Something is happening in the labor movement. All across the United States, workers are striking and winning. Public approval of unions is at a 15-year high. Teachers, hotel workers, and supermarket cashiers have inspired 50,000 General Motors workers to walk off the job, touching off the first United Auto Workers’ nationwide strike in over a decade.

Clara Mejía Orta, a Labor Studies graduate student at the UMass Labor Center, won the United Association for Labor Education’s New Generation Award at the 2019 UALE Conference earlier this month in Philadelphia, PA.

We are proud to launch the inaugural issue of the Undergraduate Journal on Work, Labor and Social Movements.  The publication is a project of the Labor Extension Program of the University of Massachusetts system, and aims to foster a cross-campus conversation among undergraduate students at each UMass campus. This is a space for students to research trends in labor from historical, economic, and sociological perspectives; to explore the roles that labor and the labor movement play in their own lives and those of their peers; and to reflect on their own activism.

It is time for us to continue the important work of training the next generation of labor leaders. Organized labor is under attack, but we are fighting back and winning: at Marriott, in Los Angeles, and across this country.

To continue that work, we must recruit, train, and place promising activists throughout the movement. To that end, the UMass Amherst Labor Center is now accepting applications to the incoming class of our residential and limited residency (ULA) Master’s programs.