Our Research

The faculty at the Labor Center is involved in a number of cutting-edge research projects. These include local projects directly in support of the labor movement and more long-term academic research. Under the direction of the faculty, graduate students in the Labor Center have the opportunity to gain hands-on experience in a wide variety of labor research. Recent projects include:

Living Wage

This research explores the economic impact of living wage ordinances, tracks the successes and failures of the living wage movement, assesses the implementation and monitoring by cities with living wage laws, and theorizes the factors that lead to more successful living wage campaigns and outcomes. Stephanie Luce is the author of Fighting for a Living Wage (Cornell University Press, 2004). 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).

The Degradation of Work

Tom Juravich has completed his book manuscript At the Alter of the Bottom Line: The Degradation which will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press in the summer of 2009.  It is based on more than 85 interviews with customer services representatives in a call center, nurses in the operating room in Boston Medical Center, undocumented immigrant workers in New Bedford, and displaced industrial workers in Dalton, Massachusetts.  A grant from the Commonwealth will place a copy of the book in every public library and every public and parochial school in Massachusetts.  Juravich is currently completing a series of audio documentaries based on the interviews from the book and preparing a web site for the book. He is also exploring possibilities to extend his ethnographic research on work and the labor process in both the U.S. and Canada.

Strategic Research and Campaigns

Over the past decade Tom Juravich developed a framework and method for union strategic corporate research and campaigns, including the development of a number of instructional materials.  He has been asked to teach this approach in the AFL-CIO/Cornell summer school for the past six years, and for the labor movement in Canada, England and Australia.  Juravich is currently updating and expanding this program in preparation for a new web site.

Labor and Community Coalitions

This research project focuses on the ability of labor-community groups to mobilize around economic justice issues. The research by Eve Weinbaum includes case studies of communities that mount grassroots organizing campaigns around a variety of issues, including plant closings, economic development policy, and civil rights/anti-racism efforts. The work focuses on issues of leadership, organizing capacity, and the importance of failure in paving the way for success. Stephanie Luce has also participated in the Building Regional Power project, and conducted studies of labor-community organizing in Cleveland, Denver and New Haven.

Wages and Global Supply Chains

Stephanie Luce is working with researchers in various countries to develop a theoretical and campaign framework for establishing a living wage for garment workers across Asia. Due to trends in global supply chains, garment production has mostly moved out of the United States to countries in Latin America and Asia. Workers have found it difficult to organize in this context, as the large retailers who dominate the supply chain have enormous leverage to set the terms of production and to quickly shift production from one factory to another. Workers are played off one another by factory and country. The Asia Floor Wage aims to unite unions and NGOs in Asian countries around a common wage demand. This would help workers build common campaigns, and would reduce the power of employers to pit workers against one another. There are many challenges to developing a regional campaign aimed at supply chains. This research examines the economic issues, as well as political and regulatory mechanisms for the campaign.

Women and Work

Labor Center faculty and staff are engaged in a number of projects examining the situation for women workers in general and low-wage women workers in particular.  In 2008, Stephanie Luce and Eve Weinbaum co-wrote an article for New Labor Forum looking at the conditions for women workers in the low-wage labor market, and organizing efforts to improve their conditions.

Childcare and Family Policy

Eve Weinbaum coordinates Working Families Massachusetts, a broad-based coalition of unions and community groups working with counterparts in other states to achieve quality childcare and paid parental leave policies for working families.