Cancelled - Ace Your Interview Workshop
2026-02-25 12:00 - 13:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | 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 - 14:00
Profs. Jennifer Jihye Chun (UCLA) and Ju Hui Judy Han (UCLA) joined by Prof. Tobias Higbie (UCLA), Prof. Jong Bum Kwon (Webster University), Prof. Hannah Appel (UCLA), and Prof. Zeynep Korkman (UCLA)

Thursday, May 14, 2026
12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Bunche Hall, Room 10383
RSVP HERE!

About the Book
Against Abandonment: Repertoire 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 catalyst 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.
Moderated by Tobias Higbie, Director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) at UCLA, it will begin with brief comments by Jennifer Jihye Chun (Asian America Studies at UCLA) and Ju Hui Judy Han (Gender Studies at UCLA), which will be followed by an open ended dialogue among panelists, with Jong Bum Kwon (Webster University), Hannah Appel (Anthropology at UCLA), and Zeynep Korkman (Gender Studies at UCLA).
Discussion
Moderated by Prof. Tobias Higbie, Dept. of History, UCLA

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 (Duke University Press, 2019) and cp-founder and organizer with the Debt Collective. She is also author of the forthcoming book Debtors Unions: Countervailing Power and Abolitionist Presence in the Age of Finance and co-author of Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition (Blackstone Publishing, 2020).
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 (ILR Press, 2009) and co-author of Against Abandonment: Repertoires Solidarity in South Korean Protest (Stanford University, 2025). She is 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: Space of Queer Activism in South Korea and the Korean Diaspora (University of Michigan Press, 2025) and co-author of Against Abandonment: Repertoires Solidarity in South Korean Protest (Stanford University, 2025). She is currently working on a decolonial travel guide to Korea and a new project on the “feminist take” on contemporary cultural politics.
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 (University of Illinois Press, 2003) and Labor’s Mind: A History of Working-Class Intellectual Life (University of Illinois Press, 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 (Duke University Press, 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 project focus on the dilemma of whiteness in St. Louis, Missouri, in the wake of the Ferguson Uprising and Black youth’s aspirations and social mobility in the time of BLM and white nativism.

2026 Labor@UCLA Research Showcase
2026-05-22 13:00 - 15:00 | Public Affairs 1323 & Zoom
Date: May 22nd
Time: 1-3 P.M.
Location: Public Affairs 1323 & Zoom
RSVP HERE!
We are excited to announce our 4th annual Labor@UCLA Research Showcase – Friday, May 22nd, 2026 from 1-3 pm in-person at Public Affairs 1323 and via zoom! This event is part of Undergraduate Research Week. Undergraduate Research Week is a week-long celebration of undergraduate research and creative inquiry at UCLA. Students from all disciplines gather to share their innovative and impactful work with the UCLA community at events such as the Undergraduate Research & Creativity Showcase.
Now in its 28th year, Undergraduate Research Week, which will be held May 18-22, 2026, is UCLA’s largest undergraduate conference. Labor Studies is an interdisciplinary program of study, which critically analyzes the theory and practice of current workplace issues. Students develop a deeper understanding of the relationships between their education and society at large and how they, as college graduates, can transform the nature of work. Students who were selected will be presenting on past or current work developed for a capstone, honors theses, or other Labor Studies and related classes (both approved and related). Lunch will be provided for in-person attendance.
If you have any questions, please feel free to follow-up with Elizbeth Espinoza, espinoza@irle.ucla.edu.

Building a Career in the Labor Movement Panel
2026-05-27 12:30 - 13:30 | Rolfe Hall 3129
Building a Career in the Labor Movement Panel
Join us for a Labor Career Panel featuring speakers working across advocacy, hospitality organizing, immigration, and the labor movement, including one speaker currently pursuing graduate studies. Learn about their professional journeys, experiences in and beyond graduate school, and the different paths they’ve taken to build careers connected to social justice and labor.
Date: Wednesday, May 27th
Time: 12:30 – 1:30
Location: Rolfe Hall 3129
RSVP HERE!
Speakers include Sheheryar Kaoosji (Executive Director at Warehouse Workers Resource Center), Jessica Durrum (Director of LAANE’s hospitality campaign), and Adriana Ramirez (Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology, UC Berkeley).

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:
Rabbi Aryeh Cohen (Professor, American Jewish University)
Kathy Finn (President, UFCW Local 770)
Jackie Goldberg (retired educator and elected official)
Leora Swerdlow (Associate, Schwartz, Steinsapir, Dohrmann & Sommers LLP)
RSVP HERE!
Sponsored by The UCLA Department of Labor Studies, the UCLA Labor Center, the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, Jewish Partnership for Los Angeles, the Jewish Labor Committee, LA Voice, UFCW Local 770 and UNITE HERE Local 11.

State of the Unions Part I: California Labor in 2025 Webinar
2026-09-09 12:00 - 13:30 | Online – Zoom
In 2025, the Trump administration unleashed a series of anti-labor and anti-immigrant policies that dramatically impacted working families in the U.S. and in California. Coming soon from the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE), the “State of the Unions” report tracks how workers and unions responded to this critical moment.
The UCLA IRLE invites you to join labor experts and organizers for a timely panel discussion on how workers and unions fought back against threats to organizing rights at the NLRB in 2025 and continued to grow their ranks.
Date: September 9, 12 – 1:30 pm PST
Location: Zoom
RSVP HERE!
This is the first installment of a series of webinars on the “State of the Unions.” Stay tuned for more details on Part II.
Memo Durgin: Guillermo “Memo” Durgin is the Organizing Director for the California Federation of Labor Unions, AFL-CIO. Prior to joining the Federation, Memo worked as a union organizer for twenty-five years with multiple unions, representing teachers, state workers and immigrant service workers. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Chicano Studies from the University of California Davis, and completed a master’s program in Ethnic Studies at California State University Sacramento.
David Rosenfeld: David Rosenfeld has been practicing union-side labor law since his graduation from UC Berkeley School of Law in 1973, where he also taught labor law courses for many years. He has argued approximately 250 cases before federal and state courts of appeal, the United States Supreme Court, the California Supreme Court and the National Labor Relations Board. Rosenfeld is an author of preeminent reference guides for workers and unions, including “California Workers’ Rights,” “Hey, the Boss Called Just Called Me Into the Office,” published by UC Berkeley and “The Campaign Guide: Organizing and Contract Enforcement in the Construction Industry,” published by the North America’s Building Trades Unions.
Amber Gonzalez: Amber Gonzalez is a worker organizer with Starbucks Workers United. Gonzalez has worked at Starbucks for 4 years in Riverside, CA, where she and her coworkers won a union election in summer 2025, then joined a months-long national strike protesting Starbucks’ unfair labor practices. She is currently completing her undergrad in political science at UC Irvine.
Justin McBride: Justin McBride is a project director at the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) and a main author of the “State of the Unions: California Labor in 2025” report. McBride is a labor studies scholar who writes about public finance and the intersections between public policy and worker organizing. He received his PhD in Urban Planning from the UCLA Department of Urban Planning and has worked for over 15 years as a labor organizer.

State of the Unions Part II: The Fight for a First Union Contract
2026-09-23 12:00 - 13:30 | Online – Zoom
Successful drives to form new unions may generate buzz and media attention, but the most meaningful change happens after that first battle is won—in employer negotiations. For many workers, forming a union is only the beginning of a longer battle to improve work standards and conditions.
Just 1 in 2 bargaining units formed in California in 2024 had achieved a union contract by Spring 2026, according to a new study from a team of researchers at UC Labor Centers. The study is included in the annual “State of the Unions” report from the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE).
The UCLA IRLE and UCLA Labor Center invite you to join labor experts and organizers for an illuminating panel discussion on workers’ prolonged fights to secure a first union contract.
Date: September 23, 12 – 1:30 pm PST
Location: Zoom
RSVP HERE!
This is Part II of a series of webinars on the “State of the Unions.” Learn more here.

Meeting the Moment, Building the Movement, Part 1– Proposition 187: Labor’s Fight for Immigrant Rights
2026-10-09 10:00 - 11:30 | Online – Zoom
Date and Time: October 9, 2026, 10-11:30 PDT
Location: Virtual
RSVP
Against the backdrop of unemployment and civil unrest in the early 1990s, California Republicans offered voters a simple, brutal solution: criminalize undocumented immigrants. Proposition 187, a statewide voter initiative, threatened to exclude immigrants from all public services and to enlist teachers, neighbors and faith leaders into the machinery of deportation. Labor unions were initially unsure how to respond, but when unions joined the fight against Proposition 187, they changed the direction of California politics.
In this virtual panel event, three veterans of the campaign to stop Proposition 187 will discuss how the moment forged coalitions between immigrant rights and labor organizers that set the stage for a historic shift in organized labor’s policy on undocumented workers. Cristina Ramirez-Vazquez, Former Regional Manager and International Vice President of Workers United, Dave Sickler, former Western Regional Director of AFL-CIO, and Joel Ochoa, labor and community organizer, will share their expertise.
Speakers
Cristina Ramirez-Vazquez: Cristina Ramirez-Vazquez began working as a union organizer with the ILGWU (International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union) in 1976. Largely recognized as the first union to embrace immigrant workers, the ILGWU merged with ACTWU in the 1980s to form UNITE! Ramirez-Vazquez became the first Latin American Immigrant to be International Vice President of UNITE! and Regional Manager of the Western States Regional Joint Board. Ramirez-Vazquez was instrumental in mobilizing her union to become one of the driving forces behind the fight against Prop 187. Recognizing the importance of broad commitment to the struggle, also coordinated the No On Proposition 187 outreach effort that organized a broad swath of communities and immigrant-advocacy organizations into a unified campaign. Ramirez-Vazquez has dedicated her life to organizing garment workers, warehouse workers and industrial laundry workers to secure better working conditions and dignity in the workplace. Now retired, Ramirez-Vazquez is still active with Workers United, working to improve medical benefits for the members of the union.
David Sickler: David Sickler, retired Western Regional Director of the AFL-CIO, spearheaded the effort to get local and national labor leaders to recognize the importance of defending immigrant workers. Following passage of the Immigration Reform Act in 1988, he established the Labor Immigrant Assistance Project and the AFL-CIO California Immigrant Workers’ Association. Sickler was a key figure in arguing for labor participation in the mass march against Proposition 187 on October 16, 1994. In his long career, Sickler also served as the senior labor advisor to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, as Commissioner of Public Works and as Executive Director of Employment Relations at the L.A. Department of Water and Power. Beginning in 2009, Sickler was Southern Regional Director of The California State Building and Construction Trades Council. Sickler also served as Chair of the UCLA Center for Labor and Research advisory committee.
Joel Ochoa: Joel Ochoa is a retired labor and community organizer. He came to the United States from Mexico in 1973, a political refugee forced from his country because of the campaign of massacres, violent assaults and arrests waged by the administration of then-president Luis Echeverría against participants in the student protest movement. On the community level in the U.S., Ochoa worked for the pioneering labor and community organization, CASA, organizing immigrant workers and their families to fight for unconditional amnesty for all undocumented immigrants. In the early 90’s he worked closely with the workers during the American Racing Equipment and the Drywall fights for union recognition in the LA Metro area. Those campaigns helped bring about change in the labor movement in Southern California, making it more inclusive and militant. Joining forces with the AFL-CIO’s California Immigrant Workers Association (CIWA), Ochoa worked tirelessly in 1994 to enlist labor unions and community organizations into the resistance against Prop 187. From 1997 to 2014 he was an International Representative for the International Association of Machinists.
Moderator
Gaspar Rivera-Salgado: Gaspar Rivera-Salgado is currently project director at UCLA Labor Center and labor studies lecturer at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. He is also the Director of the UCLA Center for Mexican Studies. He teaches classes on work, labor and social justice in the US and immigration issues. Among his publications include the volume (with J. Fox) Indigenous Mexican Migration in the United States (UCSD 2005); and the recently published volume (with E. Telles, and M. Sawyer) Just Neighbors: Research on African American and Latino Relations in the United States (Russell Sage, 2011). He received his doctorate in sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Meeting the Moment, Building the Movement, Part 2– Labor Strategies to Defend Immigrant Worker Rights Today
2026-10-16 10:00 - 23:30 | Online – Zoom
Date and Time: October 16, 2026, 10-11:30 PDT
Location: Virtual
RSVP
Part 2 of the “Meeting the Moment” series brings together three leaders at the forefront of labor and community responses to the current militarized federal immigration in cities across the U.S. Facing the largest deportation campaign since the 1950s, labor unions and their members, alongside allies in the immigrant rights movement, are taking creative, nonviolent action to defend communities.
The virtual panel will welcome David Huerta, President of SEIU California and SEIU-United Service Workers West (USWW), Bernie Burnham, President of the Minnesota AFL-CIO, and Kurt Petersen, Vice President of UNITE HERE Local 11, to share their insights as leaders of the movement.
Speakers
David Huerta, President, SEIU California and SEIU-United Service Workers West (USWW): David Huerta is a veteran labor organizer and the president of SEIU California and SEIU–United Service Workers West, representing hundreds of thousands of janitors, security officers and service workers. He began his career in the 1990s as an organizer with Justice for Janitors in Los Angeles and has been recognized for his leadership in immigrant integration and worker empowerment. In June 2025, while serving as a peaceful community observer during an ICE raid in downtown Los Angeles, Huerta was injured and arrested on felony charges of conspiring to impede a federal officer. After protests by union members, civil rights groups and Democratic leaders, he was released three days later after posting a $50,000 bond. This moment cemented his reputation as a steadfast advocate for labor and immigrant rights, and as a symbol of resistance to federal overreach.
Bernie Burnham, President, MN AFL-CIO:Bernie Burnham became President of the Minnesota AFL-CIO in 2021 in a history-making election. As a Pacific-Islander, she is the first person of color to head the state’s labor federation. During Operation Metro Surge, she led Minnesota’s labor movement in coalition with community and religious organizations in the fight against ICE’s brutal assault on immigrant rights, worker rights, and the deaths of innocent Minnesotans. The struggle is ongoing as labor stands up to the administration’s continued weaponization of the federal government to intimidate unions, communities, and anyone who peacefully opposes its radical authoritarian agenda.
Kurt Petersen, Co-president, UNITE HERE Local 11: Kurt Petersen is a Co-President of UNITE HERE Local 11, which represents 35,000 hotel and food service workers in Southern California and Arizona. Petersen studied Theology/Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and attended Yale Law School. He went on to win the first union contract for farm workers in Washington State history at Chateau Ste. Michelle Winery with the United Farm Workers. Since moving to Los Angeles in 1995, he has organized more than 25,000 workers into UNITE HERE. Most recently, Petersen led the largest hotel strike in the nation’s history, and won a life-changing contract with 50% wage increases, including groundbreaking language that gave workers the right to strike if the activity of ICE or Border Control threatened worker safety during the 2026 World Cup. Local 11’s hotel and stadium contracts will expire in January 2028, months before the Olympics. Petersen, along with his Co-Presidents Ada Briceno and Susan Minato, was recently named in the Los Angeles Times 2024 LA Influential list.
Moderator
Gaspar Rivera-Salgado: Gaspar Rivera-Salgado is currently project director at UCLA Labor Center and labor studies lecturer at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. He is also the Director of the UCLA Center for Mexican Studies. He teaches classes on work, labor and social justice in the US and immigration issues. Among his publications include the volume (with J. Fox) Indigenous Mexican Migration in the United States (UCSD 2005); and the recently published volume (with E. Telles, and M. Sawyer) Just Neighbors: Research on African American and Latino Relations in the United States (Russell Sage, 2011). He received his doctorate in sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

UCLA Coding Bootcamp for Union Research
2027-06-01 - 2027-06-30
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 in the summer of 2027, and applications will open in late February.
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: TBA – Summer 2027
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.

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.
