Institute for Research on Labor and Employment

Death and Taxes (and other hot topics): Debating the 2012 California Ballot Propositions
2012-11-01 12:15 - 13:45 (America/Los_Angeles)
California voters face big decisions on the 2012 ballot initiatives. From tax policyto the death penalty to genetically modified food labeling, a lot is at stake on the
ballot. Join us for an educational and informative forum to analyze the initiatives.

Sea Change or More of the Same? Looking Beyond November 6: A Presidential Election Panel Discussion
2012-10-17 18:00 - 21:00
After the horse race is over and Election 2012 has been decided, the business of governing is going to get very difficult very quickly. With budget cuts looming and taxes set to rise, voters are struggling to understand competing visions for the future. Is a balanced compromise possible in an atmosphere of extreme partisanship? How does the rhetoric of an election year match our fiscal reality?
Join Mark Z. Barabak, political writer for the Los Angeles Times; Sky Gallegos, political strategist and experienced campaign veteran; Adam Nagourney, Los Angeles bureau chief for The New York Times; Dan Schnur, director of USC’s Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics; and Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr., dean of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs for an engaging discussion that’s sure to enlighten and inform.

2012 Benjamin Aaron Labor Law LectureSeparate and Unequal: Arbitration and Private Justice
2012-10-04 17:30 - 19:30
Cliff Palefsky, a dynamic speaker and leading critic of mandatory arbitration agreements, will provide valuable insights from the plaintiff’s perspective on the “hot topic” of employment dispute arbitration. Mr. Palefsky has been in the forefront of the opposition to mandatory arbitration for the past 24 years in both the courts and the legislature. He has been involved in many of the leading arbitration cases, and will reflect on the rapidly developing state of the law, including the NLRB’s D.R Horton decision, the state of class actions after AT&T v Concepcion, the alternative dispute resolution industry, the proposed Arbitration Fairness legislation, and the implications of mandatory arbitration on civil justice in America.

Impact of Colonial Policies on Contemporary Educational Outcomes
2012-06-05 00:00

Book Presentation - Just Neighbors? Research on African American and Latino Relations in the United States
2012-05-31 17:00 - 20:30
Editors Edward Telles, Mark Sawyer and Gaspar Rivera-Salgado willbe joined by distinguished panelists to discuss how African Americans and Latinos relate to each
other in contemporary American society and how these social interactions are transforming the US
political, cultural and labor landscapes. Just Neighbors? Research on African American and Latino
Relations in the US is published by the Russell Sage Foundation, 2011.

UCLA Labor Center 2012 Banquet
2012-05-10 00:00

La restructuración de la Industria Siderúrgica en México
2012-05-09 12:30 - 14:30
Starting in the 1980s, the Mexican government reduced its participation in the steel industry, a sector which had been one of the engines of national economic growth.The government closed, restructured and privatized large steel plants, including Fundidora Monterrey in 1986, Minera Cananea in 1989, and Altos Hornos de México (AHMSA) and Siderúrgica Lázaro Cardenas-Las Truchas in 1991. Steel production played a highly significant role in Mexico’s industrialization, driving the expansion of mining, the formation of the working class and the rise of the labor movement. The
restructuring of the steel industry left thousands of workers jobless and without employment possibilities elsewhere. In this presentation,Professor Martínez analyzes the employment and unemployment experiences of former metallurgic workers from AHMSA and Fundidora Monterrey
in the context of the restructuring of the steel sector, the larger modernization and privatization of the national industrial base, the dismantling
welfare provisions and the liberalization and globalization of the Mexican economy.

The Elasticity of Labor Supply to the Firm over the Business Cycle
2012-05-02 12:00 - 14:00
Recent work suggests that the labor elasticity of supply to the firm is finite. In other words, labor markets are not perfectly competitive. We provide the first estimates of the degree of labor market imperfections over a long period of time with significant variation in the state of the macroeconomy. Using data from the Ford Motor Company from 1918 through 1940 we analyze the labor elasticity of supply to the firm over the business cycle. We find significant variation in this parameter over time and consistent with predictions from a simple search model we find evidence of it being procyclical. Our analysis also contributes two methodological extensions to the empirical monopsony literature. First, we are able to relax the assumption that all employee separations in the firm are replaced by recruits. Second, we use data that allows us to isolate workers who quit for voluntary reasons. Both have significant impacts on our estimates.

Worker's Memorial Day
2012-04-28 00:00

Human Persons, Incompressible Needs and Minimum Wages in Post-war France
2012-04-25 12:30 - 14:00
The passage of minimum wage legislation in 1950 led to one of the odder chapters in the history of French bureaucratic committees. Paul Bacon, Minister of Labor, convened a High Commission on Collective Bargaining in April of that year to measure a model worker’s budget. Over thirty members strong, the meeting assembled major leaders of all three unions, representatives of large and small employers, artisans, managers, family associations and a number of state bureaucrats. Over the following two months, these men hashed out the principles and the practice of a new republican minimum standard of living. No point proved too fine for debate, from theoretical reflections on science and measurement to the durability of underwear.The minimum wage commission appears an exemplary moment in postwar French consumer society. First, it enacted a political contest between unions and employers, mediated by the state and family associations. Second, as it called upon expert testimony, the commission participated in the emergence of an empirical, policy-oriented postwar social science. Third, the commission’s work reflected French citizens’ everyday struggle to reconcile scarce resources and expanding consumer desires

Panel - Organizing Workers in the Informal Economy: Brazil, China, Mexico, South Africa ... and Los Angeles
2012-04-20 18:00 - 21:00
Across the globe, workers in the informal economy are organizing — from trash recyclers in Brazil and day laborers in China, to street vendors in Mexico and domestic workers in South Africa. Researchers from these countries will join labor activists from Los Angeles on a panel discussion about these and other organizing efforts, and discuss how labor unions and governments have responded to these grassroots campaigns.

Learning from the Past to Change the Future: 20 Years of Justice for Janitors
2012-04-19 00:00

Wisconsin and the Assault on the Public Sector
2012-04-16 14:00 - 17:00
What is the political background to the systematic attack on public sector unions, and on the publicsector more generally, in Wisconsin, elsewhere in the Midwest, and in other places in the US? To
what extent does it have the support of the electorate and the broader public? Our speakers will
consider this issue in connection with their analysis of the historic explosion of working class
resistance in Wisconsin in February 2011, which broke a long period of labor quiescence in the US.
They will evaluate the role of the trade unions in this conflict, asking if broader, more militant
tactics were a realistic option. They will discuss the recall campaign that emerged as the main form
of carrying on the struggle, asking what are its chances for success and what it can accomplish.
They will debate the future of the movement, in connection with their understanding of the
relationship between the Wisconsin uprising and the Occupy movement that came to fore to
continue struggle the eight months later…posing the question of what role can Occupy play in
catalyzing, and supporting, battles by the trade union movement and working people more
generally.

UCLA Lewis Center Informal City Series: Crystals, Mud and Space: Street Vending Informality
2012-03-15 00:00

UCLA Lewis Center Informal City Speakers Series: The Logical Reproduction of Informality among Low Income Self-Help Communities in the USA
2012-03-08 00:00

IRLE Graduate Student Research Conference: Participatory Democracy and Social Justice Struggles: From Port Huron to #Occupy
2012-03-06 00:00

UCLA Lewis Center Informal City Speakers Series: America's Playground: Informal Sociability Among Atlantic City's Street Homeless
2012-03-01 00:00

UCLA Lewis Center Informal City Speakers Series: Place as a Site of World-Making
2012-02-23 00:00

Book Talk - "NAFTA and the Politics of Labor Transnationalism"
2012-02-22 12:30 - 14:00

UCLA Lewis Center Informal City Speakers Series: To Regulate or Not: Day Labor, Worker Centers and Inequality
2012-02-16 00:00

UCLA Lewis Center Informal City Speakers Series: Tending to Life and Plants in Los Angeles: Latino Immigrant Workers and Gardeners
2012-02-09 00:00

Book Talk - "States' Gains, Labor's Losses: China, France, Mexico Choose Global Liaisons, 1980 - 2000"
2012-02-08 12:30 - 14:00

"Understanding the Brazilian Labor Success Story"
2012-02-02 12:30 - 14:00

UCLA Lewis Center Informal City Speakers Series: The Garage Sale
2012-02-02 08:00 - 17:00

UCLA Lewis Center Informal City Speakers Series: The Informal as Praxis
2012-01-26 00:00

UCLA Lewis Center Informal City Speakers Series: Together - The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation
2012-01-19 00:00

Book Talk: "Urban Sustainability in the Age of Climate Justice: Lessons from Metro Phoenix"
2012-01-12 14:30 - 16:00
Thoughtful people look to cities for evidence that progress is being made in the fight to avert climate change. The “sustainable cities” movement is thriving all across the world, and mayors compete for the title of “greenest city in America.” In this lecture, drawing on his own research in the metro Phoenix area, Andrew Ross shows that the key solutions are more social than technical in nature. Marketing a green lifestyle to affluent residents will create showpiece sustainable enclaves, but will not alter the patterns of “eco-apartheid” that afflicts most large U.S. cities.
Ross’s new book, Bird On Fire, based on extensive interviews in the region, looks at some of Phoenix’s biggest challenges–water management, urban growth, immigration policy, pollution, energy supply, and downtown revitalization–in light of his arguments for policies that promote environmental justice.

"Working for Nothing: The Latest Fast-Growth Sector?"
2012-01-12 12:30 - 14:00
Corporate profits have never been higher, at a time when the real unemployment has soared. Have bosses learned how to get by without workers? Not really, but the evidence suggests a growing reliance on new kinds of free labor to boost the balance sheet of companies that are canny enough to harvest it. Free, or token-wage, labor is increasingly available though a variety of channels: crowdsourcing, data-mining, prosumerism, or other sophisticated digital techniques for extracting rents from user/participants; expanded prison labor programs; the explosion of unpaid near-obligatory internships in every white-collar sector; and the whole gamut of contestant volunteering that has transformed so much of our commerce in culture into an amateur talent show, with jackpot stakes for a few winners and hard-luck schwag for everyone else.

Who is Occupy? Profile of Users of the Occupy Wall Street Website: A Window into the Demographics of an Evolving Movement
2011-12-01 14:00 - 15:30

Annual Ben Aaron Labor Law Lecture: "Rhetoric, Reaction and Rule of Law at the NLRB"
2011-11-16 18:00
Presented by Wilma Liebman, former Chair of the National Labor Relations Board
From Wisconsin to Capitol Hill, we have witnessed an escalating battle over the very legitimacy of labor law and existence of collective bargaining rights. The political and economic environment in which this conflict is occurring has ratcheted up the attacks and overheated the rhetoric, exposing a divide as profound as any on the domestic policy front. While the NLRB, from the beginning, has been no stranger to controversy, events of the last few years have represented a record accumulation of difficulties. Recent actions by the Board and its Acting General Counsel, including efforts to revitalize the Agency and its procedures, have triggered intense reactions by Congress, the business community, and the media. While the imperative for a sober dialogue over a fair labor policy could not be more real, what we have instead is rancorous political rhetoric.
Former NLRB Chairman Wilma Liebman will discuss the Board’s recent activities, the political controversy they have triggered, and the persistent challenges to the enduring values of the National Labor Relations Act — including the rule of law itself — all critical to a democratic society and a fair economy.
