UCI Labor Center
Introducing our 2024 Labor Summer Interns!
The UCI Labor Center is excited to announce our 2024 class of Labor Summer interns! These 12 interns represent a diverse group of majors and backgrounds, tied together by their experience and passion for the labor movement and community organizing. This is the 2nd annual group of students to participate in the state-wide internship program along with other UC campuses. This program allows students to gain experience and connect with working people through the labor movement and community organizations.
A Message from the Academic Director
Welcome to the UCI Labor Center! Workers are at the center of our outward-facing programs, research, and labor education. Through our work, we tackle the economic and social challenges facing working people and their families, raise up their accomplishments, and connect to their struggles for dignity and respect on the job. In our first year, we will launch UCI’s first-ever Labor Summer, a full-time paid internship program for UCI students that pairs them with a labor union or worker organization. Stay tuned as we develop more programming, research, and engagement opportunities that forward our mission of advancing workers’ rights and a worker-centered economy. As the inaugural faculty director, I am incredibly excited by the center’s potential to foster new ideas, new leaders, and new partnerships to improve the lives of working families in Orange County and beyond. Onward!
Virginia Parks
UCI Labor Center Mission
The UCI Labor Center builds the power of working people in Orange County and beyond by promoting, defending, and expanding workers’ rights. Through research, advocacy, policy innovation, education, and outreach, the center supports unions and worker organizations in their efforts to build a fair and racially just worker-centered economy.
In the News
See what the UCI Labor Center is doing.
Report on refinery closure provides guide for changing economy
A new report by Virginia Parks, professor of urban planning and public policy, documents the difficult post-layoff job search and working conditions of hundreds of California fossil fuel workers in the aftermath of the 2020 closure of the Marathon Martinez oil refinery in Contra Costa County, providing an illuminating case study of the perils and needs of workers.…
Anteaters complete Labor Summer internships
Whether they were on the picket lines with hospitality workers, researching policy or helping to organize workers, the inaugural group of UC Irvine Labor Summer interns gained valuable lessons on the purpose of unions and experience that they plan to apply in their future endeavors.
UC Irvine Labor Center opens on campus
The University of California, Irvine has opened a new campus center that will provide timely and policy-relevant labor research, will educate the next generation of labor and community leaders, and will advance labor and workers’ rights initiatives.
UCI Labor Center has new director
Christopher Duarte envisions a world where Orange County workers and employers reap a mutually beneficial future. The former vice president and chief operations officer of Workers United Local 50, the union that represents Disneyland employees, has begun his new job as director of the recently formed UCI Labor Center.
National Jurist: UC Irvine opens new Labor Center
NBC Bay Area: What Happens When A Refinery Closes
The Sacramento Bee: After a California refinery closed, laid-off fossil fuel workers got hit with a ‘gut punch’
Futurity: Report: Laid Off Fossil Fuel Workers Need Support
UCI Social Ecology: UCI students start Labor Summer internships
Video – Virginia Parks
Brought to you by the
UC Irvine
School of Social Ecology
5300 Social and Behavioral Sciences Gateway
Irvine, CA 92697-7050
© 2020 UC Regents