalitions throughout Los Angeles, as they do in other cities around the world, organize gatherings where thousands of people, organizations and supporters come together to bring awareness to the intersecting struggles of working people in their communities.
In preparation for May Day, Labor Studies 10 will be hosting a teach-in on past May Day events in Los Angeles, their impact on the city and its community members, and on the current May Day celebrations and their significance during these tumultuous political times.

Monday, April 27th
4-6:30 pm

Bunche Hall 2209A
RSVP HERE!

Teach-In – 4:00 – 5:45pm
Poster-Making Session 6-6:50pm

Book Talk: Jonathan Rosenblum on How Socialists Win, In Conversation with Robin D.G. Kelley
2026-04-29 16:00 - 17:30 | Royce Hall 314
Book Talk: Jonathan Rosenblum on How Socialists Win
In Conversation with Robin D.G. Kelley
Veteran labor organizer and journalist Jonathan Rosenblum discusses his new book, We’re Coming For You and Your Rotten System: How Socialists Beat Amazon and Upended Big-City Politics, an insider’s account of Seattle’s socialist city council member Kshama Sawant and the successful movement she led against corporate power and compromising labor leaders. An inspiring lesson for building worker power.
Date: April 29, 2026 @ 4 P.M.
Location: Royce Hall 314

May Day March
2026-05-01 10:00 - 15:00
Date: Friday, May 1st
Time: 10 AM
Location: MacArthur Park
This May 1st, join us at MacArthur Park at 10 AM and march alongside workers from every sector, trade, and craft.
This year’s message is clear: Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo. Come out and be part of LA’s annual May Day march! 📢
Students — we’re working on a bus from UCLA to MacArthur Park and back, plus a teach-in and poster-making session before the march. More details coming soon.

Labor Studies NOW Presents: Book Panel on Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest
2026-05-14 12:00 - 13:00
Labor Studies NOW Speaker Series
Jennifer Jihye Chun and Ju Hui Judy Han
Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest
Date: Thursday, May 14th
Time: 12-1 PM
Location: 10383 Bunche Hall
RSVP HERE!
Moderator: Tobias Higbie
Discussants: Jong Bum Kwon, Hannah Appel, Zeynep Korkman
Organized by: Department of Labor Studies, Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, and Center for Korean Studies
About the book
Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest (Stanford University Press, 2025) offers insight into the utility and futility of protesting precarity under neoliberal capitalism. Based on long-term ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with key labor and social movement activists, the book follows the protests of minoritized workers, especially women employed in precarious jobs, as they contend with what it means to be treated as disposable and what it takes to resist. Long-term protest camps, life-threatening hunger strikes, grueling prostrations, perilous high-altitude occupations are agonizing to perform and to witness but often powerful as affective catalysts of change. Through dramatic performances and rituals that repeat across time and space, Against Abandonment finds that protesters cultivate repertoires of solidarity as a relational force that binds people and worlds together in a collective praxis of refusal. In doing so, Against Abandonment builds upon intersectional, transnational, and abolitionist feminist theorizing that has long emphasized the centrality of building relations of care and community in place-based struggles against capitalist abandonment.
About the authors
Jennifer Jihye Chun is Professor of Asian American Studies and Labor Studies at UCLA. She is the author of Organizing at the Margins: the Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States (2009) and co-author of Against Abandonment: Repertoires Solidarity in South Korean Protest (2025). She is the Interim Chair of the Department of Labor Studies and has a faculty teaching appointment in the International Institute.
Ju Hui Judy Han is Associate Professor in Gender Studies at UCLA. Han is the author of Queer Throughlines: Spaces of Queer Activism in South Korea and the Korean Diaspora (2025) and co-author of Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest (2025). She is currently working on a decolonial travel guide to Korea and a new project on the “feminist take” on contemporary cultural politics.
About the panelists
Hannah Appel is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Global Studies and Associate Faculty Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. She is the author of The Licit Life of Capitalism (2019) and co-author of Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition (2020). Appel is a co-founder and organizer with the Debt Collective.
Tobias Higbie is Professor of History and Labor Studies and the Director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) at UCLA. He is a labor historian whose research explores the intersection of work, migration, and social movement organizing in the United States. He is the author of Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1880-1930 (2003) and Labor’s Mind: a History of Working-Class Intellectual Life (2019).
Zeynep Korkman is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at UCLA. Her research explores the gendered relationships between affect, labor, religion, and transnational feminist politics, with a focus on Turkey and the broader Middle East. She is the author of Gendered Fortunes: Divination, Precarity, and Affect in Postsecular Turkey (2023). Her ongoing research investigates the affective and laborious contents and discontents of transnational feminist solidarity.
Jong Bum Kwon is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Webster University. His research interests include cultural anthropology, urban studies, globalization, race and ethnicity, ethnographic methods, with a focus on contemporary Korean labor and capitalism and Asians in America. His current research projects focus on the dilemma of whiteness in St. Louis, MO, in the wake of the Ferguson Uprising and Black youth’s aspirations and social mobility in the time of BLM and white nativism.

The Past, Present, and Future of Jews and the Labor Movement in Los Angeles
2026-05-28 17:30 - 20:00 | UCLA Labor Center
Thursday, May 28, 2026 • UCLA Labor Center • 5:30 PM
675 S Park View Street, Los Angeles, CA 90057
What drew Jewish immigrants to the labor movement? How did unions become distinctly “Jewish” spaces — and what happened when they changed? Join historians, organizers, and community leaders for a panel on Jewish labor activism in Los Angeles: from the open-shop battles of the early 20th century to today.
Featuring Jackie Goldberg (Community Leader & Labor Activist)
RSVP HERE!
Sponsored by UCLA Department of Labor Studies UCLA Labor Center, UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, Jewish Partnership for Los Angeles

UCLA Coding Bootcamp for Union Research
2026-06-08 - 2026-06-12
The UCLA Strategic Research Lab will hold a five-day intensive training in using the power of Python coding to simplify tasks for union research. The camp will be held from June 8-12, 2026, and applications will open in late February.
Applications for Coding Bootcamp are now live!
The Coding Bootcamp is an intense and challenging experience! Come ready to jump feet first into a weeklong journey towards simplifying your work, discovering new data sources, and automating your most routine research tasks!
Key Training Topics:

Python fundamentals
Dynamically moving and combining multiple files
Fuzzy matching different data sets
Use APIs to bulk download data, such as open government data
Scraping websites to collect data, such as:

property listings,
company information,
government data,
pdfs, and
data sets that cannot be downloaded directly

Cleaning, merging, and deduplicating data such as worker lists, property records, or company information
Using text patterns to extract data

Who should apply
This course is designed for union or movement researchers that often encounter large amounts of data in the course of their work. The skills taught in this course will allow students to collect, process, and analyze data more efficiently and accurately.
This course does not cover topics such as databases (i.e. SQL), advanced data analysis (i.e. statistics and data modeling), machine learning, or extracting text from PDFs–these are advanced topics that cannot be covered in the time we have, but students will have a solid Python foundation and can work on self-teaching these topics after the course.
Prior coding experience is not required to attend this course. However, all accepted students must participate in a short, self-paced python pre-course. We will also cover Python fundamentals together in class.

Advice From the 2025 Coding Bootcamp Cohort:
“You should definitely attend this program if you’re thinking about it! This program really helps make coding feel so much more accessible no matter how much experience you have coming in. I have learned so many different ways to use coding to make my work so much more efficient and comprehensive.”
“It is like drinking out of a firehouse. That’s just the way this sort of thing works. Keeping a good attitude and accepting that you will be challenged is extremely crucial to being successful.”
“I have learned so much and feel so much more capable in the work I do.”

Event Details:

Dates: June 8-12, 2026
Time: Monday-Friday, 8am-6pm
Location: UCLA James Lawson Jr. Worker Justice Center, Los Angeles
Cost: $850 (includes training materials & refreshments)
Meals: Not included, but local dining options are available

The Instructor: Mellissa Chang

Mellissa Chang (she/hers) is freelance campaign researcher and data engineer. She conducts data-informed campaign research and builds data tools for labor unions and non-profits. Prior to this, she was a research coordinator at the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, where she tracked and analyzed eviction data and acquisitions to support tenant organizing campaigns around the country. During the pandemic, she closely tracked covid relief spending, identifying parent recipients and matching recipients to a database of federal regulatory violations, earning her the DC Femme Tech Award in 2021. Before entering the non-profit sphere, she worked as an airports campaign researcher at 32BJ. Mellissa holds a B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University. In her spare time, she builds automated mass transit systems in Minecraft.

Application details
This application includes a short diagnostic test. The results of this test are only used to help design the course and are NOT factored into your application assessment.
This course is rigorous and fast-paced. By applying to this course, you pledge to remain focused and engaged, and to ask for help when needed.
Applications close on March 21, 2026. Accepted candidates will be notified shortly after this deadline. Space is limited.

Email srl@irle.ucla.edu for more information or if you have any questions.

About The UCLA Strategic Research Lab:
The UCLA Strategic Research Lab is a capacity-building training hub and network for researchers from labor and community-based organizations. As a research unit of a public university, the SRL seeks to train strategic researchers for the common good. Besides the Coding Camp for Union Research, the Strategic Research Lab also holds its annual Strategic Labor Research Conference, one of the largest annual convenings of labor and movement researchers in the nation.
Sign up for email updates for other Strategic Research Lab events and trainings here.
