Thursday, February 2nd, 2023

Ruth Milkman is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and History at the CUNY Graduate Center and at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, where she chairs the Labor Studies Department. Her most recent books are Immigration Matters and Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat.

Unions remain a voice for the voiceless, especially given that the playing field has been very strongly tilted in favor of employers for some time. Employers are very aggressively anti-union, even in settings where union is long established like at UPS. The current wave of workers trying to unionize are not the usual suspects of historically unionized workers. They're mostly college educated, instead of blue collar workers, and they seek to address the gap between their labor market expectations and the actual job quality and pay that is available to them.