TEAM

Seth Harris

Seth D. Harris is a Distinguished Professor of Practice at Northeastern University and Affiliated Faculty and a Senior Fellow at the Burnes Center for Social Change (and its partner project The GovLab) where he runs the Initiative on Labor and Economic Justice. Prior to joining Northeastern University, Professor Harris was the Deputy Assistant to the President for Labor and the Economy and Deputy Director of the Biden White House’s National Economic Council. Building on almost seven years of service in the Labor Department during an earlier administration, Professor Harris was Acting U.S. Secretary of Labor (and a member of President Obama’s Cabinet) and Deputy U.S. Secretary of Labor from 2009 to 2014. Between the Obama and Biden Administrations, he was an attorney in Washington, D.C., a Visiting Professor at Cornell University’s Institute for Public Affairs and School of Industrial & Labor Relations, and one of the nation’s most sought-after analysts, speakers, and commentators on work, workers, workplaces, the economy and labor market issues, government leadership, and government performance.

Alexandra Anderson

Alexandra Anderson is an undergraduate student in Northeastern’s College of Arts, Media and Design pursuing a B.A. in Journalism. She is a Communications Intern at the Burnes Center for Social Change, specifically contributing to Power at Work — a blog promoting labor and economic empowerment.

Anirudh Dinesh

Anirudh Dinesh is a research fellow at the Burnes Center and conducts research and training on governance innovation. He is a member of the InnovateUS project, our innovation skills training for public sector employees. He is also a member of the team designing and piloting experiments for new models of public engagement, what the Burnes Center calls people-led innovation, to improve the legitimacy and effectiveness of policy making and solve urgent problems.

Dane Gambrell

Dane Gambrell is a Research Fellow at the Burnes Center for Social Change where he leads a series of projects related community engagement, collective intelligence, and AI for public impact. He is an editor and writer for Power At Work, an online publication which aims to put workers and worker power at the center of discourse in the United States. Dane's writing has been published by The Hill, New Jersey’s Future of Work Task Force, Apolitical, Rebooting Democracy, the American Geographical Society, and others. He is a summa cum laude graduate of New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering with a Bachelor of Science in Sustainable Urban Environments.

Saiph Savage

Saiph Savage is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences, where she directs the Northeastern Civic A.I. Lab. The impact of Dr. Savage's research has led to her being named one of the 35 innovators under 35 by the MIT Tech Review. Forbes Magazine also named her one of the 20 leaders in the field of AI in Mexico, and she was awarded large grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Dr. Savage enjoys recognition from UNESCO for having globally one of the most impactful AI research projects. Her work has also won paper awards at top scientific venues in human-computer interaction, including ACM CHI, CSCW, and the Web Conference. The growing public interest in Dr. Savage's research has garnered international press coverage from the BBC, New York Times, The Economist, Deutsche Welle, Vice, Wired, Forbes, and Fortune.

Anne Sedar

Anne Sedar is a second-year English major at Northeastern University. She loves going on walks with her dogs, aimlessly browsing bookstores, and all things science fiction and fantasy.

Nicole Rubin

Recent graduate from Northeastern University with a Bachelors of Science in Cultural Anthropology and Sociology. During my time at Northeastern, I spent time working to make anthropological works more accessible for general audiences with the Public Anthropology Lab. My interests lie in museum work, photography, traveling, digitization, and nonprofit work.

Asia Simms

Asia Simms is an undergraduate student in Northeastern’s College of Social Sciences and Humanities pursuing a B.A. in Environmental Studies and Sociology. She is a Communications Intern at the Burnes Center for Social Change, specifically contributing to Power at Work— the blog promoting labor and economic empowerment.

Staff

Kimberly Lucas

Kim is an academic-practitioner who is committed to community-driven civic research, innovation in city-university collaborations, and leveraging our collective expertise for the social good. Kim previously served as Interim Executive Director at Metrolab Network and Director of Civic Research for the City of Boston. Kim’s research focuses on early childhood policy and the child care market, and their practical experience includes over a decade of innovation in community-engaged research.

Tom Walsh

Tom Walsh is an undergraduate student in Northeastern’s College of Social Sciences and Humanities pursuing a B.S. in Political Science and Business Administration. He works as the Social Media Manager and keeps the blog's pages updated with the latest content and events.

Ingrid Berg

Bonnie McGilpin

Bonnie McGilpin is the Director of Communications at the Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University, where she supports Power at Work. Most recently, she served as the Director of Communications at the Boston Planning & Development Agency where she led the agency’s communications through a rebranding, a historic building boom, multiple mayoral transitions, and the internal and external transition to a virtual workplace and organization due to the COVID-19 pandemic. She has served as press secretary for former Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh and Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley’s gubernatorial campaign, and as a deputy press secretary and speechwriter for Massachusetts Governor Deval L. Patrick. Bonnie is a graduate of Northeastern University.

Olivia Leon

Olivia Leon is a third year undergraduate student at Northeastern’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences pursuing a B.A. in English and Communications. In her time at Northeastern, Olivia has published work in several publications such as Tastemakers Music Magazine and The Avenue. And outside of Northeastern, she continues her love for the arts from working with various organizations that provide resources for artists to developing her own music-focused publication Quiet Down Magazine.

Michael Felsen

Michael Felsen is an attorney, worker protection advocate, and global labor rights activist. He is the former Regional Solicitor (top lawyer) for the U.S. Department of Labor in the New England region. He his juris doctor from Northeastern University School of Law.

Michael F. Lovenheim

Michael Lovenheim is a senior fellow (adjunct) at the Hoover Institution and a professor of economics, public policy, and industrial and labor relations at Cornell University. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research in the Economics of Education and Public Economics working groups as well as a CESifo Network Fellow in Economics of Education. He earned a BA in economics from Amherst College in 2000 and a PhD in economics from the University of Michigan in 2007, after which he spent two years as a Searle Freedom Trust Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

Samuel Dodini

I am an applied labor and public economist with broad interests. My current work in labor examines the effects of occupational licensing and monopsony power. I also have various work on the interactions between labor unions and firms, workers, and the public transfer system as well as work on how firms invest in their workers’ human capital. I also have work incorporating insights from behavioral economics into labor supply decisions and firm-worker interactions. My other work in public economics focuses on the effects of SNAP work requirements on household finance and the effects of place-based development and housing policies. Before starting at NHH, I received my PhD from Cornell University.

Alexander Willén

I am a labor economist primarily studying topics on labor market power and institutions, the public transfer system, human capital development and education.

Xóchitl Bada

Xóchitl Bada is an Associate Professor in the Latin American and Latino Studies Program of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Peasant Studies, Forced Migration Review, Population, Space, and Place, Latino Studies, and Labor Studies Journal. She is the author of Mexican Hometown Associations in Chicagoacán: From Local to Transnational Civic Engagement (Rutgers University Press, 2014) and coauthor with Shannon Gleeson of Scaling Migrant Worker Rights (University of California Press, 2023). Her areas of specialization include migrant access to political and social rights, migrant organizing strategies, violence and displacement, and transnational labor advocacy mobilization in Mexico and the United States. She is co-editor of the books New Migration Patterns in the Americas. Challenges for the 21st Century (Palgrave, 2018), Accountability across Borders: Migrant Rights in North America (The University of Texas Press, 2019), the Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Latin America, and The Routledge History of Modern Latin American Migration.

Shannon Gleeson

Shannon Gleeson is the Edmund Ezra Day Professor at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and holds a joint appointment with the Brooks School of Public Policy. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography from the University of California, Berkeley and was previously on the faculty of the Latin American & Latino Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her books include Building Citizenship

José Calderón

Jose Guillermo Zapata Calderon is an Emeritus Professor in Sociology and Chicano Studies at Pitzer College and President of the Latino and Latina Roundtable of the Pomona Valley and San Gabriel Valley.

Victor Narro

A nationally known expert on immigrant rights and low-wage workers, Victor Narro has been involved with immigrant rights and labor issues for almost 40 years. He is currently a Project Director for the UCLA Labor Center and Core Faculty for the UCLA Department of Labor Studies, where he teaches classes that focus on immigrant rights, low-wage workers, and the labor movement. Victor is also Core Faculty for the Public Interest Law Program at UCLA School for Law.

Emily Spatz

Emily Spatz is an undergraduate student at Northeastern’s College of Arts, Media and Design pursuing a combined major in journalism and political science. She is the story and stylebook editor for the Power at Work blog — a blog promoting labor and economic empowerment. Outside of the blog, she is the deputy campus editor for the school’s independent newspaper, The Huntington News, and enjoys reporting on politics and social justice.

SEIU-United Health Workers West

Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW) is a healthcare justice union of more than 100,000 healthcare workers, patients, and healthcare consumers united to ensure affordable, accessible, high-quality care for all Californians, provided by valued and respected healthcare workers.

Jiaqi Zhang

I’m a fourth year Ph.D. student in MIT EECS, advised by Caroline Uhler. My research focuses on establishing statistical and algorithmic foundations for decision-making within systems created by underlying causal rules. In particular, I develop tools to understand causal relationships using data, extrapolate to predict the effects of unseen interventions, and select informative interventions for experimental design. Motivated by problems in cell biology, these tools allow us to learn from and better design large-scale interventional experiments (e.g., using genetic or chemical perturbations).

Michelle Fujii

Originally from Japan, Fujii grew up concerned about many global issues. At Antioch College, she pursued her interests by working for a criminal defense and civil rights attorney, assisting the Research Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition at Nagasaki University, and learning about urban reforestation in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She directed her focus to the labor movement while working at a plaintiff-side employment law firm where she received a crash course in employment law and context for her family’s experiences of workplace discrimination and wage theft. This job deepened her understanding of the prevalence of workplace injustices and the various forms of worker exploitation. As a student at Northeastern Law, Fujii has learned more about worker organizing and unions through her classes and extracurricular activities. Her first co-op was at the New York City Commission on Human Rights. She hopes to use her law degree to further the interests of people over profit.

Michelle Valentin Nieves

Michelle Valentin Nieves serves as the Vice President of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), as the only female Founding officer of a new independent union and advocacy organization that represents 8 thousand Amazon workers who voted for the first-ever union representing Amazon workers in the U.S at a warehouse on Staten Island called JFK 8. to support workers who are raising standards in their workplaces.

Jordan Barab

Jordan Barab served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor at OSHA from 2009 to 2017. Before that he worked for the House Education and Labor Committee, the Chemical Safety Board, the AFL-CIO, OSHA and AFSCME. He currently produces Confined Space, a newsletter of workplace safety and labor issues.

Alexa Coultoff

Alexa Coultoff is a metro co-op at the Globe who also frequents the Rhode Island bureau. She studies journalism and criminal justice at Northeastern University, where she works as the projects editor for Northeastern’s student-run paper, The Huntington News.

Phil Cohen

Phil Cohen earned his nickname by being one of the most effective labor organizers ever in a region that has never been kind to unions. But Cohen is more than just an organizer: He is also a songwriter, an accomplished wildlife photographer, and now, the author of a powerful memoir that offers an uncommonly up close and personal look at the struggles of organized labor in the South.

Joseph Brant

Joseph Brant is an undergrauate student in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities pursuing a B.A. in Political Science and Economics. He was a Communications Intern at the Burnes Center for Social Change, specifically contributing to Power at Work - the blog promoting labor and economic empowerment. He also lead the curation of The Weekly Download, which features a varied range of journalism, research, and analysis promoting and discussing worker power.

Victoria Acosta

Andrew Strom

Andrew Strom is an Associate General Counsel of Service Employees International Union, Local 32BJ in New York, NY.

Marc Rodrigues

Marc Rodrigues is a Research Analyst at Center for Popular Democracy.

Francisco Diez

Francisco Diez is an organizer from Philadelphia and the Worker Justice Policy Advocate at The Center for Popular Democracy.

Robert Bruno

Robert Bruno is Director of the Labor Studies Program and a Professor of Labor and Employment, as well as the director of the Project for Middle Class Renewal in the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois, Urban-Champaign. In addition to publishing numerous scholarly articles on a diverse range of labor relations subjects, Professor Bruno has also co-authored numerous research reports on labor unions, workplace practices and labor and employment policy topics.

Katherine Gallagher Robbins

Dr. Katherine Gallagher Robbins is a Senior Fellow at the National Partnership for Women & Families, where she works to build the Partnership’s research capacity to tell a more holistic story of how the policies the National Partnership has pushed for over the last five decades support women with a focus on women of color, disabled women, LGBTQIA+ women, and women with other marginalized identities. She works alongside the organization’s health justice team in its call for access to abortion and an improved healthcare system focused on equity in underserved communities; and she contributes to the economic justice team’s goal of passing a national paid family and medical leave program and winning other policies supporting women at work.

Anwesha Majumder

Anwesha Majumder is the first Economist at the National Partnership for Women & Families, where she will play a central role in the National Partnership’s development of quantitative economic research to advance the organization’s research and policy agendas. Prior to joining the National Partnership, Anwesha pursued health equity and health care quality improvement at the Maryland Health Services Cost Review Commission and the US News & World Report Best Hospitals team, as well as economic justice for women of color at TIME’S UP. She has also performed field epidemiology for vaccine-preventable diseases and monitored public health priorities at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization.

Chuck Cascio

Chuck Cascio is an award-winning journalist, educator, short-story writer, and business leader. The author of three nonfiction books, Chuck has had hundreds of news stories, feature articles, and opinion pieces published in a wide-range newspapers, magazines, and journals. Among Chuck's awards are a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, a Suburban Newspapers of America Award for Column Writing, a Distinguished Teacher Award in the Presidential Scholars Program, a Rothman Institute Award for Entrepreneurial Leadership, and other honors and citations for journalism, creative writing, teaching, and business.

Daniel Perez

Daniel Perez (he/him) joined the Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN) team at EPI as State Economic Analyst in 2022. He provides technical assistance to the state-level policy research and advocacy organizations that make up EARN and conducts research into the historical causes of poverty and inequality. Perez is particularly interested in the role of unions and collective bargaining as means for working people to build economic and political power.

Amie Stager

Amie Stager is the Associate Editor for Workday Magazine.

Leta E. Miller

Musicologist Leta Miller specializes in 20th-century music in the United States. Her earlier publications dealt with the French renaissance, music and science in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the music of C.P.E. Bach. In 2011 UC Press published her book Music and Politics in San Francisco: From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War, complementing her numerous articles and books on avant-garde composers of the 20th century, such as Lou Harrison, John Cage, and Henry Cowell. Subsequently, she published a biography of composer Aaron Jay Kernis with the University of Illinois Press, and is currently working on a biography of composer Chen Yi. Among the courses she teaches at UCSC are: music history from the middle ages through the baroque, a history of music theory from the Greeks through Rameau, a history of the string quartet, and a cross-cultural seminar on East Asian influences on European and American composers.

Stuart Eimer

My research primarily focuses on organized labor in America. This work has explored the history and function of AFL-CIO central labor councils. This historical work ultimately led to research on contemporary labor councils and a co-edited book that has become the authoritative text on the subject. It also resulted in a Political Power and Social Theory article on the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the American Labor Party, and Third Party Politics in the United States. It also resulted in an article on the Milwaukee County Labor Council, which is one of the 50 most-cited articles in the Labor Studies Journal. My most recent work explores innovative organizing strategies being employed by the Service Employees International Unions (SEIU).

Benjamin Sachs

Benjamin Sachs is the Kestnbaum Professor of Labor and Industry at Harvard Law School and a leading expert in the field of labor law and labor relations. He is also faculty director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy. Professor Sachs teaches courses in labor law, employment law, and law and social change, and his writing focuses on union organizing and unions in American politics.

Kevin Gallagher

I'm Kevin Gallagher, a journalism major at Northeastern University. I have a passion for learning about the stories of those from every corner of the globe, and then projecting and amplifying them through the various media channels that consumers regularly check. I possess a creative vision and an unyielding work ethic that allows me to transform my ideas into compelling media, whether through articles, blog posts, social media campaigns, presentations, newsletters or any other communication mediums. I am willing and able to learn about how ideas are best communicated and adapt to the individualized needs of various organizations to create the best media possible. Let's connect and collaborate to bring powerful narratives to life.

Julian Lutz

Julian Lutz is the Princeton GradFUTURES Fellow with the Initiative on the Future of Work and the Innovation Economy in the Center on Education and Labor at New America. He is a joint-degree Master in Public Affairs candidate at the Princeton University School of Public and International Affairs and a Juris Doctor candidate at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. As a Toll Public Interest Scholar and a Peggy Browning Fellow, his legal work focuses on the nexus of union-side labor law, affordable housing, community economic development, and state and local governance. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of Volume 9 of the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Public Affairs. He received a B.A. in Political Science from Saint Joseph's University.

Eric Fure-Slocum

Over the past several years, Eric Fure‐Slocum, Assistant Professor of History, has used academic civic engagement pedagogy to enhance learning in at least five different courses and has assumed leadership in supporting other faculty interested in this approach to teaching. Eric thoughtfully developed and integrated a variety of civic engagement projects into American Conversations, a four‐course sequence on ideas that have shaped United States history and culture.

Claire Goldstene

Claire Goldstene has taught United States history at the University of Maryland, the University of North Florida, and American University. She is the author of The Struggle for America's Promise: Equal Opportunity at the Dawn of Corporate Capital (2014).

Daniel J. Galvin

Daniel J. Galvin (Ph.D., Yale University) is a Professor of Political Science and a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. He is the author of Presidential Party Building: Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush (Princeton University Press), co-editor of Rethinking Political Institutions: the Art of the State (NYU Press), and has published numerous journal articles and book chapters.

Chris Bohner

Research-tivist with stops @ IBT, UNITE HERE, Culinary 226, AFL-CIO, worker centers, and 50/50 Climate Project.

Molly Kinder

Molly Kinder is a nationally recognized expert in labor policy, economic inequality, low-wage work, and the present and future of work. Her research at Brookings examines the impact of generative AI on work and workers.

Les Leopold

After graduating from Oberlin College and Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs (MPA 1975), Les co-founded the Labor Institute (1976), a non-profit organization that designs research and educational programs on occupational safety and health, the environment and economics for unions, worker centers and community organizations. In addition to his current book, Runaway Inequality: An Activist’s Guide to Economic Justice (Labor Institute Press, 2015), he is the author of How to Make a Million Dollars an Hour: Why Financial Elites get away with siphoning off America’s Wealth (John Wiley and Sons, 2013); The Looting of America: How Wall Street’s Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It, (Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009); The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi, (Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2006). The Mazzocchi story won the Independent Publisher Award for best biography. He is currently helping to build a national economic educational train-the-trainer program with unions and community groups (all proceeds from his current book go back into this campaign). He is currently doing research on how economic runaway inequality is exacerbating the effects of Covid-19 on essential workers and police brutality.

Lynn Rhinehart

Lynn Rhinehart is a senior fellow at EPI, where she works on labor and employment policy with a focus on unions and collective bargaining. Rhinehart returns to EPI after serving in the Biden administration as a senior counselor to the Secretary of Labor and Acting Secretary of Labor, advising them on issues relating to unions, collective bargaining, and labor policy, including the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment (vice-chaired by the Secretary of Labor).

Margaret Poydock

Margaret Poydock joined EPI in 2016. As a senior policy analyst, she works on issues of unions, labor standards, and strikes. She also helps manage EPI’s legislative and policy initiatives to build a more just economy. Previously, Poydock was EPI’s communications assistant where she provided support for the media relations, publications, and web departments.

Dominic D. Wells

Dominic D. Wells is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Fire Administration (FIAD) program at Bowling Green State University. He teaches courses in political science, public administration, and fire administration. His primary research area is labor politics and policy. Dr. Wells is the author of From Collective Bargaining to Collective Begging: How Public Employees Win and Lose the Right to Bargain (Temple University Press). His work has been published in Risk, Hazards, & Crisis in Public Policy, the Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy, the Journal of Political Science Education, and the Journal of Public and Nonprofit Affairs.

Maurizio Guerrero

Maurizio Guerrero is an award-winning journalist who for 10 years was the bureau chief in New York City and the United Nations of the largest news-wire service in Latin America, the Mexican-based Notimex. He now covers immigration, social justice movements and multilateral negotiations for several media outlets in the United States, Europe and Mexico. A graduate journalist of the Escuela de Periodismo Carlos Septién in Mexico City, he holds an M.A. in Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies from the City University of New York (CUNY).

Chandra Childers

Chandra Childers is a senior policy and economic analyst with the Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN) at EPI. Her work is primarily focused on supporting EARN’s state and local policy research and advocacy network in the Southern United States. Childers is committed to economic justice and ensuring that all workers have a voice in their workplaces and that they experience real economic security independent of race, sex, or economic status. Using an intersectional lens, her research focuses on employment, earnings, job quality, and worker power.

Diana Reddy

Diana Reddy joined UC Berkeley School of Law as an Assistant Professor in 2023. She teaches Contracts, courses in labor and employment, as well as seminars on organized labor and civil rights, law and political economy, and social movement advocacy. Diana’s research focuses on the regulation of work as a site where critical choices are made about the relationship between American economic commitments and its democratic ideals. Her recent scholarship has been published in the Yale Law Journal, the Yale Law Journal Forum, and the Emory Law Journal , among others. Some of her shorter pieces are available on the Law and Political Economy blog, examples include “Labor Bargaining and the Common Good” and “Anti-CRT and a ‘Free Market’ in Racial Education.”

David A. Gray

I am a Teaching Associate Professor in the American Studies Program and the Department of History at Oklahoma State University. My research explores two areas of cultural history.

Eva Batlle

Eva Batlle is a high school student based in Boulder, Colorado who worked as a summer intern at Power At Work. She worked on behind-the-scenes research for Power At Work. She also helped curate sources for the Weekly Download. When she’s not working, she enjoys playing volleyball, participating on the mock trial team, and watching classic films.

Phyllis Michael Wong

Phyllis Michael Wong joined her husband at Northern Michigan University when he was president from 2004 to 2012. In Marquette, on the shores of Lake Superior, she learned about the "Gossard Girls," women of all ages who worked for H. W. Gossard Company in the Upper Peninsula (UP). Teenage girls, young single women, married mothers, and widows sewed apparel, mostly undergarments, and processed paperwork from 1920 until both Michigan factories closed in 1976. Wong's interest started with a 2007 club project to celebrate "women who made a difference." She researched Geraldine Gordon Defant, an organizer with the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) who was at Gossard in the 1940s.

Alvin Velazquez

Alvin Velazquez is a Visiting Associate Professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law.

Zeno Minotti

Zeno Minotti is an undergraduate student in Northeastern University's College of Arts, Media, & Design. He is pursuing a degree in Communication Studies and Psychology with a minor in Sociology. He is the Worker Power and Labor Communications Specialist with the Burnes Center for Social Change, specifically contributing to the Power at Work. Zeno is also a statistician for Harvard Athletics, and a broadcaster for WRBB, Northeastern's student radio.

Michael McCulloch

Michael McCulloch is an architect and historian whose research engages housing, labor, industrialization, and landscape. He is Associate Professor and Chair of the Master of Architecture Program at Kendall College of Art and Design of Ferris State University. Michael holds a Ph.D. in Architecture from the University of Michigan and a M.S. in Urban Design from Columbia University. He has previously taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Detroit Mercy, and Drury University.

Alexandra Martinez

Alexandra Martinez is a Cuban-American writer who reports on worker’s rights, immigration, and art-washing. Her reporting on Miami’s housing crisis was an Esserman Knight Award finalist. She is a Columbia University graduate and is directing a documentary in Miami, where she lives with her daughter.

Angelique Casem

Angelique is a rising fourth year student at Northeastern University. She is majoring in Business Administration, with a concentration in Marketing. She has previously worked at The Boys and Girls Club of America in Philadelphia on their Social Media Marketing Team, and looks forward to continuing utilizing the learned skills and tools at the Burnes Center for Social Change. Aside from academic and work-related endeavors, she loves exercising, thrifting, journaling, and photography.

Joanna Wuest

Joanna Wuest is an incoming Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University where she writes and teaches on LGBTQ rights, health, and political economy. Previously, she held positions at Princeton University and Mount Holyoke College, and received a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019.

Michael Arria

Michael Arria is the US correspondent for Mondoweiss and the author of Medium Blue: The Politics of MSNBC.

David Madland

David Madland is a senior fellow and the senior adviser to the American Worker Project at American Progress. He has been called “one of the nation’s wisest” labor scholars by Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. The president of the Service Employees International Union, Mary Kay Henry, says Madland’s work “is creating a North Star for how we increase workers’ power in the economy and democracy.”

Sachin Shiva

Sachin Shiva is a research assistant for the Inclusive Economy team at American Progress. Previously, he served as an investment analyst for Cambridge Associates, working on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and impact investing opportunities. He studied government, public policy, and human-centered design at Dartmouth College. While there, Shiva completed internships at Philabundance and the National Center for Law and Economic Justice. Outside of work, he enjoys cooking different cuisines and outdoor recreation in northern Virginia.

Eric Blanc

Author of the books Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics (Verso 2019) and Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire, 1882-1917 (Brill 2021), Eric Blanc is an assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, researching new workplace organizing, strikes, digital labor activism, and working-class politics.

Victoria Acosta

Wes McEnany

Wes McEnany is a second-year Executive MPA candidate at Cornell University's Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy. He spent 12 years as a union organizer with the Service Employees International Union and the Communication Workers of America. He's currently the Deputy Labor Policy Director of the United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions under Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

Mike Matejka

Mike Matejka is a historian, writer, and community organizer with a passion for Illinois labor history and years of experience presenting to a wide range of audiences.

Ben Carroll

Ben Carroll lives in Durham, North Carolina and is the organizing coordinator for the Southern Workers Assembly.

Claudia Strauss

Claudia Strauss is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Pitzer College. She is the author of What Work Means, Making Sense of Public Opinion and coauthor of A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning.

Isabela Escalona

Isabela is the Senior Associate Editor for Workday Magazine.

Anna Sargent

Anna Sargent is an undergraduate student in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities. She is pursuing a degree in Political Science and International Affairs with a concentration in Law and Legal Studies. She works with the Burnes Center communications team and Power at Work digital communications assets to promote the blog and keep its social media accounts updated with the latest content and events.

Tongyu Wu

Associate Professor of Sociology (Tenure-Track) at Zhejiang University. Research fields include labor, organizations, information technology, migration, gender, and China studies.

Julia Conley

Julia began her journalism career on PBS's weekly news analysis show Bill Moyers Journal, first as a production assistant and eventually producing interview segments for veteran journalist Bill Moyers. She also worked for over two years as a producer on Al Jazeera America's daily news broadcasts, and later on documentary films focusing on issues including the roots of the American opioid crisis and the history of white supremacy in the U.S. She has written for the quarterly women's magazine A Women's Thing, and joined the Common Dreams staff in 2017.

Luis Feliz Leon

Luis Feliz Leon is an associate editor and organizer at Labor Notes.

Kressent Pottenger

Kressent Pottenger holds an master’s degree in labor studies from The Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies at City University of New York and was awarded the SEIU 925 Research Fellowship by Wayne State University in 2012. She is currently working on a research project about 925 and women organizing in the workplace.

Joseph van der Naald

I am a PhD candidate in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. My research falls into the domains of economic, labor, and political sociology. In addition to my dissertation research, I am also a researcher at the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College, a research assistant at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, and a research analyst at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. My research with the National Center has been featured in the Washington Post and the New York Times. I also serve as the newsletter editor for the Labor and Labor Movements section of the American Sociological Association.

Melissa Lyon

Melissa (Mimi) is an assistant professor of public policy at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the University at Albany, SUNY. Mimi studies the political economy of education, focusing on inequality, governance, and teacher politics and policy. She is a quantitative social scientist who works at the intersection of education policy, political science, and labor economics. Her aim with this work is to contribute new knowledge that helps to inform how we can make educational systems more equitable for students and teachers. Her current projects center around three interrelated components of the political economy of education: teacher unionization, teacher labor markets, and state-level education governance.

Magally A. Miranda Alcázar

Magally A. Miranda Alcázar is a Chau Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Pomona College, and an activist working at the intersection of gender, race, labor and technological disruption.

Surina Venkat

Surina Venkat is a city news staff writer at the Columbia Daily Spectator. Follow her on X at @surinavenkat.

Dylan Hatch

Dylan Hatch is a student, organizer, and writer based in central Massachusetts. Dylan is a graduate student at the Cornell University School of Industrial & Labor Relations, where he studies the intersection of labor unions and worker cooperatives. Dylan is also an intern at the Wellspring Labor/Co-op Committee in Springfield, MA, and a member of the Communications Task Force of the USFWC's Union Co-op Council.

Monique Morrissey

Monique Morrissey joined the Economic Policy Institute in 2006. Her areas of interest include Social Security, pensions and other employee benefits, household savings, tax expenditures, older workers, public employees, unions, and collective bargaining, Medicare, institutional investors, corporate governance, executive compensation, financial markets, and the Federal Reserve. She is active in coalition efforts to reform our private retirement system to ensure an adequate, secure, and affordable retirement for all workers. She is a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance. Prior to joining EPI, Morrissey worked at the AFL-CIO Office of Investment and the Financial Markets Center.

Jennifer Sherer

Jennifer Sherer (she/her) is Acting Deputy Director of EARN. Her work focuses on expanding the ability of working people to achieve racial, gender, and economic justice through organizing, collective bargaining, and state and local policy change. She leads the Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN) Worker Power Project, supporting a growing cohort of state and local groups working with labor and grassroots partners to advance state and local policies that expand worker rights and build worker power. Her publications include reports and articles on labor unions, public-sector collective bargaining, “right-to-work” laws, child labor, worker misclassification, wage theft, women’s labor education, labor oral history, and working-class voters, and her work has been cited by numerous local and national media outlets including The Washington Post, The New Yorker, NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, and NPR.

Beth Simone Noveck

Beth Simone Noveck is a professor at Northeastern University, where she directs the Burnes Center for Social Change and its partner project, The Governance Lab (The GovLab). She is faculty at the Institute for Experiential AI, School of Law, and in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, the College of Arts, Design, and Media, the College of Engineering, and affiliated faculty at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences.

Alí R. Bustamente

Alí R. Bustamante is the director of the worker power and economic security program at the Roosevelt Institute, where he focuses on how public policy can structure markets around both economic and social value and empower Americans through the provision of public goods and stronger labor protections. Prior to joining Roosevelt, he served as chief economist at the Louisiana Workforce Commission, senior research associate at the Southern Economic Advancement Project, and as faculty at Florida International University, the University of New Orleans, and Loyola University New Orleans. Bustamante earned a BA and PhD from the University of Miami, where he specialized in political economy.

Evan Tao

Evan Tao is a rising sophomore from Cambridge, Massachusetts, concentrating in International and Public Affairs at Brown University. At Brown, he is a staff writer for the non-partisan student-run publication Brown Political Review, an admissions tour guide, and a proud member of Brown Debating Union. In his free time, he loves cooking Chinese food and playing Irish folk music. He is passionate about immigrant rights and hopes to be an immigration attorney or state policymaker in the future.

Lillian Finley

Lillian Finley is a student at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication studying journalism and mass communications with a minor in design studies.

Aurelia Glass

Julia Aurelia Glass is a policy analyst for the Inclusive Economy team at American Progress with a focus on the American Worker Project. Glass formerly worked as a mechanical engineer before her experiences as a trans woman inspired her to transition into public policy and pursue a master’s in international economics and finance at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, where she completed a capstone project predicting improved corporate performance through LGBTQ-friendly human resource policies. She studied engineering mechanics and economics at Johns Hopkins University.

Lesley Lavery

Lesley Lavery is a Professor of Political Science at Macalester College. Her interests include American politics, political behavior, civic engagement and public policy. Her scholarship focuses specifically on the ways in which policy may influence political engagement and participation. Using No Child Left Behind as a lens, she recently examined parents’ views on schools, education policy and government, adding to a growing body research that suggest that public policies shape citizens beliefs about their place in and value to society. Her recent work appears in Politics and Policy, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, and the Economics of Education Review.

Sarah Lazare

Sarah Lazare is the editor of Workday Magazine and a contributing editor for In These Times. She tweets at @sarahlazare.

Mia Nguyen

Alec Rhodes

Alec Rhodes (he/him) is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research focuses on the causes and consequences of economic inequality and financial insecurity for individuals, families, and communities. Much of his work brings a political economy, demographic, and/or spatial lens to questions related to inequality, poverty, and mobility. Rhodes is especially interested in how inequalities accumulate over the life course and across different market contexts, as well as the potential for social institutions and social policies to ameliorate inequalities.

Keith B. Brown

Keith Brower Brown started in April as the first Labor-Climate Organizer at Labor Notes, the long-running media and organizing network for rank-and-file activists. The new role will focus on reporting and supporting workplace fights with bosses in growing green transitions, especially in the construction, manufacturing, and energy sectors. Keith’s work will build on his decade of research on energy labor in the US and Brazil, including a recent dissertation at UC Berkeley Geography, and organizing as a UAW steward to build the Unite All Workers for Democracy reform caucus.

Joe DeManuelle-Hall