Vivian Price: Labor Studies Gives Professor and Filmmaker a Lot to Work With

When Vivian Price was working on her master’s degree in history at the University of Texas at Austin, she took a job in a fiberglass boat factory.

“That really opened my eyes,” says the assistant professor of interdisciplinary studies. “We had to take salt pills to keep from fainting because the heat was so bad, and they didn’t choose to air condition the place. I was exposed to asbestos. I really improved my Spanish working there; most of the work force was Latino. And I worked in a number of different factories after that, in electronics and pharmaceuticals, even a steel mill.”

Price’s interest in labor, and particularly women in the workplace, propelled her to a career as an educator and filmmaker. As an instructor in labor studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills and advisor to the Labor Studies Group, a student organization, she is enthusiastic about bringing the Almudena Carracedo’s documentary, “Made in L.A.” to the campus on Mar. 10. The 2007 film focuses on the lives of three women, one from El Salvador and two from Mexico, who work in the garment industry in Los Angeles. Their struggle for better working conditions and rights in the workplace is a story that Price hopes will bring the issues to the forefront for Dominguez Hills students.

“Capitalism at this point preys on women,” she says. “They are targeted as a low-cost, docile workforce. One of the things this film does is to show how they’re anything but docile, trying to find strategic ways to make a difference.”

Price, whose internationally recognized filmography includes the award-winning “Transnational Tradeswomen” and “In My Own Words, Against All Odds,” the story of the first African-American journeywoman in the electrician's union in Los Angeles, is currently working on “Sufrimiento Sin Fronteras” (Suffering Without Borders), a documentary about the post-World War II bracero program in the United States, which brought migrant workers from Mexico into the country to work in slavery-like conditions.

“The foundation of the Chicano generation was the bracero program, where Mexico had been shaped economically as a colony in the United States and by American capitalists in the 19th and early 20th centuries,” says Price. “The growers in the U.S. decided that they would bring in Mexican workers, who would not be able to organize. Although on paper they had a lot of different rights, they were in fact, really modern slaves. They could be shipped back for any reason at all and they didn’t have any family here. They lived in barracks and had to work from 14 to 16 hours a day, or no hours if there was bad weather, and they wouldn’t be paid.”

Price is making “Sufrimiento Sin Fronteras” with colleague Gilbert Gonzales, professor of social sciences at the University of California, Irvine. As she worked with him on research for his book, Guest Workers or Colonized Labor?: Mexican Labor Migration to the United States, she got the idea for the film.

“We both thought it was really important because of the discussions of guest worker programs today,” she says, “and what is going on in the United States as far as globalization, imperialism, and supposedly solving the problems of not having an exploitable work force that will work for nothing and having a guest worker program that will again, enslave people, no matter what it says on paper.”

With this year being the 30th anniversary of labor studies on the Dominguez Hills campus, Price is excited about two new classes being added to the curriculum, one on labor leadership in Los Angeles, the other on research methods in labor studies. She describes a recent class session of the former, during which an organizer from the Writer’s Guild of America spoke to students.

“Students were really thrilled to hear from him about the struggle,” she says, “and things like how people deal with strike breakers or the issue of trying to raise someone’s consciousness by talking to them, rather than just shouting at them.”

Price says that the research methods class will be instrumental in helping students land jobs in the field.

“We have a number of unions coming to us wanting to hire our students,” she says. “They often want organizers or researchers and we want to be able to give students the background they need to get these jobs.”

Price, who has built a career around many unsung communities within the workplace, says that students have many job options after earning a degree in labor studies.

“People think labor studies is something specialized, but in fact, the majority of our lives is about the world of work,” she observes. “Labor unions are a big employer and there are lots of opportunities to work as an organizer, a researcher, or business representative. You can also work in personnel for the government, corporations, or nonprofit organizations. Having an understanding of labor relations, employment and the history of the working class and labor movements can be useful in a lot of different situations.”

For more information on Price and her documentaries, click here.

- Joanie Harmon