Programs
The UCLA Labor Center hosts a number of exciting and ground-breaking programs to address our mission to promote research, education, and policy change to improve the lives of workers, students, and our communities.
Profiled in the Los Angeles Times, the Labor Center launched the first Black Worker Center in Los Angeles to address the job crisis in the African American community. The center focuses on providing pipelines for black workers to obtain skilled, union jobs and to improve the quality of existing jobs in the black community.
California Construction Academy 
The California Construction Academy (CCA) is dedicated to building a better construction industry through facilitation, research, and popular education. It envisions a construction industry that leads the country in triple bottom line returns—environmental, economic, and social benefits.
The UCLA Labor Center has emerged as a national center for research, education, and policy on undocumented immigrant student issues. The Dream Resource Center builds on the leadership of university students addressing local and national policy on equal access to higher education and pathways to citizenship. The main objective of this initiative is to build the infrastructure to prepare for the day when immigration reform would provide undocumented immigrant youth with a pathway to citizenship.
Global Solidarity - Pacific Rim
For several years, the UCLA Labor Center has been at the forefront of developing labor leader and labor scholar exchanges between the United States and Pacific Rim countries, especially China and Vietnam. In the global economy, there is a pressing need for unions and workers to build crossborder communication, understanding, and solidarity.
Institute for Transnational Social Change 
Established in 2008, the Institute for Transnational Social Change (ITSC) works to develop crossborder collaboration among key worker-led organizations in Mexico and the United States. ITSC’s activities aim to increase opportunities for crossborder collaboration and access to leadership development programs, health and safety trainings, and organizational capacity building.
The Labor and Education Collaborative for Low-Wage Worker-Parents and K-12 Education Reform in Los Angeles brings union and community worker-parents together with union and community leadership to improve members’ children’s educational opportunities. For worker-parents to build a strong force for education reform, the collaborative supports the “Parent Worker University,” where parents attend workshops to become better informed about how the public school system functions and how resource inequalities affect their children’s education.
Student Leadership Development 
The Labor Center, housed in the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, offers over two hundred leadership development, service-learning, and field research placements annually to undergraduate students at UCLA and from other universities. Students participate in these experiential learning opportunities through the interdisciplinary Minor in Labor and Workplace Studies and summer internship programs taught by UCLA faculty from various social science departments.