UCSB Community Labor Center hosts Worker and Tenant Rights Fair

More than 15 organizations tabled at the Worker and Tenant Rights Fair on Nov. 4 at the Student Resource Building lawn, spearheaded by UC Santa Barbara Community Labor Center. 

The organizations which attended work with tenants and workers specifically in the UCSB community and throughout the Central Coast. They shared resources with the community and opportunities to get involved. 

The Community Labor Center’s Programs and Operations Director, Fabienne Doiron, helped lead the event alongside some of the organization’s student assistants, as well as the External Vice President for Statewide Affairs’ office. Doiron shared that the variety of organizations present included unions, community organizations, student organizers and several state agencies.

Doiron said she and others at the Community Labor Center have realized a lot of students hold their first jobs in college and are not aware of their rights as workers. Students new to the workforce might not know what minimum wage is or how many breaks they are entitled to.

Another goal of the event was to introduce students to the labor movement. They wanted to show students all of the unions and organizations that work toward empowering laborers throughout the region.

The Community Labor Center does not work directly with campus labor. Instead, their focus is to support workers throughout the Central Coast — from San Luis Obispo to Ventura County. They have a community focus alongside their campus focus.

“We look to uplift workers throughout our region, and we do that in three main ways,” Doiron said. “One is to provide strategic research that centers workers’ needs and experiences. Another one is to provide education and training programming, both to the campus community and to folks off campus. And then the third is to try to engage students on labor issues and to try to plug them into the labor movement.” 

One of the organizations present was UAW 4811, a large union in higher education with over 60,000 members spanning across all 10 UC campuses. They represent teaching assistants, graduate student researchers, tutors and readers, academic researchers, postdocs and student support staff.

“We represent a pretty broad swath of laborers at UCSB and we’re working with lots of other unions and organizations to make this a better place to work. So I think it’s important for the community to know what we’re doing, and who we are,” UAW 4811 Head Steward and UCSB graduate student Victoria Albert said.

The Student Labor Advocacy Project (S.L.A.P.) aimed to bring information and awareness about UC labor practices to students. UCSB S.L.A.P. began at the end of the last academic year and is based on UC Los Angeles’ S.L.A.P.

Fourth-year sociology major Fred Torres is a member of S.L.A.P. and said that their three main committees are educational, organizational development and propaganda. Torres explained that the organization is still in its developmental stages.  

“Now we’re trying to collect students’ input — their concerns, any problems or any changes they want to see at the university — through our posted board [on their table at the event]. That way when we do host events, when we do get together, we know what we could focus on and start organizing,” Torres said.

Milena Seymour, a fourth-year English and ecology and evolution double major and member of S.L.A.P.,  emphasized the importance of their club collaborating with underrepresented groups across campus, as well as participating in fairs like the Worker and Tenant Rights Fair.

“We talked to a lot of people who are interested in joining unions and learning more about unions. We kind of helped serve as an information middleman to help students get involved in that,” Seymour said.

A version of this article appeared on p. 3 of the Nov. 12 print edition of the Daily Nexus.