Our Faculty and staff
Eve Weinbaum ~ Director, Associate Professor
Eve Weinbaum received a Ph.D. in Political Science in 1997 from Yale University. She also holds a Masters degree in Public Policy from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and a B.A. in Political Philosophy from Yale University.
From 1995-1997, Weinbaum was the Political Mobilization Director and Education Director for the Southern Region of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE!). She worked in nine states of the Southeast, organizing, educating, and mobilizing members around a wide range of issues and union campaigns, including the campaign against sweatshop labor. From 1990-1994 Professor Weinbaum was a staff member and lead organizer for the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO), Local 34 and 35 of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees (HERE), representing workers at Yale University. Prior to becoming a union organizer, she worked as a community organizer with the Council for Community-Based Development and other groups.
Professor Weinbaum's research focuses on community response to plant closings, organizing, and labor and politics. She is the author of To Move a Mountain: Fighting the Global Economy in Appalachia (The New Press, 2004), and articles including "Organized Labor in an Era of Contingent Work and Globalization" in Which Direction for Organized Labor?; "Transforming Democracy: Rural Women and Labor Resistance" in Women Question Politics; and "The Politics of Deindustrialization: Three Case Studies" in New England Journal of Public Policy. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Successful Failures: Toward a Theory of Social Movements.
Professor Weinbaum serves as Director of the Labor Center and Graduate Program Director for the MS in Labor Studies and the Union Leadership and Administration MS in Labor Studies. She teaches Introduction to Labor Studies, Collective Bargaining and Contract Administration, Labor and Community, and Labor and Politics, and she also coordinates the Internship Seminar.
Weinbaum can be reached at:
Phone: 413-577-0458
Fax: 413-545-0110
Or by E-mail.
Tom Juravich ~ Professor
 Professor Tom Juravich received a Ph.D. in Sociology in 1984 from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. From 1984 to 1993 he was on the faculty of the Department of Labor Studies at Pennsylvania State University, where he directed a workers' education program in the Philadelphia area. Juravich joined the UMass Labor Center in 1993, and from 1996 to 2007 he served as the Director of the Labor Center. In 1995 he became the first director of the Union Leadership and Administration (ULA) program, a limited-residency Masters program for union officers, activists and staff, serving as its director from 1995 to 2007.
His research interests include union organizing, strategic campaigns and research, work and the labor process, labor history and worker and labor culture. He is the author of Chaos on the Shop Floor: A Worker's View of Quality, Productivity, and Management (Temple University Press); with William Hartford and James Green, Commonwealth of Toil: Chapters in the History of Massachusetts Workers and Their Unions (University of Massachusetts Press); with Kate Bronfenbrenner, Ravenswood: The Steelworkers' Victory and the Revival of American Labor (ILR/Cornell University Press); and The Future of Work in Massachusetts (University of Massachusetts Press). At the Altar of the Bottom Line: The Degradation of Work in the 21st Century, based on ethnographies of call center representatives, immigrant workers in fish processing, operating room nursing staff, and displaced industrial workers, will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2009.
Juravich is on the editorial boards of the New Labor Forum and the Labor Studies Journal, has been active in the Massachusetts Society of Professors/MTA/NEA, and was a founding member of Local 1000 of the American Federation of Musicians. A singer and songwriter, Juravich's latest CD Altar of the Bottom Line (2007) and Tangled in Our Dreams (with Teresa Healy) (2006) were released by Finnegan Music.
Professor Juravich teaches Labor Research, Work and the Labor Process, Labor and Work in the U.S., and Advanced Corporate Research.
Juravich can be reached at:
Phone: 413-545-5986
Fax: 413-545-0110
Or by E-mail.
Stephanie Luce ~ Associate Professor
 Professor Stephanie Luce received a Ph.D. in Sociology in 1999 and an M.S. in Industrial Relations in 1992, both from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Prior to coming to the Labor Center, she worked at the U.S. Department of Labor, the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, and the Political Economy Research Institute. She was also an active member of the Coalition for Allied Student Employees (CASE-UAW) at the University of California at Riverside and of the Teaching Assistant's Association (TAA/AFT Local 3220) at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She currently serves on the Executive Board of the Massachusetts Society of Professors, MTA/NEA. She is a board member for the National Priorities Project and Kopkind.
Professor Luce's main research has been on the political and economic impacts of the living wage movement. She is author of Fighting for a Living Wage (Cornell University Press), and is the co-author with Robert Pollin of The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy (New Press), and co-author with Robert Pollin, Jeannette Wicks-Lim and Mark Brenner of A Measure of Fairness: The Economics of Living Wages and Minimum Wages in the United States (Cornell University Press). She has also researched the effects of globalization on jobs and workers, including work with Kate Bronfenbrenner tracking the global movement of jobs. Her other research interests include international labor standards, women and work, labor-community coalitions, and low-wage labor markets. Recently, she worked with researchers at the UC Berkeley Labor Center to examine the impacts of establishing living wages at Wal-Mart.
Professor Luce serves on the editorial board of the Labor Studies Journal and is a weekly moderator for the electronic news service, Portside Labor. She is a member of the Jobs with Justice Worker's Rights Board.
Professor Luce teaches Labor Economics, Advanced Research Methods, and Labor and Globalization.
Luce can be reached at:
Phone: 413-545-5907
Fax: 413-545-0110
Or by E-mail.
Dale Melcher ~ Labor Extension Coordinator
Dale Melcher coordinates the Labor Extension program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and holds an M.S. in Labor Studies from the Labor Relations and Research Center at UMass. She was a founding member and serves on the Board of Directors for the Women's Institute for Leadership Development (WILD) and also teaches for the United Association of Labor Educators (UALE) Northeast Regional Summer Institute for Union Women.
She is the co-author of "Women and Local Union Leadership: The Massachusetts Experience," published in the Industrial and Labor Relations Review.
Ms. Melcher teaches Labor Education, Women and Work, and Immigration, Race, and Gender.
Melcher can be reached at:
Phone: 413-545-6166
Fax: 413-545-0110
Or by E-mail.
 Harris Freeman ~ Visiting Assistant Professor ~ ON LEAVE
Harris Freeman, a former machinist and toolmaker, has been a visiting professor teaching labor and employment law at the Labor Center since 1998. As of June 1, 2009, he is on leave while serving as a member of the Commonwealth Employee Relations Board, having been appointed by Governor Deval Patrick. Harris continues as a member of the faculty at Western New England College School of Law where he teaches legal research and writing as well as labor and employment law courses. He is also on leave as an adjunct faculty member in the Social Thought and Political Economy Program at the University of Massachusetts.
For more than twelve years Harris was an active member of the United Auto Workers and the International Association of Machinists while employed at Chrysler Motors, General Dynamics, Pratt and Whitney, and McDonnell Douglas in Detroit, Michigan; East Hartford, Connecticut; and St. Louis, Missouri.
He received his Juris Doctor from Western New England College School of Law, graduating cum laude in 1993. He then served for two years as law clerk to the Honorable Michael A. Ponsor at the United States District Court in Springfield, Massachusetts. Harris has since practiced law in western Massachusetts, focusing on employment and labor issues, civil rights, and criminal appellate law in the state and federal courts. He is a cooperating attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, a member of the editorial advisory board of Working USA and a member of the board of directors of the Massachusetts Fair Housing Center, a Holyoke, Massachusetts, legal services organization.
Freeman can be reached at:
Phone: 413-796-2214
Fax: 413-545-0110
Or by E-mail.
STAFF
 Beth Berry joined the Labor Center in 1991. She worked with Tom Juravich to begin the ULA program in 1995 and has copyedited many of his books, as well as other publications from the Labor Center. She has served as personal typist for novelists including John Edgar Wideman and Valerie Martin and poets including James Tate and Dara Wier, and has copyedited a number of publications, including special editions of Labor Studies Journal and Max Page's most recent book, The City's End. She currently serves on the editorial board of Change Agent, a journal focused on bringing social justice issues to adult education. Berry has taken writing workshops with Tamas Aczel, Leslie Fraser, Anna Kirwan, and Patricia Lee Lewis and has had a book of her haiku titled Haiku Frenzy published by David Publishing. As assistant to the director and graduate program secretary, Berry is well situated to help students, faculty, and others interested in the Labor Center.
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