 Hundreds of janitors marched through the streets of downtown Los Angeles today demanding higher wages and better working conditions. Los Angeles was not always a hub for organized labor. In fact, at one time it was known as the Citadel of the Open Shop. Well, I grew up in Los Angeles. We did not have a liberal city council. We often had right-wing city councils. The town was very anti-labor. According to the Service Employees' International Union, headway has been made in the downtown Los Angeles area. I helped build the collection at UCLA Library of the history and programs of the LA Alliance for New Economy, Lane. Unite here, Local 11. From the 1980s on, labor unions had to rebuild, and they rebuilt around the immigrant workforce, the new immigrant workforce, especially in the service industries and hotels and tourism, building service workers, public sector workers, teachers. And that is really what makes the LA labor movement so much a leader in the U.S. labor movement today. As I started getting older and I was thinking about retiring, I felt that it was important to preserve the history of how that transformation happened in Los Angeles. I thought this will be lost if we don't save these collections. The library holds a lot of great collections for labor history. You've got Unite here, Local 11 papers, the Justice for Janitors papers, LA Alliance for a New Economy. The UCLA Library is really a rich resource for studying labor history. Slowly, we started collecting, and Lane was mostly documents, videos, and remarkable photographs. So it seemed like the next step would be Unite here, Local 11. So it was suggested that we should do oral histories of the activists in Local 11, the housekeepers, the dishwashers, the cooks, how they got involved in the union and what it meant to them. The papers of Unite here, Local 11, of Justice for Janitors, of Lane, of Clue, of individual organizers, they show that political change, challenges to the status quo don't just happen naturally. The only way to ground ourselves and the president in some ways is to know where we've been, because we don't exactly know where we're going and what the future will hold. So these collections enrich the possible pasts that we can see, and that makes different futures possible as well.