The future of California’s organized labor movement was on full display at the Corwin Pavilion on Aug. 8, when UC Santa Barbara’s Community Labor Center (CLC) celebrated 14 students who just completed an intensive internship program with local labor unions. Now in its third year, the Labor Summer Internship Program pairs students with local unions and worker organizations, providing them with hands-on experience in organizing, communications, and outreach.
Since its establishment at UCSB in 2023, the program has grown from 11 participants to 14 this year, with many alumni later securing full-time jobs with their host organizations. To date, 8 interns have joined their host unions to work full-time. This year's cohort worked with a diverse range of organizations, including the United Farm Workers, United Domestic Workers, and the Service Employees International Union, which mostly represents public sector workers.
It’s difficult to imagine a more critical moment for organized labor than right now, as evidenced by some of the work the 2025 Labor Summer interns and the program’s recent graduates are doing. On Sept. 29, Gonzalez Fletcher joined fellow Labor Summer interns Amri-Alejandra Salazar and Alyssa Ellis for a protest outside Oxnard City Hall, where city workers were rallying in support of their fight for a living wage. “Workers should be able to afford to live where they work, said Ellis, who addressed the city council that evening, urging them to provide a cost-of-living increase for their employees.
Amri-Alejandra Salazar, Antonio Gonzales-Bradford, and Alyssa Ellis at Oxnard City Hall.
Alyssa Ellis with SEIU protesters outside Oxnard City Hall.
Earlier that week, Labor Summer interns Axel Valencia Alvarez and Itzel Barragan, both attached to the United Farm Workers, volunteered at a seminar for farm workers at a community meeting in Oxnard. After veteran organizer Roman Pinal, a UFW national vice president, provided updates about the recent immigration enforcement raids in Camarillo and Carpinteria, they scheduled educational visits with the workers and handed out cards in Spanish and English that provided advice on what to say—and not to say— if confronted by ICE agents.
They were joined in that effort by Jenny Alvarez, a 2024 Labor Summer graduate who now works as a full-time UFW organizer. Herself a child of immigrants from El Salvador, Alvarez credited Labor Summer with providing young students with an opportunity to not just learn about but join the struggles of people in their community. “There aren’t enough hands on deck right now,” she said. “Labor Summer gives you the opportunity to connect with others to understand that you're part of something much bigger."
Jenny Alvarez at a UFW meeting with local farmworkers.
“The internship serves as a meaningful entry point for students to find long-term work within the labor movement,” said Carmen Rhodes, the CLC’s executive director, who runs Labor Summer along with Academic Coordinator Fabienne Doiron and Ralph Armbruster, the program’s faculty director. The Aug. 8 ceremony featured several prominent speakers including Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, a former member of the California State Assembly who is now the president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, who argued that the importance of labor unions has never been more vital than in today’s highly charged political climate, which features massive cuts in federal funding and unprecedented attacks on undocumented workers.
“If you look at the history of the world and you look at dictatorships and authoritarian governments, there is only one institution that has been able to take those on,” Gonzalez Fletcher said. “And do you know what that is? Organized labor." She urged the Labor Summer graduates—many of whom come from low-income and immigrant communities—not to lose their faith, and to try to enjoy themselves while they help organize their communities. “They want to demoralize you,” she said. “But by being together and being part of the labor movement and growing together, you're going to refuse to be demoralized, and you will fight back. Do not let them steal your joy!”
Among the graduates at the ceremony was her son, UCSB communication major Antonio Gonzalez Bradford, who interned with the Central Coast Labor Council, whose executive director, Jeremy Goldberg, also attended the ceremony. "There's hundreds of students that are learning to organize, learning to be part of labor movement and out there doing it and out there organizing,” Goldberg said, noting that Labor Summer also includes interns from other UC campuses including UCLA and UC Berkeley. “It’s so cool how big it is.”
Social Sciences Dean Charlie Hale congratulated the interns for standing up for immigrant workers now being targeted for deportation by the same federal government that just a few years earlier had lauded them for being essential workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. “These attacks on immigrant communities and families are part and parcel with attacks on our university,” Hale said. “The good news is how many of us have pulled together to resist, to reaffirm our core values and keep us unified and strong this year coming up. I think ceremonies like this one help us to sharpen our collective resolve.”
Concluding the ceremony was California State Senator Monique Limon, who previously worked at UCSB and commended the Labor Center for addressing problems that politicians in Washington D.C. and Sacramento have so far failed to fix. "The opportunity that the Labor Center has provided for our community, for our region to be able to really grapple with all of that—the human side of this, the labor side of this, the policy side of this, the fiscal side of this—is really, really important," Limon said. “Even in these most difficult times, our community is speaking up even more but is going to take more of us to ensure that these atrocities don't become something that is normalized or happen in silence.”
In top photo, from left, are: Carmen Rhodes and Monique Limon with interns (back row) Becky Chen, Ciara Johnson, Le Ant Metzger, Brenna Boldt, Antonio Gonzales-Bradford, Axel Valencia Alvarez, Fabienne Doiron and Ralph Armbruster. Front row interns: Kathryn Stevens, Itzel Barragan, Giselle Alvarez, Amir-Alejandra Salazar, Jesus Vasquez Jimenez and Emma Hirsch. Not shown: Emma Eliezer Vega.