Commencement speech presented by Victor Narro, Project Director at the UCLA Downtown Labor Center

Panelists will discuss the successful organizing campaign of a small group of Latino gardeners in conjunction with a few Chicana/o activists against the City of Los Angeles’s draconian leaf blower ban, charging jardineros or gardeners with a misdemeanor, a $1,000 fine, and up to 6 months in jail. To read in advance on this historic […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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!

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 […]

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, […]

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.

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 […]