UCLA historians launched a revamped digital labor history archive in April, preserving materials from movements led by Southern California unions.
The Memory Work Research Initiative at UCLA – which the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment oversees – digitized documents, images and flyers on an online archive called Power from the Past.
UCLA historians started the initiative in the basement of the Service Employees International Union Hall more than 10 years ago, said Toby Higbie, a history professor. SEIU represents about 2 million public sector and property service workers across the United States, according to its website.
“Los Angeles has been a really vital union town for a long time, and it’s well known for some really spectacular and creative campaigns,” Higbie said. “People who are in the labor world know those stories and often evoke them, but we wanted to be able to share the materials with the broader community.”
The initiative digitized documents stored in the basement from the 1990s Justice for Janitors campaign – a labor movement led by SEIU.
Caroline Luce, Higbie’s colleague and former student, said the website was designed to make information on LA labor movements accessible to broader audiences. The digital tool offers multiple ways to experience archival materials, including blog posts, videos and images, she added.
“We wanted to think about what our audience was really interested in learning,” Luce said.
The IRLE also created a social media series to highlight different labor history stories weekly, said Willa Needham, a communications specialist for the organization.
The series has featured videos of Asian American and Pacific Islander workers protesting the acquittal of LAPD officers in 1992 following the beating of Rodney King, as well as photographs from 2003 May Day marches – which recognize international workers.
Needham said learning about previous labor movements is important for those who are participating in ones now.
“It’s important for organizers to understand that they’re not reinventing the wheel,” Needham said. “We have … so many examples of campaigns that have been successful and also campaigns that have been unsuccessful – both of which are elevated in Power from the Past.”
Union members, archivists and librarians collaborated to create the website, Luce said.
“One of the things about our digital era is that it really masks the tremendous amount of labor that goes into creating sites like this,” she said.
The project focuses on LA and Southern California because the IRLE wanted to stay connected with nearby unions, Higbie added.
Needham said that though she believes the archive will resonate especially with workers and organizers, she hopes it will also appeal to students and educators who might not know about these labor movements yet.
“These are undeniably formative parts of what makes LA Los Angeles, today, and they deserve more attention, respect and inclusion in our popular understanding of where we got to this moment and how we got to this moment,” Luce said.
As the IRLE prepares for its 80-year anniversary, Higbie said its archival work is evolving – and is nowhere close to finished.
“We call our project ‘memory work’ because we understand that memory does work,” Luce said. “We believe that learning from the past can help us better understand the present and imagine better things in the future.”
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