"Can you imagine a business administration program that doesn't take for granted the need to make profits?" asks Elaine Bernard, who heads Harvard's Trade Union Program, "or that doesn't want to talk to business leaders, or place its students in companies?" But when a labor program assumes that workers should strive to raise wages and improve conditions, it's considered selfish--against the public interest.

In July, for instance, at the height of recall mayhem in California, the Institute for Labor and Employment was given the "California Golden Fleece Award" by the Pacific Research Institute, a right-wing think tank. (From 2000 through 2002, PRI received $450,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation and $150,000 from the John M. Olin Foundation, both prominent funders of ultraconservative causes.) ILE's crimes, listed on PRI's website, included popularizing unions in high schools and adult schools and doing research that supported campaigns to raise the minimum wage and pass "living wage" ordinances. The PRI called all this evidence of ILE's "anti-capitalism" that "strikes at the heart of a basic economic freedom in America--the right of employers and employees to freely negotiate compensation." The not-so-subtle implication was that workers should negotiate as individuals, not in unions.

In August the PRI's agenda became even clearer. In an Orange County Register op-ed, PRI staffers Andrew Gloger and Lawrence McQuillan suggested ominously that "a Davis defeat could signal an end to the ILE. But would that be such a bad thing?" The Register, voice of the most extreme of the state's Republicans, editorialized, "Here's a program that ought to go, even if the state weren't submerged in red ink."

Finally, the recall forces (mobilized by the website www.recallgraydavis.com) sent out an e-mail appeal on August 17, accusing the ILE of organizing anti-recall workshops "where recall supporters are beaten." In actual fact, UCLA's Downtown Labor Center had been asked by building trades unions to allow use of one of its rooms for a meeting to discuss anti-recall strategy. The center agreed, but the meeting was later moved to another site, and no labor center staff even went to it. The only beating was a sidewalk scuffle in Sacramento, where pro-recallers picketed an anti-recall event that had no connection to the labor center. Nevertheless, recall organizers linked the labor center to the incident. Their site asked readers to send e-mail messages to ILE director Ruth Milkman (a UCLA professor); Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center; and even Richard Atkinson, then president of the University of California.

One e-mail response asked "Are you completely a criminal?????" "The nation is awakening to you liberal (communist) elitists...why don't u move to cuba," warned another. Meanwhile, ABC lobbyist Matt Tennis, in Sacramento's Capitol Morning Report, asked innocently, "Why are California taxpayers paying for a program that trains union officials how to defeat the recall campaign against Gray Davis?"

The attack on the ILE could close the doors of one of the best-funded labor studies programs in the country. Three years ago, the Institute for Labor and Employment was created in cooperation with the California Labor Federation and pro-labor legislators. By winning a permanent multimillion-dollar yearly appropriation, this new umbrella institution was able to begin expanding the decades-old programs at Berkeley and Los Angeles to eight of the system's nine campuses.

The ILE's creation came on the heels of a change in direction in the old programs. In the mid-1990s a new set of academics and staff took charge in Berkeley and Los Angeles, with a much more dynamic vision of the ILE's relationship with workers and unions. The Labor Center in Los Angeles became an institution in which students, academics and union organizers studied the increasing role of immigrants in the Los Angeles work force. The Center for Labor Research and Education in Berkeley gave a home to labor activists who formed the Labor Immigrant Organizing Network, and then wrote the resolution that changed the position of the AFL-CIO itself on immigration.

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