Harry Bridges Center marks continued growth of Labor Studies with Annual Awards Celebration
More than 100 students, faculty, and members of the ILWU community convened in November for the Annual Awards Celebration hosted by the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies at the University of Washington (UW).
Adapted to the continuing conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Celebration featured an online awards ceremony honoring this year’s scholarship and grant recipients, which was followed by a socially distanced luncheon and exhibit held on the UW Seattle campus. The events were supported by contributions from the ILWU, including Local 19 and Local 52, Local 23, Local 32, and the Washington Area District Council. From California, Local 26, Marine Clerks Association Local 63, and Local 94 also supported the event.
The Harry Bridges Center was established in 1992 to honor the memory of Harry Bridges, founding president of the ILWU. The Center was the result of a grassroots fundraising campaign led by ILWU members and pensioners, making it a truly unique institution on a campus shaped largely by billionaire donors. Sharing Harry Bridges’ and the ILWU’s commitments to pragmatic labor organizing, democratic unionism, principled antiracism, and social justice, the Bridges Center advocates for working people and the study of their issues in higher education. The Center funds working class students, sponsors classes on labor issues, and supports research by faculty and students on labor topics. In 2010, the Bridges Center founded the Labor Archives of Washington, dedicated to preserving and promoting the history of working people in the Pacific Northwest. The Bridges Center is led by faculty Director Dr. Kim England, a Professor of Geography, who is currently serving her fourth year as the Harry Bridges Endowed Chair in Labor Studies.
Driven by the surging interest in labor issues and worker rights sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic, Labor Studies classes this year experienced record enrollments, with high demand requiring some classes to be expanded two or even three times during registration. In spring of 2021, the Bridges Center launched the Building a Movement Labor Internship. The program placed eight UW students in paid internships with local labor organizations, and it is continuing again this winter. Even unionization itself is spreading at UW, including a successful union election to create the UW Libraries Union, a bargaining unit that includes the staff of the Labor Archives of Washington.
In total, this year’s awards ceremony recognized 40 students and faculty, one of the largest groups ever to receive funding from the Harry Bridges Center. Like the Bridges Center itself, these scholarships were created through donations by ILWU members and locals to support working class students and labor activists. The Martin and Anne Jugum Scholarship, created in 1997 in memory of the late former president of Local 19 and his wife, was awarded to two outstanding students: Shoaib Laghari, studying economics and serving as the Bridges Center’s Student Assistant; and Brendon McCarroll, a legal advocate devoted to educating others about neurodiversity and disability accommodations in the workplace. Another award honoring a Local 19 member, the Frank Jenkins Jr. Fellowship, was created by the local to memorialize one of its path-breaking Black-Filipino leaders. Frank Jenkins Jr. was a founding member of Local 19 and worked on the waterfront for over 40 years. He passed away in 1974, but is still remembered fondly by union members today. This year’s recipient of the Jenkins Fellowship was Diana Vergara, an incoming freshman who has dedicated her education to fighting for workers’ rights, particularly in immigrant communities.
In 2018, pensioners Michele Drayton and Ian Kennedy, retired members of Local 52, established a scholarship to support working class students enrolling at UW. The Kennedy Drayton Scholarship was presented to Angelica Perez, a freshman hailing from a union farm worker family in Bellingham, WA, who plans to study law in order to advocate for immigrant workers. The Bridges Center’s Gundlach Scholarship, created by the late Jean Gundlach, a longtime ILWU secretarial staff member, was also awarded to a student pursuing a legal career. The award went to Selena Caldera, a former organizer with Iraq Veterans Against the War, who is now devoted to training workers on their rights in the workplace.
The final award announcement of the ceremony was the Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes Scholarship. This award, created by the ILWU’s Marine division, the Inlandboatmen’s Union of the Pacific (IBU), honors two union activists who were killed in 1981 in Seattle for their efforts opposing the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. This year’s scholarship, announced by Silme’s daughter Ligaya Domingo, was awarded to Paul Ryan Villanueva, an undocumented student pursuing a Masters Degree in Public Policy. This past summer, Villanueva took part in the UCLA Labor Center’s Dream Summer internship program, working to mobilize workers for the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA) conference. He plans to use his degree to work on issues of environmental justice.
Following the awards portion of the ceremony, Ligaya Domingo welcomed two comrades of Silme and Gene to the program, Rich Gurtiza and Emily Van Bronkhorst, for a special recognition. Former union members and reform activists within Silme and Gene’s local in the 1980s, Local 37 (now IBU Region 37), both Gurtiza and Van Bronkhorst devoted their lives to organizing for workers in the Seattle area until officially retiring this past year. Gurtiza spent decades as the Regional Director of IBU Regional 37 and an activist with APALA, and Van Bronkhorst long served as vice president of SEIU Healthcare 1199NW. Each has been a strong supporter of the Harry Bridges Center, and contributed to its growth over the years. Though retired, both remain committed to the labor movement – retired from the job, but not the struggle.
Other portions of the awards ceremony included a short presentation on new Labor Studies initiatives at the UW’s Bothell and Tacoma campuses, which together hosted dozens of online labor seminars open to the public over the past year. Research grants were also announced for UW graduate students and faculty, who are studying a wide variety of labor issues: collaborating with local unions and activists to study workplace safety and responses to COVID-19; racial justice in maritime industries; labor education in high schools; local government protections for domestic workers; and much more. The evening was capped by a rousing speech by UCLA Labor Center Director Kent Wong, who stressed the importance of institutions like the Harry Bridges Center for reproducing the labor movement across generations of struggle.
The Harry Bridges Center, a creation of ILWU rank and file, is meeting the challenge of introducing the labor movement to new generations. Through scholarship and internships, classes and research projects, and the preservation and promotion of workers’ history, the working class and its issues are a growing part of higher education at the University of Washington.
More information about the Bridges Center’s research projects and scholarship recipients, including video interviews with students, is available at: https://labor.washington.edu/celebration-program
-Andrew Hedden