Eve Weinbaum

Eve Weinbaum received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University. She also holds a Master’s degree in Public Policy from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, and a B.A. in Political Philosophy from Yale University.

Weinbaum has worked in the labor movement for many years, currently serving as President for the union of faculty and librarians at UMass. 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 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.

Weinbaum’s research focuses on organizing, labor and politics, women and low-wage workers, and community coalitions. 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.

Weinbaum teaches the Final Paper Course, Labor and Community, Race and Gender in the Labor Movement, and Labor and Politics.

Selected Publications

• Eve S. Weinbaum. To Move a Mountain: Fighting the Global Economy in Appalachia.New York: The New Press, 2004.
• Eve S. Weinbaum and Stephanie Luce. “Low-Wage Women Workers,” New Labor Forum 17:2 (Summer 2008), pp. 20-34.
• Eve S. Weinbaum, “Split to Win?: Assessing the State of the Labor Movement,” Dissent, Winter 2006, pp. 54-6.
• Eve S. Weinbaum and Gordon Lafer. “Outside Agitators and Other Red Herrings: Getting Past the ‘Top-Down/Bottom-Up’ Debate.” New Labor Forum, Spring/Summer 2002.
• Eve S. Weinbaum. “From Plant Closing to Political Movement: Challenging the Logic of Economic Destruction in Tennessee,” in New Poverty Studies: The Ethnography of Politics, Policy and Impoverished People in the U.S., eds. Judith Goode and Jeff Maskovsky. New York: New York University Press, 2001.
• Max Page and Eve S. Weinbaum. “The City that Workers Built,” Reviews in American History, 29 (2001).