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Our Friday April 8, 2005 symposium,
jointly organized with the Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law
(BJELL),
Making Movement: Communities of Color and New Models of Organizing
Labor was a great success.
MCLE credits are available for California attorneys.
The day-long symposium featured Saru
Jayaraman, Executive Director of the Restaurant Opportunities Center of
New York (ROC-New York) and Elena Durazo, President of UNITE!-HERE
Local 11 and General Vice President of the HERE International Union.
Panels included:
- The Revolving Door
of Immigrant Labor
- Innovative
Approaches to Organizing Workers: Rethinking the Labor Question
- Linking Legal
Advocacy and Labor
And the symposium ended with a reflective
roundtable discussion, Making Movement.
Making Movement: Communities of Color
and New Models of Organizing Labor furthered the dialogue
inititated between our journals in our joint 2001 symposium, The
Changing Face of Labor: Critical Labor, Immigration, and Employment Issues
in the New Global Economy. Four years later our missions, mandates, and
voices reunited.
The goal of Making Movement was to
spotlight organizations advocating for and advancing the rights of working
communities of color in the United States and beyond. The decline of unions
in the U.S. and the growing number of immigrant workers and workers of
color demand a rethinking of traditional models of organizing labor. We
must answer the critical question, "How can attorneys, community
advocates, sociolegal scholars, labor organizers, and workers use our
skills in complementary ways to advocate for the material and symbolic
advancement of underrepresented communities?"
We were delighted to have created the space
for an invigorating discussion of contemporary struggles to organize
labor while fundamentally critiquing conventional notions of citizenship.
We expect our audience members, keynote speakers, and panelists to connect
current political projects with the 20th century history of U.S.
immigration and labor law and policy, including the:
- deportation of U.S.
citizens of Mexican ancestry during the Great Depression,
- passage of the
National Labor Relations Act,
- internment of
Japanese Americans during World War II,
- 22-year long federal
Bracero Program,
- infamous federal
program, "Operation: Wetback," which continued this
country's centurial history of forcibly coercing and excluding human
labor,
- abolition of the
national origin quotas of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of
1965,
- passage of the North
American Free Trade Agreement
- creation of the
federal-state collaboration, "Operation: Gatekeeper," which
militarized the California border with México,
- presidential
proposal of a new temporary guestworker program,
- post-9/11
deportation of immigrants from the Middle East and Southeast Asia,
- "INS
raids" on Latina/o communities in 2004,
- reported vigilantism
of the Minuteman Militia and other extremist, often racist,
anti-immigrant groups along the Arizona-México border.
Workers’ rights are human
rights.
Join us as we come together to make movement.
***
For more information about other Berkeley La Raza Law Journal
symposia, click here.
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