After Marikana: The State, the ANC, and the Future of the Labor Movement in South Africa

The colloquium will be devoted to the crises and conflicts that have wracked the labor movement in South Africa in recent years and the implications of these struggles for the future of South African politics. In 2012, police from the African National Congress (ANC) government gunned down 44 striking platinum workers in what has come […]

The Hand That Feeds

At a popular bakery café, residents of New York’s Upper East Side get bagels and coffee served with a smile 24 hours a day. But behind the scenes, undocumented immigrant workers face sub-legal wages, dangerous machinery, and abusive managers who will fire them for calling in sick. Mild-mannered sandwich maker Mahoma López has never been […]

Precarious Lives: Gendered Engagement with Neoliberal Development and the Contemporary Academy – CANCELED

This talk is an engagement with the conditions of precarity that characterize the current moment. Navarro links her ethnographic research on offshore banking in the US-owned Virgin Islands to scholarship detailing the troubling neoliberal turn made by the American academy, this lecture is an engagement with neoliberalism and its effects. Building on black feminist scholarship, […]

Bonded for Flexibility: Migrant Workers in Qatar’s Construction Industry anbd Beyond

Qatar, the host of the 2022 World Cup, has been called out for its labor practices. Human rights and labor organizations have condemned the treatment of migrant workers and have called the small gulf nation a modern slave state. While Qatar has been singled out for its labor practices, forced labor arrangements, whether formally sanctioned […]

2015-16 Benjamin Aaron Labor Law Lecture

Please join us for an informative evening as our special guest Dr. David Weil, Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division at the Department of Labor, discusses his priorities and initiatives at the Hour and Wage Division, including the Wage and Hour Division’s strategic enforcement and opportunities for stakeholder engagement with the agency to raise […]

Apple, Foxconn and China’s New Working Class: Political Economy of Global Production

This is a worker-centered analysis of Apple, the world’s most profitable corporation, and its primary supplier, with more than one million workers in China alone, the world’s largest industrial employer, Foxconn. Apple's commercial triumph rests not only on its design and marketing supremacy but on the reversal of its original business model from producing computers […]

Occupiers and Dreamers: Insiders and Outsiders in a New Political Generation

Young adults have long been overrepresented among political activists, and their generationally specific experiences and worldviews often shape social movement agendas. Although these phenomena have received limited scholarly attention in recent years, they are highly salient features of the new cycle of protest that has emerged in the 21st century United States. This talk analyzes […]

Uber Drivers: Independent Contractors, Employees, or Something Else?

Are Uber Drivers and others who provide service in the On-Demand economy entitled to the employment rights, benefits, and protections that other employees enjoy? Or, are the “gig workers” actually independent contractors, entitled to no protection at all? If they are employees, they would get benefit of minimum wage and overtime laws, protection against discrimination, […]

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