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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
This research forum takes a broad look at emerging issues of immigrant integration, incarceration, and low-wage work. Six very different researchers from four UC campuses will present their cutting-edge research, looking at the destructive effects of many policies currently in place, but also at alternatives to move toward economic and social justice.
With good reason, scholars and policy makers have focused on the profound industry-wide transformations American banking and finance experienced over the last three decades, emphasizing deregulation, concentration within a handful of giant global banking corporations, their abandonment of the “real economy” for market-based banking grounded in securitization and derivative transactions, and the devastating effects these […]
While critical scholarship has made important contributions to the understandings of markets and difference, many of these approaches have focused on how dominant markets have actively depended upon, as well as excluded groups based on, hierarchies of raced, gendered, classed, sexualized, and national differences. That we better understand how capitalism depended on enslavement, how US […]
Drawing upon black feminist criticism and a diverse array of archival materials, Sarah Haley’s No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity illuminates black women’s experiences of imprisonment in the South to uncover how gendered regimes of incarceration were crucial to the making of Jim Crow modernity. No Mercy Here examines […]
Recent research has revealed that contrary to the expectations generated by globalization, there is no automatic correlation linking world trade expansion and multinational companies, product innovation, and more generally, economic progress (measured in terms of growth) with social progress. On the contrary, there is evidence showing that even when there has been a significant job […]
Today precarious work presents perhaps the greatest global challenge to worker well-being, and has become a major rallying point for worker mobilization around the world. This conference focuses on analyzing the growth of precarious employment and informal labor, its consequences for workers and their families, the challenges it poses to worker organizing and collective mobilization, […]
Delving beneath Southern California’s popular image as a sunny frontier of leisure and ease, this book tells the dynamic story of the life and labor of Los Angeles’s large working class. In a sweeping narrative that takes into account more than a century of labor history, John H. M. Laslett acknowledges the advantages Southern California’s […]
