BY NEAL SACHAROW
UCLA Today

It was an opportunity that home-care worker Eleonor Martinez couldn't pass up, a chance to study U.S. labor history, learn about health and safety issues and improve her public speaking skills on the UCLA campus.

So when offered a spot in the California Union Leadership School, an innovative program that is part of the UCLA in LA partnership with greater Los Angeles, she joined 25 other workers representing janitors, security guards and hotel, garment, health-care, nursing home and construction workers in a weeklong training last month.

With funding from the UC Institute for Labor and Employment (ILE), the UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education launched its inaugural initiative to promote leadership development among union workers from various sectors of the labor community throughout the Los Angeles region. At El Colegio de Liderazgo Laboral, the first entirely Spanish-language labor leadership training in the United States, participants, UCLA students and faculty were welcomed by Vice Chancellor for Research Roberto Peccei and Ruth Milkman, director of the ILE and the UCLA Institute of Industrial Relations.

"We are very pleased that the ILE is able to open the doors of UCLA, with its many resources, to all of you," Milkman said. "I hope this is the first of many teaching and learning exchanges between your communities and those of us here in the university."

The ILE, founded in July 2000, has a research agenda that focuses on the new dynamic that infuses economy, labor and workers in California. Immigrant workers now make up a large part of California's workforce, representing a growing proportion of low-wage labor markets, with important implications for the state.

Kent Wong, the labor center director, believes that the California Union Leadership School's programs provide a very special opportunity. "It brings together experienced educators and a broad spectrum of union members to address the big-picture issues that individual local unions normally don't have sufficient time to explore," he noted.

Inspired by their experiences, many of the workers said that the skills-development training they received -- including instruction in public speaking, effective one-on-one communication and the details of how to conduct meetings -- would be useful not only at work, but in other aspects of their lives.

"It was exciting to learn about globalization and its impact on us as immigrants," said Aaron Gonzalez of Service Employees International Union Local 1877, which represents Los Angeles janitors. "I will definitely take this information back to my union, as well as to my community."

Participants attended classes at Hershey Hall and the Sunset Canyon Recreation Center, but the work didn't stop there. While staying at Hilgard House, they continued the Colegio with a critical review of each day's activities, small-group discussions and film screenings.

"It exceeded our most ambitious expectations," said project director Stephanie Arellano, who supervised the program. "Participants were challenged to shift their focus from wages and benefits and to adopt a broader vision. They left with a new understanding of their roles in their unions, their communities and contemporary history."

The center plans to offer additional educational programs in the coming months and years.