Jasmine Kerrissey

Jasmine Kerrissey is Director of the Labor Center and Professor of Sociology. Kerrissey’s research focuses on labor movements, work, and inequality. Much of this work asks how workers' organizations have mattered— and what their strength means for workplace, economic, social, and political outcomes.    

Kerrissey is co-author, along with Judy Stepan-Norris, of Union Booms and Busts: The Ongoing Struggle over the US Labor Movement (Oxford University Press 2023), which won the distinguished book award for the Labor and Labor Movements section of the American Sociological Association. Union Booms and Busts uses archival data from 1900 to 2015 to analyze patterns of union density in eleven major industries. They ask how factors such as political and economic climate, strikes and replacement of striking workers, organizing strategies by workers and dis-organizing strategies by employers, and race and gender dynamics at work shape surges and retreats in union strength. The public dataset is available here. Kerrissey is also co-editor of the book Labor in the Time of Trump (Cornell University Press 2020).

You can see some of her work on unions and political participation, worker safety, COVID-19, income inequality, and race and gender wage equity, and tipped workers on her website.  Kerrissey has appeared in media outlets such the Washington Post (including articles on union elections and strikes), NPR, the Boston Globe, and others.

She teaches courses on U.S. Labor History, Food and Labor, the Sociology of Work, Comparative Labor Movements, and others. Kerrissey is also active in organizing conferences and public facing events that bring scholars, students, labor, and community groups together.

Prior to her graduate work, Kerrissey worked as an organizer with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which included Justice for Janitors campaigns and healthcare organizing.