Schwarzenegger is at it again. In a bold political move, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger used his line-item veto to eliminate all funds for the University of California Miguel Contreras Labor Program in September.
It is imperative that this be rectified in next year’s budget, or all the hard work to establish workers’ resources, student leadership opportunities and groundbreaking research in labor and employment will discontinue.
This is an affront to academic research and to the principles of a public institution. Even more, this is an attack on members of underrepresented groups. Their voices are being silenced.
It makes sense that budget cuts across the board are necessary to keep our institution afloat.
However, this is not the approach Schwarzenegger has taken. While making a few cuts here and there for departments across the board, he completely eliminated the UC Labor Program’s budget in the very last stages of budget planning and without any type of academic review.
There were no announcements or warnings during the program’s budget’s creation in January 2008 or its revision that May. It wasn’t until the final planning stages that Schwarzenegger decided to use his executive power and cross off the UC Labor Program.
Thankfully, UC President Mark Yudof was able to allocate money from emergency funds to keep the Labor Institute going another year ““ albeit $1.4 million less.
Although Schwarzenegger has made nonpartisan statements on this issue, it is clear that this move had political motives. The elimination of a $5.4 million fund from a $3.3 billion UC budget isn’t going to make that big of a difference. Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center, said, “It is clear that he is using us as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the state legislature.”
Wong went on to say, “Schwarzenegger has no problem in continuing the budgets of big business research and development and training corporate leaders. But when it comes to a tiny program that teaches students about workers’ rights, he is offended.”
Schwarzenegger is further aligning the UC with corporate interests. If in principle public institutions are to be paid for by the people, then adhering to a specific interest group violates this.
The Miguel Contreras Labor Program includes the Institutes for Research on Labor and Employment and Centers for Labor Research and Education at UCLA and UC Berkeley, as well as the UC-wide Labor and Employment Research Fund. Since there are no official labor and workplace centers at the other eight campuses, the program covers funding for labor and employment research at these schools as well.
Furthermore, more than 200 internships are made available to students each year, all of which provide opportunities to get involved with the community. Internships involve everything from community organizing to facilitating wage claims in the Los Angeles area. Additionally, UCLA is the only campus that offers a Labor and Workplace Studies minor out of the entire UC system.
Legendary community leaders such as Dolores Huerta and the Rev. James Lawson Jr. teach courses (the latter teaching a class in Labor and Workplace Studies this spring quarter) that are being threatened by this line-item veto.
Although the other campuses do not offer official majors or minors in this area of study, they do provide Leadership Academies for students interested in pursuing a career in social justice-oriented work.
This budget cut is an assault on low-income and underrepresented students. When you take away a program that funds research on labor and workers’ rights and teaches about oppressive conditions in the community, you’re taking away the voice of underrepresented groups ““ for it is usually immigrants whose rights are being taken away in the workforce.
From female garment workers toiling 16-plus-hour days for inadequate wages to back-breaking industrial work where poisonous gases go unmonitored, it is those who have the least rights whom are being taken advantage of.
Diane Valencia, a fourth-year international development studies student and an organizer of the Save the UCLA Labor Institute campaign said, “If you try to take away the Labor Center, you’re eliminating the story of working-class people. You’re basically eliminating the history of people of color.”
Sure, we learn about such histories in our Chicano/a, Asian American and Afro-American studies courses, but the labor institute has a unique role in pursuing community-oriented research specifically highlighting the struggle of working-class people.
In fact, the recent CLEAN (Community, Labor, Environmental Action Network) Carwash Campaign that addressed the exploitation of Latino men by their corporate counterparts was brought forward in large part by the Labor Institute’s research. The Labor Institute has provided an insurmountable amount of research on important issues such as health care. Schwarzenegger himself has even quoted the UC Labor Program’s research on health care on his Web site.
Although Gov. Schwarzenegger considers this battle won, supporters of the Miguel Contreras Program are not taking this sitting down.
The Save the UCLA Labor Institute campaign is running in full force in the hopes that past supporters such as Chancellor Gene Block will persuade the governor to change his mind.
Unless the Labor Program is added to the May revision of the budget, there is a serious chance that the Labor Program will cease to exist.
If funding continues into the 2010-2011 budget, then hopefully the Labor Program will be able to outlast Gov. Schwarzenegger, and his narrow-minded right-wing politics, by the time he’s out in 2011.
If you want to fight Schwarzenegger, then e-mail Sterling at asterling@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.