Skip to main content

Unionizing the Ivory Tower - A Special Book Event with the author, Al Davidoff

The Worker Institute is sponsoring a special book event that should be of interest to union leaders and activists, social justice organizers, labor studies students, and everyone wishing to promote worker rights. Unionizing the Ivory Tower chronicles how a thousand low-paid custodians, cooks, and gardeners succeeded in organizing a union at Cornell University.
book launch
Unionizing the Ivory Tower - A Special Book Event with the author, Al Davidoff

Make Your Shortlist Longer. An Actionable and Equitable Hiring Strategy.

eCornell Keynote — Progress toward gender equity in most industries — especially in leadership — continues to be disappointingly slow. While there are many blockers of progress, one particular hiring practice stands out: In informal hiring situations, managers will often devise a shortlist of potential hires. The informality of that shortlist — and the familiarity with candidates — reproduces implicit and systemic bias by its very informality. In short, hiring managers know people who look and think like them, and they are the people who typically get shortlisted and hired. Managers then end up missing out on the best talent available to them. New research by Professor Brian Lucas and a team at Cornell’s ILR School finds that when you make your shortlist longer to include more women, you reduce the risk of overlooking strong female candidates who may be better suited for the role than typical male shortlisters. Why deprive your organization of the best, most-qualified talent? Make your shortlist longer and you’ll not only make smarter hiring decisions, but you’ll also be helping to reduce systemic and implicit bias in your workplace. Minimal effort, maximal return.

Localist event image for Make Your Shortlist Longer. An Actionable and Equitable Hiring Strategy.
Make Your Shortlist Longer. An Actionable and Equitable Hiring Strategy.

Joint Labor & Public Economics Workshop: Guo Xu

Guo Xu, Berkeley Beyond the War: Public Service and the Transmission of Gender Norms This paper combines personnel records of the U.S. federal government with census data to study how shocks to the gender composition of an organization can persistently shift the gender norms of its workers. We exploit city-by-department variation in the sudden expansion of female clerical employment driven by America’s entrance into World War I, and find that daughters of civil servants exposed to female co-workers are more likely to work later in life, command higher income, and have fewer children. The effects are driven by exposed fathers and daughters in their teenage years at the time of exposure. We also show that cities exposed to a larger increase in female federal workers saw persistently higher female labor force participation in the public sector, as well as modest increases in private sector labor force participation. Collectively, the results are thus consistent with both the vertical and horizontal transmission of gender norms, and highlight how increasing gender representation within an organization can have broader labor market implications.

Localist event image for Joint Labor & Public Economics Workshop: Guo Xu
Joint Labor & Public Economics Workshop: Guo Xu

A Conversation with NLRB Board Member

Join us for a conversation with David Prouty, National Labor Relations Board member. This is an in-person event co-sponsored by Cornell's Student Assembly and is part of ILR's Union Days 2024. Free and open to the public. Reception with refreshments to follow.

Localist event image for A Conversation with NLRB Board Member
A Conversation with NLRB Board Member

Conference on Transnational Labor Rights in a Globalized Economy

Join us in Ithaca to discuss the challenges to workers’ power posed by global supply chains and trade agreements, and the tools devised to address them, including new international instruments and global movements. This conference brings together labor activists, organizers, legal experts, and scholars to discuss how workers may build their power in a contemporary climate of liberalized trade, increasing interconnectivity, and global supply chains. Hear about efforts to advance an ILO standard on decent work in global supply chains, and learn about real-world developments from labor organizers in the Global south. See our full list of speakers here. Conference Co-Organizers: Desirée LeClercq (Cornell University) and Hila Shamir (Tel Aviv University) Sponsors: American Society of International LawCornell ILR Global Labor InstituteCornell International Law JournalFrank W. Pierce Memorial FundCornell Law School Tel Aviv University Exchange InitiativeMario Einaudi Center for International Studies

Localist event image for Conference on Transnational Labor Rights in a Globalized Economy
Conference on Transnational Labor Rights in a Globalized Economy

The Left in China

Ralf Ruckus will present central arguments from the book The Left in China. A Political Cartography (Pluto Press, 2023): All over the world, progressive forces debate the nature of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). While some consider them to be socialist, others recognize the critical role of the current CCP government in facilitating capitalist exploitation and the suppression of social struggles. Often, little or no attention is given to leftwing oppositional movements and groups in the PRC. Since the founding of the PRC in 1949, changing class divisions have led to waves of social protests by workers, migrants, and women, which inspired several generations of leftwing opposition against CCP rule. The dialectic of social struggles and leftwing oppositional movements has shaped the history of the PRC, from the socialist build-up in the 1950s to the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, the democracy movements in the 1970s and 1980s, the resistance of the socialist working class against capitalist restructuring in the 1990s and 2000s, and the struggles of migrant workers and women since. This event is co-sponsored by the East Asia Program.

Localist event image for The Left in China
The Left in China

Conference on Transnational Labor Rights in a Globalized Economy

Join us in Ithaca to discuss the challenges to workers’ power posed by global supply chains and trade agreements, and the tools devised to address them, including new international instruments and global movements. This conference brings together labor activists, organizers, legal experts, and scholars to discuss how workers may build their power in a contemporary climate of liberalized trade, increasing interconnectivity, and global supply chains. Hear about efforts to advance an ILO standard on decent work in global supply chains, and learn about real-world developments from labor organizers in the Global south. See our full list of speakers here. Conference Co-Organizers: Desirée LeClercq (Cornell University) and Hila Shamir (Tel Aviv University) Sponsors: American Society of International LawCornell ILR Global Labor InstituteCornell International Law JournalFrank W. Pierce Memorial FundCornell Law School Tel Aviv University Exchange InitiativeMario Einaudi Center for International Studies

Localist event image for Conference on Transnational Labor Rights in a Globalized Economy
Conference on Transnational Labor Rights in a Globalized Economy

Conference on Transnational Labor Rights in a Globalized Economy

Join us in Ithaca to discuss the challenges to workers’ power posed by global supply chains and trade agreements, and the tools devised to address them, including new international instruments and global movements. This conference brings together labor activists, organizers, legal experts, and scholars to discuss how workers may build their power in a contemporary climate of liberalized trade, increasing interconnectivity, and global supply chains. Hear about efforts to advance an ILO standard on decent work in global supply chains, and learn about real-world developments from labor organizers in the Global south. See our full list of speakers here. Conference Co-Organizers: Desirée LeClercq (Cornell University) and Hila Shamir (Tel Aviv University) Sponsors: American Society of International LawCornell ILR Global Labor InstituteCornell International Law JournalFrank W. Pierce Memorial FundCornell Law School Tel Aviv University Exchange InitiativeMario Einaudi Center for International Studies

Localist event image for Conference on Transnational Labor Rights in a Globalized Economy
Conference on Transnational Labor Rights in a Globalized Economy

Labor Economics Workshop: Melanie Wasserman

Melanie Wasserman, UCLA

Localist event image for Labor Economics Workshop: Melanie Wasserman
Labor Economics Workshop: Melanie Wasserman

The Takedown of Elon Musk’s $56 Billion Pay Package

Lead plaintiff attorney David Tejtel speaks on a failure of corporate governance and its legal remedy.
Tesla car charging
The Takedown of Elon Musk’s $56 Billion Pay Package

Graduate Conference: Agrarian Studies, Climate Change and the Future of Work

The future of work is hot. Literally. Unpredictable seasons, droughts, floods, warming temperatures, rising seas, and a host of other climatic factors are changing what work is, what it means, and what it does to the body. These effects are unevenly felt across geographies, forms of difference, and inequalities. The impacts of climate change – extreme temperatures and changing agricultural cycles - on agrarian environments demand new frameworks to analyze work in the agrarian present and future. We invite abstracts that conceptualize climate change as a problem of work. Rather than restricting a changing climate to new weather patterns, shifting topographies, and techno-fixes, this conference opens a conversation to think about climate change through other anthropogenic changes, such as sociopolitical and economic transformations. This graduate conference will bring graduate students across disciplines to speak on a variety of topics including agrarian change, urban and rural relations, infrastructural transitions, uneven geographies of risk, and the politics of scale and temporality. We invite graduate students to send abstracts of up to 250 words to hak78@cornell.edu by March 1st, 2024.

Localist event image for Graduate Conference: Agrarian Studies, Climate Change and the Future of Work
Graduate Conference: Agrarian Studies, Climate Change and the Future of Work

Joint Labor & Public Economics Workshop: Francesca Truffa

Francesca Truffa, Stanford

Localist event image for Joint Labor & Public Economics Workshop: Francesca Truffa
Joint Labor & Public Economics Workshop: Francesca Truffa

A Fireside Chat with Jake Rosenfeld

In pay, objective pay is more relative than your HR Director thinks Jake Rosenfeld (Wash U) chats with Prof. Diane Burton (ILR School) about his books and ongoing research. Snacks will be available. Professor Jake Rosenfeld's research and teaching focus on the political and economic determinants of inequality in the United States and other advanced democracies. He is primarily interested in the determinants of wages and salaries, and how these vary across time and place. He is the author of many articles and two books, You're Paid What You’re Worth and Other Myths of the Modern Economy (2021) and What Unions No Longer Do (2014). He is Professor of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. This talk is hosted by the Institute for Compensation Studies, Cornell’s Center for the Study of Inequality, and the Cornell Population Center. It is co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology.

Localist event image for A Fireside Chat with Jake Rosenfeld
A Fireside Chat with Jake Rosenfeld

Understanding Working Conditions in New York State’s Solar Industry

Join the Cornell ILR Climate Jobs Institute on Friday, April 26th, for a first look at the results of our exploratory study on the working conditions of New York State solar workers. This event will include a summary of the study’s results—drawing from over 250 survey responses from on-the-ground solar workers—followed by a panel discussion with workers and leaders in this sector.

Union construction workers
Understanding Working Conditions in New York State’s Solar Industry

Agrarian Studies, Climate Change, and the Future of Work

This inter-disciplinary conference brings together experts on questions of climate change, agrarian transformations and labor to help us reflect on the future of work.
Women working in a field
Agrarian Studies, Climate Change, and the Future of Work

Labor Economics Workshop: Trevon Logan

Trevon Logan, Ohio State Competition and Consumer Discrimination in Public Accommodations Abstract: In models of consumer discrimination, discrimination can persist in equilibrium. We present a model of discrimination where one group of consumers have discriminatory preferences related to consuming alongside another group of consumers. The model identifies the equilibrium relationship between the ratio of consumers of both types and the ratio of non-discriminatory to discriminatory firms in a local market. We examine this empirically using a new county-level dataset constructed from the Negro Motorist Green Books and the Census of Business to measure the number of non-discriminatory and discriminatory public accommodations in the United States between 1939 to 1955. Using various sources of plausibly exogenous variation in the consumer population ratio, we show that changes in the racial composition of consumers led to increases in the ratio of discriminatory to non-discriminatory firms in the post-war era. We also show a strong role for market power, where increasing provision of non-discriminatory treatment was primarily seen in the least competitive markets. Using novel data on prices matched to firms, we also show that since far more firms were in the discriminatory market than the non-discriminatory market, the prices in the discriminatory market were not higher than in the non-discriminatory market. The results imply that consumer preferences for discrimination were remarkably strong historically, that market power blunted the influence of consumer preferences, and that extensive racial discrimination would have been maintained nationwide without bans on racial discrimination in public accommodations.

Localist event image for Labor Economics Workshop: Trevon Logan
Labor Economics Workshop: Trevon Logan

Joint Labor & Public Economics Workshop: Edoardo Teso

Edoardo Teso, Northwestern

Localist event image for Joint Labor & Public Economics Workshop: Edoardo Teso
Joint Labor & Public Economics Workshop: Edoardo Teso