Growing up outside Detroit in the 1970s, with the city in decline and factories closing, Tobias Higbie experienced firsthand how the historical record can help people make sense of their current environment.
At the Detroit Institute of Arts, where his mother volunteered, the young Higbie became fascinated with the monumental frescoes of the Detroit Industry Murals, painted by Diego Rivera during the Great Depression. Now a National Historic Landmark, the mural’s massive panels portray a city split along class lines between union workers and those in power.
“I usually say that Diego Rivera made me a labor historian,” said Higbie, who today is a UCLA professor of labor studies and history and director of the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. “I grew up in a middle-class home in a suburb of Detroit, and most of the adults in my town frowned on unions, to say the least. I learned about the class divide and its racial components at the same time that I was becoming aware of the economic collapse that was happening around me.”
Higbie’s research explores the intersection of work, migration and social movements. His students in the UCLA labor studies major, he said, come primarily from underrepresented communities in the Los Angeles area, and a majority are first-generation college students. Through his teaching, he hopes to guide them toward meaningful encounters with labor history — and to prepare them to become change-makers in their own communities, whether as labor organizers, community leaders or legislators, or in other professions.
In June, Higbie was one of four UCLA professors to receive this year’s Chancellor’s Awards for Community-Engaged Scholars. He’s using the funds to develop a new course for the 2024–25 academic year in which students will work with local labor and community organizers to interpret historic documents from organized labor movements in Los Angeles between the 1980s and early 2000s.
The materials they’ll analyze are part of an archive that was created by Higbie and colleagues at the UCLA Labor Center and UCLA Library over the past decade and is maintained by UCLA Library Special Collections. In addition to documents, the archive includes posters, buttons and T-shirts from the United Service Workers West’s Justice for Janitors campaign, UNITE HERE Local 11 and the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, among others. It also includes oral histories, many of which are available online.
“It’s a record of the dramatic resurgence of organized labor in Los Angeles, and among immigrant and Latinx workers generally,” Higbie said. “Union campaigns like Justice for Janitors reshaped the workplace and altered the city’s political landscape.”
As part of the course, the students will produce resources like interactive maps, genealogies, videos and artwork meant to engage other researchers and the public. Higbie said he hopes the experience will help students more fully understand today’s workers’ rights movements — not just as portrayed on the news or in social media, but through a historical lens.
“I’ve seen how students can be turned on to history by holding an original document in their hands,” Higbie said. “I’ve also seen how documents of the past can fascinate and inspire contemporary organizers and activists. My aim is to pry open the hyper-presentism of digital media culture, pushing the envelope of memory outward to encompass contexts that can help people gain their bearings in a complex, disorienting world. And in that way, perhaps we can begin to see a different future as well.”
The course dovetails with Higbie’s broader “Memory Work Los Angeles” project, which was initiated in 2010 under the auspices of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment to collect archival materials including documents, images, interviews and interpretive histories in collaboration with community partners. The project facilitates relationships between Los Angeles labor organizers and UCLA faculty, staff and students who collect, organize, research and interpret the archives.
Both “Memory Work” and the new course Higbie is developing reflect the community-engaged approach of UCLA’s labor studies program, which he chaired from 2019 to 2022. Higbie also was instrumental in the effort to launch, in 2019, UCLA’s undergraduate major in labor studies — the first of its kind in the University of California system.
Higbie said he hopes those resources and the new class help UCLA students understand their capacity to make history by seeing the bigger picture — just as he did years ago, staring up at the Rivera murals.
“Change doesn’t happen because of a single person, or a great person,” Higbie said. “Change happens when big groups of people act in concert in one direction. The science of this is, ‘How does that happen?’ And that’s what we’re after.”