Narro says.

Nathalie Contreras has been part of that transformation. After eleven years working as labor organizer, she is now a mother and just one semester from completing her degree at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles. She got her start first working for unions after taking classes at the UCLA Labor Center as an undergraduate. Then she did an externship with a day-labor workers center: IDEPSCA—Instituto de Educacion Popular del Sur de California. Today the institute operates six day-laborer hiring halls across the city, where workers can take classes in English, as well as in labor and immigration law. The model it helped pioneer, of community non-profits geared towards organizing workers and legal training, has spread throughout the country to become a regular feature of the philanthropic world.The Marguerite Casey Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the now-defunct Discount Foundation are just a few of the funds behind the proliferation of workers’ centers in American cities. And students like Contreras, often relayed through university programs, are their new cadre.

Victor Narro worked with IDEPSCA to set up the first day-laborer workers centers in Los Angeles in the 1990s. After Contreras became one of his students in the mid-2000s, she began organizing day laborers and screening employers to ensure that wages were paid and good working conditions maintained. Then she began working for Unite Here. The UCLA Labor Center “gave me a firm grounding on labor economics, and an appreciation of how the labor movement has shaped the history of this country,” she says. “It’s at the core