Tuesday, February 18, 1997
LABOR:
UCLA event to focus on transcending race, gender, class linesBy
Alex Caputo-Pearl and Hany Khalil
In the last five years, UCLA students and workers have led a
series of movements to reform our university. We have sought to
create a Chicano studies program to keep tuition at reasonable
levels, to win recognition of academic student employees’ right to
have a union voice, and to preserve affirmative action policies in
the public sector, among others. Although our immediate goals were
different, to one degree or another we have raised the same
question: What does it mean to be a genuinely public university?
What is the responsibility of the public university to the poor,
the marginal and low-income communities of color?
Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, we have put forward a
vision of how to publicize our university. We have called upon the
university to establish policies and institutions that make
building a more equitable, democratic society its central mission.
A real public university should be accessible to all those who want
to learn, not just to the sons and daughters of UC Regents. Those
who work and study there should have a say in basic university
decisions that affect their lives. Its curriculum should be
relevant to the lives and needs of working people. Above all, the
university must end its self-imposed social isolation. It must turn
its resources outward to support and strengthen movements for
social justice and democracy within and outside its walls.
How, concretely, can campus-based activists and researchers
contribute to building movements for social justice? That is the
central question labor, community and university activists will
discuss at a major teach-in at UCLA to be held this Thursday and
Friday. Titled "The Fight for Our Future: A Teach-In with the New
Labor Movement," the teach-in builds on a single insight: The
country’s drift to the right cannot be slowed unless activists
divided by issues and identities find some way to unite. The labor
movement, once thought unable to play such a unifying, progressive
role, appears to be becoming a home for initiatives successfully
linking racial, gender, environmental and class dimensions of
people’s lives into a broader social movement.
As many at UCLA are now aware, Los Angeles (and more broadly,
California) is perhaps the national center of this revitalized
labor movement. Contracts won by Justice for Janitors are lifting
the region’s largely female, immigrant janitorial work force out of
poverty. Maria Elena Durazo, president of Local 11 of the Hotel and
Restaurant Employees, is leading a highly visible effort to win
livable wages and respect for workers at the New Otani Hotel in
downtown.
Last summer, the Los Angeles Manufacturing Action Project
(LAMAP), a labor/community project to unionize some of the region’s
most exploitative manufacturing industries, kicked off with a bang.
Their campaign to help drivers employed by Mission-Guerrero Â
L.A.’s No. 1 tortilla maker (patrons of El Pollo Loco and Del Taco
know their tortillas well) Â won a new contract, providing
livable wages and a decent health plan, in a matter of weeks.
Research and other support provided by UCLA professors, graduate
students and undergraduates were instrumental to LAMAP’s
success.
These developments have not gone unnoticed. For the first time
in the history of the labor movement, the American Federation of
Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) is holding
its annual leadership meeting in Los Angeles this week. By doing
so, the new leadership of the AFL-CIO seems to be signaling its
recognition of the importance of these L.A.-based efforts and its
new concern for strategic, aggressive efforts to organize
traditionally excluded members of the work force.
The UCLA teach-in follows on the heels of this meeting. It is
modeled after a similar teach-in held at New York’s Columbia
University last fall. That forum served as both an opportunity to
reflect upon the breakdown of the alliance between labor,
university and community activists in the 1930s and 1960s and the
potential for a revitalized spirit of collaboration in the
1990s.
Speakers at the Columbia event  ranging from African
American philosopher Cornell West to AFL-CIO head John Sweeney to
feminist Betty Friedan  emphasized the important role a
revitalized labor movement could play in forging a new
transformative politics. They spoke with excitement concerning the
apparent emergence of a new labor movement in the United States
that is increasingly multiracial, inclusive of women and
immigrants, turning away from its past support of Cold War
policies, and more willing to engage in confrontational, innovative
tactics to defend workers’ rights. Some forum participants also
asserted that the new labor movement had far to go in learning how
to support progressive community-based social movements to
unabashedly challenge the rightward drift of the Democratic Party,
and to develop strategies that make central the needs of workers
across borders and overseas.
Speakers consistently emphasized the importance of university
research support for labor initiatives and grassroots social
movements. They called upon students and university researchers to
aggressively defend in academic and policy circles the need to make
corporations and the economy more accountable to labor and
community interests. Finally, they encouraged students to support
efforts to democratize the university and to work with grassroots
struggles outside the university.
In contrast to the more academic focus of the Columbia teach-in,
the UCLA event will primarily bring together organizers from labor,
community and educational institutions to look at opportunities to
collaborate. The UCLA teach-in will provide for an exchange of
ideas for seasoned organizers while encouraging the development of
a new generation of activists. It will kick off on Thursday night
at 7 in Moore 100. John Sweeney, the newly elected president of the
AFL-CIO, United Farm Worker leader Dolores Huerta, mayoral
candidate Tom Hayden and Congressman Xavier Becerra, among others,
will lead a panel and discussion.
On Friday, workshops will be held from 9-5 (come to Ackerman
Grand Ballroom for information on where the workshops will be
held). Themes include welfare "reform" and working families,
immigrant workers, youth in the labor movement, working women, and
labor and environmental justice. The teach-in will close with a
session looking at the intersection of race, gender and class in
the labor movement. Speakers for this session include L.A. writer
Mike Davis and civil rights leader Joe Hicks.
Already a wide range of L.A.-based union and community
organizations have endorsed the teach-in. Nearby campuses will be
sending contingencies of students and faculty to attend it.
While all participants in the teach-in will come away more
informed about current developments in the labor movement, UCLA
undergraduates in particular will have unique opportunities to
follow up on what they learn. Students can participate in a field
study class with LAMAP and specialize in the labor and workplace
studies program at UCLA. In addition, they can join the new
Student-Labor Solidarity group that is starting in the Labor
Center.
For more information, contact the UCLA Labor Center at
310-794-0385.