Remember This!

Power from the past

Category: Photos

Photographs from the UCLA Library, community archives, and the project team.

  • Fighting for Joint Liability

    Fighting for Joint Liability

    While many recognize the 1990s as a time of the labor movement’s resurgence in Los Angeles, for garment workers, it was a time of existential crisis. Facing new competition from imported goods, local manufacturers returned to old ways of doing business, hiring mainly undocumented immigrants, firing union activists, and severing long-standing contracts. A raid on an apartment complex in El Monte revealed how dangerous the exploitation had become: the CA Department of Industrial Relations found 72 Thai women, victims of human trafficking, being held against their will and forced to sew for 18 hours a day. The clothing investigators found in the apartment was sold at major national retailers, including Robinson’s May, Montgomery Ward and Mervyn’s. 

    The incident in El Monte—which occurred amidst UNITE’s years-long campaign against Guess? Jeans Inc., Los Angeles’ largest apparel manufacturer—prompted UNITE! and its allies to rethink their tactics. It made clear to garment workers that they needed legislation to establish Joint Liability, so that manufacturers like Guess? And retailers like Robinson’s May could be held accountable for conditions to which they subcontracted their work. Previous attempts to pass similar legislation had been vetoed by governors Wilson and Deukmejian, but after Assemblywoman Hilda Solis introduced the new bill, AB633, Gov. Gray Davis expressed his support. AB633 increased registration fees to fund additional inspectors, established an expedited process for wage theft claims and introduced successor employment liability so that subcontractors couldn’t simply close their shops to avoid paying fines. Unfortunately, almost immediately, major retailers in Los Angeles challenged the law in court, claiming the new rules did not apply to them, and the fight for Joint Liability continued.

    Pictured here: Assemblymember Hilda Solis and Father Pedro Villaroya of CLUE stand with Thai workers from El Monte at UNITE! rally, while organizer Cristina Vásquez speaks at a retailer-accountability demonstration at the Robinsons-May store in Santa Monica, CA in December 1997. From the Steve Nutter Collection, IRLE Archives. 

    For more about AB633, read: Blasi, Gary, and University of California Institute for Labor & Employment. 2001. Implementation of A.B. 633 : A Preliminary Assessment  / Gary Blasi and Associates. Los Angeles: Institute for Labor and Employment, University of California, Los Angeles.

  • Boycott Forever 21

    Boycott Forever 21

    In 2001, the coalition of organizations that had come together to support the Thai Workers in El Monte pooled their funds to establish the Garment Worker Center (GWC), as a legal clinic to support workers in filing wage claims under the new procedures established by AB633. They hired three young Asian American women to run the GWC, including Kimi Lee as director, a lawyer who had previously worked on wage theft cases at the ACLU. But soon after they opened, the GWC’s small organizing staff began to notice that many of the workers seeking their support were coming from the same shops. And some additional research revealed that those shops were producing garments for the same company: fast fashion retailer Forever 21.  

    The GWC launched its multi-pronged campaign against Forever 21 in 2001. With support from the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, they filed a lawsuit on behalf of thirty-three workers alleging wage theft and dangerous working conditions. They organized picket lines at Forever 21’s subcontractors across the city and at its various retail stores, and even demonstrations outside the homes of the company’s owners. And they organized a nationwide boycott campaign calling on their fellow workers and allies to join through loud and colorful public demonstrations like this one. Pictured here: María Pineda, one of the thirty-three workers who filed the lawsuit, and GWC Director Kimi Lee (in the orange vest). 

    Check out more photos from the GWC’s campaign against Forever 21 here.

    Watch the 2007 documentary about the Forever 21 campaign, Made in L.A. at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juvhOO2RdgA

  • Day of Conscience Against Sweatshops

    Day of Conscience Against Sweatshops

    A garment worker carries a “Bill For Your Dirty Laundry” at a “Day of Conscience to End Sweatshops” rally and march in Los Angeles’ garment district on October 4, 1997. Organized by UNITE and its allies as part of their campaign against Guess? Jeans, the event was part of a national day of action that aimed to pressure the Presidential Task Force on Apparel Manufacturing to enforce a strong accord that would protect garment workers’ rights in Los Angeles and around the world. 

    Photograph by Linda A. Lotz, CLUE records (LSC.2441), UCLA Library Special Collections Collection Information: https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8g167r7/

    View more of Lotz’ photos from the CLUE collection here.

  • May Day Los Angeles, 2003

    May Day Los Angeles, 2003

    The Multi-Ethnic Immigrant Workers Organizing Network (MIWON) formed in the year 2000 to support immigrant and undocumented immigrant labor rights across Los Angeles. The coalition brought together the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), Instituto de Educación Popular del Sur de California (Institute for Popular Education of Southern California, IDEPSCA), Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA), the Pilipino Worker Center (PWC), and later the Garment Worker Center (GWC), among other organizations. Throughout its ten years, these groups committed themselves “to the struggle for dignity, justice, and the human rights of immigrant workers and all peoples,” through sharing strategies and information, fostering interethnic and interracial solidarity, and promoting political consciousness and civic engagement among low-wage workers in Los Angeles.

    MIWON campaigned for the passage of the “Immigrant Workers Bill of Human Rights” at the Los Angeles City Council in 2001, and to expand undocumented immigrants’ access to drivers’ licenses and government-issued identification. But perhaps their most enduring tactic was their annual commemoration of May Day (International Workers Day), marches that promoted solidarity among multiethnic and immigrant workers in Los Angeles and beyond. 

    Pictured here: a scene from MIWON’s May Day march in 2003, where protestors connected “immigrant bashing” in Los Angeles and the United States government’s invasion of Iraq weeks earlier. 

    View more images from the 2003 May Day march here.

  • Daily Picket Debrief

    Daily Picket Debrief

    This photo was donated by Sammy Feldblum, a participant in the UC UAW Labor Summer Program who contributed to the UAW Fair UC Now 2022 Collection. As Feldblum described, the significance of the image was in capturing the challenges of trust-building and communication. As he wrote:

    “I chose this photo not because I am the one with the megaphone, but instead because it gestures toward one of the great difficulties of union democracy: the ability to convey evolving information between rank-and-file and leadership, to effectively channel the union’s collective will. Our strike spanned nine campuses, and included some 48,000 workers: collective action comprised both organizing our particular corners of campus and coordination across campuses and the state. This picture, by UCLA anthropologist Nicole Smith, shows an end-of-day consultation within our picket line, in which we considered strategy and mood. By strike’s end, a congress of leaders from each department gathered to facilitate information sharing from the picket line to the bargaining table and back; before that, though, difficulties in communication were felt at times as a lack of attentiveness to rank-and-file priorities.”

    “Union democracy is a dynamic thing: the strength of this strike depended on the widespread mobilization of membership cultivated by actions in the preceding years, and the strike in turn proffered new experiences, activations, and insights to inform the struggles ahead. Perhaps my holding the microphone is then in fact illustrative: far from a seasoned unionist before the strike, I, like so many others, found myself newly thrust into vexed situations with material stakes and unclear outcomes, and nothing to do about it but think hard with my comrades about how to proceed as the tides roiled all around us.”

    Photos from this picket line, as well as many others, are part of the UAW Fair UC Now 2022 Campaign Collection, part of the Wayne State Reuther Library.

  • March to the State Capitol

    March to the State Capitol

    The University of California is one of the largest public universities in the United States and the third largest employer in the state. As a result, when UC workers go on strike, the state government can become a crucial point of leverage. Many state legislators, particularly those who serve districts where the UC’s campuses are located, believe strongly in the university’s public mission. During the UAW Fair UC Now Campaign, academic workers sought to challenge the notion that the UC was living up to that public mission in multiple ways as a means to win support from those legislators for their bargaining demands. They sent letters and petitions to legislative offices, lobbied for increased workplace protections, and as captured here, marched on the capitol itself. On Dec. 5, UAW members from UC Davis and other campuses descended on the state capitol building in Sacramento, continuing their march to the Offices of the UC President nearby. They called on state legislators to use their influence to ensure that the UC bargain in good faith and pay all of its employees a livable wage.

    Photos from this action, as well as many others, are part of the UAW Fair UC Now 2022 Campaign Collection, part of the Wayne State Reuther Library.

  • Kayak Picket Line

    Striking academic workers from UC Irvine picket the seaside home of a major UC donor.

    The UAW Fair UC Now 2022 Campaign began Nov. 14, when striking graduate workers formed picket lines on campuses across the state that continued for at least four weeks. But after classes concluded for the year in December, striking workers had to rethink their strategies. How can you escalate a work stoppage when that worksite is effectively closed? The members of UAW decided to focus their demonstrations on new targets. Working together, they identified new picketing locations across the state, including the workplaces and residences of the UC Regents and other key stakeholders. Many of these off-campus demonstrations also took novel forms, including the kayak action pictured here, when students from UC Irvine paddled their picket line towards an off-shore island where the residence of a major UC donor was located.

    Photos from this picket line, as well as many others, are part of the UAW Fair UC Now 2022 Campaign Collection, part of the Wayne State Reuther Library.

  • Justice for Janitors History Day

    Justice for Janitors History Day

    The members of SEIU-USWW gathered at the union hall in May 2011 to share their stories, memories, photographs, clippings, and artifacts. Long-time union member Victoria Marquez brought an extensive collection of documents, buttons, t-shirts, and other items. Later, she shared her life story with Andrew Gomez as part of a UCLA Oral History Research Center project. You can listen and read along here.

  • Fast for USC Workers

    Fast for USC Workers

    In 1999, UNITE HERE leader Maria Elena Durazo led workers, clergy, and activists in a fast to protest the failure of the University of Southern California (USC) to negotiate with their workers. In an editorial printed in the Los Angeles Times, Durazo compared the fast to those of United Farm Worker leader Cesar Chavez. “How could I ask others to work harder in the labor movement, to take even greater risks for their children and their co-workers, unless I was willing to fast side by side with them?” she wrote in explanation of the fast.

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  • Jobs with Peace

    Jobs with Peace

    How can progressive political movements win power in geographically expansive and multiracial cities like Los Angeles? The answer, according to the Los Angeles Jobs with Peace campaign was “coalition architecture,” an intentional strategy to link the interests of organized labor with the peace movement, the women’s movement, and the African American civil rights movement through the shared goal of creating good jobs for all by redirecting money from military to domestic spending. In 1984 and 1986, the campaign backed citywide ballot initiatives and built a network of supporters at the precinct level to turnout voters. The 1984 Proposition X called on the city to research and report on pension and contract funds that flowed to military contractors. It passed by a comfortable margin. Proposition V in 1986 would have established a commission to advise the city on how to redirect funds away from military contractors. Proposition V faced a well-funded opposition campaign from business interests and lost by a wide margin. Despite the defeat, the campaign built an effective get-out-the-vote operation at the precinct level that would be the basis of future progressive victories.

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