These are some noteworthy labor headlines we read this week.

Weekly Labor Reads:

TOP STORY

A Mass Strike in Minneapolis Against ICE?

Today, January 23, families and workers across Minneapolis and the state are engaging in a general strike to protest federal immigration enforcement on their streets. Unions, community groups and faith organizations called for a day of “no work (except for emergency services), no school, and no shopping” this Friday in response to immigration officers’ violent conduct, including the killing of Renee Nicole Good, who was shot while observing an immigration raid. The general strike campaign, called “ICE Out of MN: Day of Truth and Freedom,” demands ICE to leave the state, for the officer who killed Good to be held accountable and for the state and local businesses to cut all funding and ties to ICE. 

Jacobin

Luis Feliz Leon

WORKER HEALTH AND SAFETY

One Year After Trump Vowed to Make America Great Again, Report Finds Workers Are Less Safe

Documented

Amir Khafagy

ECONOMIC INEQUALITY

A New Low for American Workers

The American Prospect

Harold Meyerson

LABOR ACTIONS



Union of 31,000 Kaiser Workers to Go on Indefinite Strike

KQED

Daisy Nguyen

HIGHER EDUCATION

Investigations and a Billion-Dollar ‘Shakedown’: How Trump Targeted Higher Education

The New York Times

Michael C. Bender, Alan Blinder and Michael S. Schmidt

IRLE IN THE NEWS

What Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy looks like in today’s movements 

UCLA Newsroom 

Madeline Adamo

Ft. Robin D.G. Kelley, UCLA Labor Studies professor

Remember This!

Memory Work Los Angeles is a project of UCLA IRLE. We bring the past to the present to highlight the diverse experiences and perspectives of working people in Southern California, the changing world of work, and the continuing struggle for equality.

On the picket line with CAUSE, 1998

In this image, students participating in “Union Summer” join a CAUSE (Coalition for Accountability in the Universal Studios Expansion) picket line at Universal Studios headquarters. Taken in 1998, this photo documents an early version of the UCLA Labor Center’s Labor Summer Fellowship. 

This week, UCLA Labor Center opened applications for its 2026 Labor Summer cohort. The Labor Summer fellowship places Los Angeles college students at labor unions or worker centers to receive frontline training as organizers on economic justice campaigns. Learn more here and apply at bit.ly/LS26FELLOW. 

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UCLA's Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) advances labor research and education for workplace justice. Through the work of its units – the UCLA Labor Center, the Human Resources Roundtable, the Labor Occupational Safety and Health program (LOSH) and its academic program, UCLA Labor Studies – the Institute forms wide-ranging research and agendas that carry UCLA into the Los Angeles community and beyond.