Institute for Research on Labor and Employment

Hour Crisis: Scheduling & Retail Worker Organizing in Los Angeles
2018-10-24 12:00 - 14:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | UCLA Bunche Hall 6275
Los Angeles retail workers struggle with unreliable hours and
unpredictable schedules that undercut their incomes and chances of
living full and healthy lives. Recently, workers have come together to
demand a fair workweek and pass local and state ordinances for
advanced schedule notice and guaranteed hours.
Come hear organizers, industry experts, and academics share their
perspectives on historic campaigns, current policy initiatives, and
research conducted by the UCLA Labor Center and LAANE.
SPECIAL GUEST:
Lane Windham, Associate Director, Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for
Labor and the Working Poor & Author of ‘Knocking on Labor’s Door’
PANELISTS:
Janna Shadduck-Hernández, Project Director, UCLA Labor Center
Preeti Sharma, PhD Candidate, UCLA Gender Studies & Researcher, UCLA Labor Center
Nelson Motto, Director, Fair Workweek Los Angeles Coalition
MODERATOR:
Toby Higbie, Professor, UCLA Department of History

Can Immigrant Students Still Feel Safe at School in the Age of Trump
2018-10-10 12:15 - 13:30 | UCLA School of Law Rm. 1357
How are public schools and teachers being affected by the Trump administration’s immigration policies? What can public schools do to protect their students? What can we do to ensure that our schools are safe spaces for all students?
This interdisciplinary panel will address such questions by drawing on two national studies by Professors Patricia Gándara and John Rogers and they will be joined by Michael Newman, California Department of Justice, Civil Rights Enforcement Section, and Thomas Saenz, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Gig Economy Event
2018-05-30 13:00 - 15:00 | UCLA Public Affairs 2243
In an expansive city with limited public transit, the arrival of companies like Uber and Lyft has transformed daily life in LA and raised important questions about job quality, employment law, and creating an economy that works for everybody. Come hear drivers, organizers, industry experts and scholars share their perspectives on the future of ride-hailing and worker organizing in Los Angeles during the age of the gig economy.

Tam Tran Goes to Washington
2018-05-22 16:00 - 17:15 | UCLA De Neve Auditorium, 351 Charles E. Young Drive, West, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Tam Tran was a filmmaker and leader of IDEAS at UCLA. She and her best friend, Cinthya Felix, graduated from UCLA and were enrolled in graduate school at Brown and Columbia Universities. They were both nationally known leaders of the immigrant youth movement. Tam and Cinthya were tragically killed in a car crash in May of 2010.

This is a special 40-minute play that was produced by the East West Players, the renowned Asian American Theater company of Los Angeles. Given the precarious status of hundreds of thousands of immigrant youth who are currently being threatened with deportation by the current administration, this play is a timely educational resource for teachers and students to address the issue of immigration and immigrant rights.

Made in L.A. - Documentary Screening and Q&A
2017-11-21 12:30 - 15:00 | UCLA Bunche Hall 3211
MADE IN LA is an Emmy award-winning feature documentary that follows the remarkable story of three Latina immigrants working in Los Angeles garment sweatshops as they embark on a three-year odyssey to win basic labor protections from the clothing retailer, Forever 21. In intimate observational style, MADE IN LA reveals the impact of the struggle on each woman’s life as they are gradually transformed by the experience. Compelling, humorous and deeply human, MADE IN LA is a story about immigration, the power of unity, and the courage it takes to find your own voice.
After the screening there will be a Q&A with organizers from the Garment Worker Center. More guests TBA!

Free Screening of Union Time: Fighting for Workers’ Rights
2017-11-07 16:30 - 18:00 | UCLA Public Affairs 2243
Union Time tells the story of one of the greatest union victory of the 21st century—the fight to organize Smithfield Foods’ pork processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina. From 1993 to 2008, workers struggled against dangerous working conditions, intimidation, and low pay. They were organized by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, whose Justice@Smithfield campaign brought national attention to the campaign. The victory led to the formation of UFCW Local 1208 and fair working conditions for 5,000 workers.

Test Divisional Event
2017-07-28
Testing, please disregard.

Building International Union Campaigns: McDonald's and the 'Fight for 15'
2017-05-22 12:00 - 13:30
Professor Tony Royle, University of York
What are the challenges associated with building effective global union campaigns? One way to answer this question is to examine the development of the ‘Fight for 15’ campaign. The campaign, which began in 2012 in New York, went global in 2014. It involved low-paid workers around the world. Professor Royle will discuss why the McDonald’s Corporation was chosen as the key target of the campaign and the challenges associated with organizing workers in the international fast-food industry. ‘Fight for 15’ has been strongly driven by SEIU, the labor union. Aspects of the international campaign reflect SEIU’s agenda and its willingness to commit considerable resources. SEIU has also tried to link the international campaign to workforce issues in different nations.

Professor Tony Royle is a professor at the University of York and previously held posts at the University of Bradford, UK; the University of Galway (NUIG), Ireland; and Nottingham Business School, UK. Tony is the author of Working for McDonald’s in Europe and co-author and co-editor of Labour Relations in the Global Fast-Food Industry. He has been an advisor for the European Parliament, the International Labour Organization and various national unions His work is used as a resource for teaching in many universities around the world. Some of it has been published in German, Italian and Spanish.

UCLA’s Role in Workers’ Lives Today
2017-04-11 17:30 - 20:30
Now more than ever, in this divided political era, higher education institutions like UCLA have an important role to play in upholding workers’ rights. Universities are where rigorous data-driven research happens on pressing economic, workplace, and political issues. They are where students develop research and critical thinking skills and engage directly in the cities where they live.
For over 70 years, the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment has conducted timely and impactful research on labor markets and how work impacts workers and their families. As home to the UCLA Labor Center, our research on immigrants, young people, and low-wage workers has driven policy change, including minimum wage, paid sick leave, and wage theft. Through the UCLA Labor Minor, every year we place over 300 students into internships in social justice and governmental organizations across the country. The Institute’s Labor Occupational Safety and Health Program (LOSH) has trained thousands of workers on health and safety measures that are sometimes the difference between life and death. And, the Human Resources Roundtable (HARRT) works with companies to recruit and retain diverse, skilled workforces nationwide.
Come celebrate with us!
Let’s vision UCLA’s work on behalf of working people and their families today and beyond.
Speakers:
Maria Elena Durazo
Vice-Chair, Democratic National Committee
General Vice President for Immigration, Civil Rights, and Diversity, UNITE HERE
Robin D.G. Kelley
Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History, UCLA
Abel Valenzuela
Director, UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment

UCLA Meyer & Renee Luskin Conference Center
425 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90095
Self-pay parking available in Structure 8

Transnational Labor Alliances: Power, Coordination, and Why Some Succeed
2016-11-18 12:30 - 14:00
Labor activists are increasingly cooperating across national borders in campaigns aimed at convincing transnational corporations to improve wages, working conditions, and labor rights. Yet to date there are no systematic studies of why some transnational labor alliances succeed while others do not. This book thus develops a causal theory of success and failure in transnational labor alliances. I hypothesize that transnational labor alliances succeed only when they exercise a type of power that threatens a corporation’s core, material interests. Moreover, workers must coordinate both within their own organizations and across national borders in order to exercise power on the international scale. Using both cross-case and within-case methods of comparative analysis, I test this hypothesis through a matched-pair analysis of six recent transnational campaigns featuring alliances spearheaded by workers from Australia, Cambodia, Indonesia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These campaigns occurred in the shipping, retail, security services, and luxury hotel industries between 1995 and 2010. The data, which include original interviews conducted over three years of fieldwork, provide evidence that intra-union coordination, inter-union coordination, and a context-appropriate power strategy are all necessary conditions for transnational labor alliances to succeed.

IRLE Colloquia Series — The Crisis of Public Sector Unionism
2016-10-23 12:30 - 14:00
Unionism and collective bargaining among U.S. state and local government employees are being widely debated, and some of these governments have sharply reduced or eliminated public employee unionism and bargaining rights. Such actions are based on a belief that fiscal adversity facing state and local governments stems mainly from the over-compensation of public employees that has ostensibly resulted from unionism, bargaining and supportive legislation enacted decades earlier. These changes, however, are being made with little or no consideration of empirical evidence about public-private sector pay and benefit relationships, the effects of unions on state and local government employee pay, the effectiveness of employment dispute resolution procedures, including arbitration, and the ability of state and local government labor and management to effectively combat fiscal adversity and enhance organizational performance. In this presentation, Professor Lewin will provide new evidence showing that, on balance, state and local government employees are undercompensated relative to their private sector counterparts, and that the effects of unions on compensation are considerably smaller in state and local government than in the private sector. Further, available evidence indicates that state and local government employment dispute resolution procedures work reasonably well based on process and outcome assessments, and that labor and management in these governments can use mutual gains negotiations to benefit not just themselves but citizens and communities more broadly. Finally, he will propose a research agenda for a new generation of scholars so that they, like their predecessors, can influence policy makers in making high stakes decisions about state and local government unionism and collective bargaining.

IRLE Colloquia Series — Book Talk: Sunshine Was Never Enough: Los Angeles Workers, 1880-2010
2016-10-16 12:30 - 14:00
Delving beneath Southern California’s popular image as a sunny frontier of leisure and ease, this book tells the dynamic story of the life and labor of Los Angeles’s large working class. In a sweeping narrative that takes into account more than a century of labor history, John H. M. Laslett acknowledges the advantages Southern California’s climate, open spaces, and bucolic character offered to generations of newcomers. At the same time, he demonstrates that—in terms of wages, hours, and conditions of work—L.A. differed very little from America’s other industrial cities. Both fast-paced and sophisticated, Sunshine Was Never Enough shows how labor in all its guises—blue and white collar, industrial, agricultural, and high tech—shaped the neighborhoods, economic policies, racial attitudes, and class perceptions of the City of Angels.
Laslett explains how, until the 1930s, many of L.A.’s workers were under the thumb of the Merchants and Manufacturers Association. This conservative organization kept wages low, suppressed trade unions, and made L.A. into the open shop capital of America. By contrast now, at a time when the AFL-CIO is at its lowest ebb—a young generation of Mexican and African American organizers has infused the L.A. movement with renewed strength. These stories of the men and women who pumped oil, loaded ships in San Pedro harbor, built movie sets, assembled aircraft, and in more recent times cleaned hotels and washed cars is a little-known but vital part of Los Angeles history.

Precarious Work: Domination and Resistance in the US, China, and the World
2016-08-19 08:15 - 20:30
Today precarious work presents perhaps the greatest global challenge to worker well-being, and has become a major rallying point for worker mobilization around the world. This conference focuses on analyzing the growth of precarious employment and informal labor, its consequences for workers and their families, the challenges it poses to worker organizing and collective mobilization, and how workers and other social actors are responding to precariousness. We seek to understand the patterns of social and economic domination of labor shaped by the state, capital, gender, class, age, ethnicity, skills, and citizenship, and examine the manifestations of labor resistance and acquiescence in their specific contexts.
The conference is initiated by the American Sociological Association (ASA)’s Labor and Labor Movements Section, the International Sociological Association (ISA)’s Research Committee on Labor Movements (RC44), and the Chinese Sociological Association’s China Association of Work and Labor (CAWL). It builds in part on an ongoing scholarly exchange between the ASA Labor Section and the CAWL. The conference program will focus on the United States and China, but will include a range of global cases and perspectives. Interdisciplinary approaches and innovative research methods are welcomed.

Does Innovation Go with Social Inclusion? Multinational Corporation in Mexico
2016-05-25 12:30 - 14:00
Recent research has revealed that contrary to the expectations generated by globalization, there is no automatic correlation linking world trade expansion and multinational companies, product innovation, and more generally, economic progress (measured in terms of growth) with social progress. On the contrary, there is evidence showing that even when there has been a significant job transfer to developing countries, there has been deterioration in its quality.
This research stems from the need to understand and document the variety of paths experienced when adapting working relations to the requirements arising from the economic innovation processes in the case of Mexico, considering there is a wide selection of multinational companies from various sectors installed in the country. Therefore, this paper aims to identify the relationship between innovation and social-labor progress, through the analysis multinational firms established in Mexico.
It is worth mentioning that this paper is derived from an study in nine countries coordinated by the Intrepid, an academic international network. In Mexico’s case, the survey represents 922 multinational firms in the manufacturing and service sectors. The purpose of the survey was to determine their performance in terms of innovation, employment practices and outsourcing. After the analysis of the data, a typology of innovation-social inclusion was designed, and based on these results, a second stage of the study was conducted through qualitative analysis with 16 companies from different productive sectors. Companies from different country of origin were taken into account, including Americans, Europeans, Chinese and Mexicans.
All selected companies have significant national and international economic relevance, and all of them follow practices of innovation. The research question in this case was whether innovation is associated with socio-labor progress in multinational companies.
The main results confirm the general perception of literature on the topic: innovation giving economic and competitive results to multinational companies is not associated to the results of social-labor progress, and the overall balance of globalization is not the reduction of inequality. In most companies, innovations (product and process) were observed and changes in the business model were also perceived; however, these improvements did not go alongside the socio-labor progress. Only a small proportion of companies follow the “high road”. Finally, this paper offers some results on the associated variables, which allow observing the positive articulation between innovation and social-labor progress.

Black Feminism, The Carceral State, and Abolition
2016-05-19 16:00 - 18:00
Drawing upon black feminist criticism and a diverse array of archival materials, Sarah Haley’s No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity illuminates black women’s experiences of imprisonment in the South to uncover how gendered regimes of incarceration were crucial to the making of Jim Crow modernity. No Mercy Here examines the brutalization of imprisoned women in local, county, and state convict labor systems, while also situating them within the black radical tradition by illuminating practices of resistance, refusal, and sabotage that challenged ideologies of racial capitalism and patriarchy, offering alternative conceptions of social and political life and envisioning a world beyond prisons.

Racializing Normative Markets: Whiteness, Masculinity, and the "Efficiency" of Networks
2016-05-12 12:00 - 13:30
While critical scholarship has made important contributions to the understandings of markets and difference, many of these approaches have focused on how dominant markets have actively depended upon, as well as excluded groups based on, hierarchies of raced, gendered, classed, sexualized, and national differences. That we better understand how capitalism depended on enslavement, how US real estate markets segregated and excluded African Americans, and how productive labor cannot be jettisoned from reproductive labor are due to this crucial research. However, we need to go further. Even as dominant, capitalist markets are depicted as exclusionary and exploitative of differences, they themselves are often held stable, and not directly analyzed as composed of particular bodies, assumptions, actions, and values. This presentation, inspired by critical race theory, cultural histories of risk and the construction of the risk-bearing individual, as well as ethnographic accounts of financial markets, examines both the underbelly of what makes financial markets possible as well as the whiteness and classed masculinity of financial markets themselves. I will explore how the very underpinnings of what makes markets and market exchange possible are arrangements of exchangeability, commensurability, and liquidity made possible, in part, through the instruments and assumptions of racial fraternity and exclusion.

Community Bank and Banking Structure Effects on Local Economies, Unemployment and Recovery: An Economic Sociology Perspective
2016-05-04 12:30 - 14:00
With good reason, scholars and policy makers have focused on the profound industry-wide transformations American banking and finance experienced over the last three decades, emphasizing deregulation, concentration within a handful of giant global banking corporations, their abandonment of the “real economy” for market-based banking grounded in securitization and derivative transactions, and the devastating effects these changes have had on the broader economy. Less clear is the extent to which decentralized systems of smaller, locally owned and operating community banks and credit unions withstood transformations in American finance, providing local economies with alternatives to banking corporations like Citigroup or JP Morgan Chase. Less clear also are whether and how localism, organizational diversity and the persistence of alternatives to “too-big-too-fail” institutions in local economies may have helped them weather the recent storm of a combined financial and economic crisis, whether by sustaining small business, fostering new enterprise formation or dampening employment shocks. Analyzing banking organization and markets at the county and metropolitan area levels, this research documents substantial variation in banking structure across local economies in the US up to and including the current period, confounding a simple narrative of dominance, displacement and homogenization under the aegis of too-big-to-fail banking corporations. It also presents preliminary analyses of whether and how differences in banking structure and the persistence of “Jeffersonian” alternatives to too-big-to-fail bank corporations in local economies affected levels and changes there in the relative size of the small business sector, new establishment formation and unemployment during and “after” the great recession.

Low-wage Workers and Public Policy: Marginalization, Coercion, and Alternatives
2016-04-28 14:00 - 15:30
This research forum takes a broad look at emerging issues of immigrant integration, incarceration, and low-wage work. Six very different researchers from four UC campuses will present their cutting-edge research, looking at the destructive effects of many policies currently in place, but also at alternatives to move toward economic and social justice.

Uber Drivers: Independent Contractors, Employees, or Something Else?
2016-04-18 17:00 - 18:30
Are Uber Drivers and others who provide service in the On-Demand economy entitled to the employment rights, benefits, and protections that other employees enjoy? Or, are the “gig workers” actually independent contractors, entitled to no protection at all? If they are employees, they would get benefit of minimum wage and overtime laws, protection against discrimination, health and safety standards, workers compensation for on-the-job injury, and many other rights under state and federal employment laws. Moreover, if they are considered “employees,” then they are entitled to the protection of the labor laws when they try to organize unions. Some have advocated that the law create a new category for these worker, such as “dependent contractor,” or “independent worker?” Others have advocated that we improve the statutory rights and protections for independent contractors. This panel will consider these issues from a number of perspectives.

Occupiers and Dreamers: Insiders and Outsiders in a New Political Generation
2016-04-06 12:30 - 14:00
Young adults have long been overrepresented among political activists, and their generationally specific experiences and worldviews often shape social movement agendas. Although these phenomena have received limited scholarly attention in recent years, they are highly salient features of the new cycle of protest that has emerged in the 21st century United States. This talk analyzes two key components of that cycle, the 2011 Occupy Wall Street uprising and the movement of undocumented immigrant “Dreamers.” Both were led by U.S. “Millennials” (born between 1980 and 2000). I argue that Millennials comprise a new political generation, with a worldview that sets it apart from previous generations of U.S. activists. I compare the Occupiers’ and Dreamers’ political strategies and organizational forms and argue that, despite a shared worldview, this new political generation is heterogeneous in regard to modes of mobilization. The Occupiers were a relatively privileged group of young people whose aspirations were frustrated, especially in the context of the Great Recession, threatening them with exclusion from the economic stratum they had long expected to enter; by contrast the Dreamers were already marginalized because of their undocumented status and sought inclusion within the economic mainstream. Their different social locations, in turn, contributed to Occupiers’ and Dreamers’ distinctly different political strategies and organizational forms.

Apple, Foxconn and China's New Working Class: Political Economy of Global Production
2016-03-30 12:30
This is a worker-centered analysis of Apple, the world’s most profitable corporation, and its primary supplier, with more than one million workers in China alone, the world’s largest industrial employer, Foxconn. Apple’s commercial triumph rests not only on its design and marketing supremacy but on the reversal of its original business model from producing computers to outsourcing its entire consumer electronics production to Asia. Drawing on extensive fieldwork at multiple sites from coastal to inland, we examine the interface of Apple, Foxconn, the Chinese state, and the unions. The power dynamics of the buyer-driven supply chain are analysed as these play out for Chinese workers in an epoch of fundamental class transformation from the predominance of state owned enterprises to a workforce that is overwhelmingly comprised of rural migrant workers. The analysis of incomplete proletarianization and the emergence of a new form of precarious labor is central to the story. Power asymmetries, including technological control and global marketing, assure the dominance of Apple in price setting and the timing of product delivery, resulting in intense pressures and illegal overtime for workers. In the wake of a wave of suicides at the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen in 2010, we studied labor practice, living conditions and patterns of resistance at Foxconn and other factories, centering on two generations of rural migrant workers in a period in which contentious social protest has grown exponentially: in a system that is fully unionized (company union), in which strikes and autonomous unions are illegal, and in which the state actively seeks to redirect conflict from worker protest to the courts. We consider the paradox of worker power and powerlessness at the interface of a system in transition from predominantly state owned enterprise with lifetime employment for urban workers to one in which large areas of the state sector have been privatized and in which a partially proletarianized rural migrant workforce, whose numbers are approaching 300 million but who lack fundamental labor and citizenship rights, constitute the core of the contemporary working class and its most volatile segment.

2015-16 Benjamin Aaron Labor Law Lecture
2016-02-23 18:00 - 20:30
Please join us for an informative evening as our special guest Dr. David Weil, Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division at the Department of Labor, discusses his priorities and initiatives at the Hour and Wage Division, including the Wage and Hour Division’s strategic enforcement and opportunities for stakeholder engagement with the agency to raise compliance behavior. He will also discuss his much acclaimed book The Fissured Workplace. Dr. Weil is an internationally recognized expert in public and labor market policy; regulatory performance; industrial and labor relations; transparency policy; and supply-chain restructuring and its effects.

Bonded for Flexibility: Migrant Workers in Qatar's Construction Industry anbd Beyond
2016-02-12 12:00 - 13:30
Qatar, the host of the 2022 World Cup, has been called out for its labor practices. Human rights and labor organizations have condemned the treatment of migrant workers and have called the small gulf nation a modern slave state. While Qatar has been singled out for its labor practices, forced labor arrangements, whether formally sanctioned or informally implemented, are widespread internationally and are profoundly compatible with modern capitalist production. This paper draws on a qualitative examine of the construction industry in Qatar to examine the ways in which compulsion is used in global production systems to meet production challenges. While critiques of the labor system in Qatar have emphasized working conditions and wages, this paper focuses instead on worker skill, an aspect of production that is often represented as a neutral input in the form of human capital. I argue that labor arrangements based on compulsion enable firms to erase the skill contribution of workers even as they rely on their skill to meet technical challenges and highly variable production targets. This systemic skill erasure forecloses all negotiations between labor and management over how skill is used and compensated, thus preserving maximum production and price flexibility for firms. The paper concludes with a call for a renewed exploration of the politics and power relations of production systems, and of the specific ways in which compulsion is deployed as a deliberate production strategy.

Protecting Immigrant Workers: New Strategies for Strengthening Labor Standards Enforcement
2016-01-29 12:00 - 13:30
Professor Janice Fine will present some of her research on the evolution of the worker center movement as well as recent work building a theoretical argument and set of case studies on the role of unions and worker centers in enforcing labor standards in low wage sectors in partnership with government agencies.

Precarious Lives: Gendered Engagement with Neoliberal Development and the Contemporary Academy - CANCELED
2016-01-21 12:30 - 14:00
This talk is an engagement with the conditions of precarity that characterize the current moment. Navarro links her ethnographic research on offshore banking in the US-owned Virgin Islands to scholarship detailing the troubling neoliberal turn made by the American academy, this lecture is an engagement with neoliberalism and its effects. Building on black feminist scholarship, Navarro will take up the notion of intersectionality and consider its continued salience vis-à-vis contemporary operations of capital. She does this in order to demonstrate the ways in which neoliberal logic builds upon, and deepens, existing hierarchies—divisions that are most often named in relation to class, but are equally significant along lines of gender, race, and color.
Taking seriously the notion that the American academy is in crisis (with institutions relying increasingly on nonsecure, poorly-paid adjunct teaching, offering ever-fewer tenure track positions for the steady stream of newly-minted Ph.D’s that are produced each year), Navarro will examine the effects of this precarity on teaching, faculty/staff research agendas, and student advising. She will pay particular attention to the ways female faculty members and scholars of color are positioned in this financial-academic environment. Linking these concerns to her own research agenda on economic development in the US Virgin Islands, her work provides a gendered analysis of the neoliberal project, as she examines the Economic Development Commission (EDC) initiative, a tax holiday program that has attracted a number of primarily American bankers to the island of St. Croix. In this talk, Navarro will explore the issue of gender vis-à-vis the EDC program, as she works through the gendered expectations governing the local women working in the EDC sector, a group known locally as ‘EDC girls.’ These workers, a group of local women who have contributed to the creation of a new social category on St. Croix, are expected to dress, act, and dispose of their generous salaries both conspicuously and in ways that benefit the broader community of St. Croix. Navarro argues that far from serving as unwitting participants in these processes, these women perform a mediating role in neoliberal globalization, actively participating in the creating of new social and economic realities.

The Hand That Feeds
2015-10-28 12:30 - 14:00
At a popular bakery café, residents of New York’s Upper East Side get bagels and coffee served with a smile 24 hours a day. But behind the scenes, undocumented immigrant workers face sub-legal wages, dangerous machinery, and abusive managers who will fire them for calling in sick. Mild-mannered sandwich maker Mahoma López has never been interested in politics, but in January 2012, he convinces a small group of his co-workers to fight back.
Risking deportation and the loss of their livelihood, the workers team up with a diverse crew of innovative young organizers and take the unusual step of forming their own independent union, launching themselves on a journey that will test the limits of their resolve. In one roller-coaster year, they must overcome a shocking betrayal and a two-month lockout. Lawyers will battle in back rooms, Occupy Wall Street protesters will take over the restaurant, and a picket line will divide the neighborhood. If they can win a contract, it will set a historic precedent for low-wage workers across the country. But whatever happens, Mahoma and his coworkers will never be exploited again.

IRLE Dialogue Southern California Port Truck Drivers: Exploitation and Resistance
2015-05-27 13:00 - 14:30
Join three engaged legal experts and a historian to discuss this history-making worker struggle within the broader context of the push to improve low-wage jobs in the Los Angeles area!

After Marikana: The State, the ANC, and the Future of the Labor Movement in South Africa
2015-05-18 14:00 - 17:00
The colloquium will be devoted to the crises and conflicts that have wracked the labor movement in South Africa in recent years and the implications of these struggles for the future of South African politics. In 2012, police from the African National Congress (ANC) government gunned down 44 striking platinum workers in what has come to be known as the Marikana massacre, a watershed moment for South Africa’s politics and its trade unions.
The speakers will consider the historic strike by 70,000 Association of Mineworkers and Construction Workers (AMCU) that ensued, the internecine battles that have been taking place among the different sections of COSATU trade union federation, and the intense factional strife between the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) and other sections of the trade union movement that has issued in NUMSA’s expulsion from COSATU.
NUMSA has now initiated a call for what it terms a united front, not only to build a new workers party to stand in national elections, but also to forge links between the struggles of productive and reproductive struggles that would better connect organized labor with the “service delivery protests” of poor, heavily immigrant workers. No less than the future of the South African workers movement and the nature the South African state are at stake.

Authors-Meet-Critics on Skills of the "Unskilled": Work and Mobility Among Mexican Migrants
2015-05-15 12:30 - 13:30
Most labor and migration studies classify migrants with limited formal education or credentials as “unskilled.” Despite the value of migrants’ work experiences and the substantial technical and interpersonal skills developed throughout their lives, the labor-market contributions of these migrants are often overlooked and their mobility pathways poorly understood. Skills of the “Unskilled” reports the findings of a five-year study that draws on research including interviews with 320 Mexican migrants and return migrants in North Carolina and Guanajuato, Mexico. The authors uncover these migrants’ lifelong human capital and identify mobility pathways associated with the acquisition and transfer of skills across the migratory circuit, including reskilling, occupational mobility, job jumping, and entrepreneurship.

New Strategies for Youth Employment: Rebuilding Community Jobs in the Face of Globalization
2015-05-14 12:30 - 14:00
Hard hit by economic restructuring have been young people of color, who face high under/unemployment rates resulting in conditions of increasing and persistent inequality, likely to affect generations to come. After assessing an array of policies that affect employment conditions among youth, Córdova will present neighborhood scale strategies that (re)build communities while increasing opportunities for youth (self)employment.
