CUNY SLU Faculty Scholarship

Samir Sonti, “Inflation and Your Next Contract, Labor Notes: https://labornotes.org/2022/07/inflation-and-your-next-union-contract

Samir Sonti, “What You Need to Know About Inflation,” Jacobin: https://jacobin.com/2022/06/what-you-need-to-know-about-inflation

Samir Sonti, “Who Pays for Inflation,” New Labor Forum: https://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/XUMIMR3YKN8JYJWKMG6N/full

Erica Smiley and Sarita Gupta, “Collective Bargaining for the Workplace and Democracy,” YES! Magazine, July 4, 2022, https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2022/07/04/bargaining-for-the-workplace-democracy

• Carolina Bank Muñoz, Penny Lewis and Emily Tumpson Molina, A People’s Guide to New York City, University of California Press

• Bernadette King Fitzsimons and Rebecca Lurie, “How Lobstermen Formed a Union Co-op to Claw Back Fair Prices,” Labor Notes

• Michael Rymer. Book Review of Paul C. Gorski’s Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty: Strategies for Erasing the Opportunity Gap (2nd ed.), Teachers College Press in Communication Center Journal Vol. 7, No. 1, 2021. (P. 138-140).

• Rebecca Lurie, “Unions and Worker Co-ops: Why Economic Justice Requires Collaboration,” Nonprofit Quarterly

• Labor MA student Alvin Baugh has written “Locke’d Out,” on the SLU Blog

• Labor MA students Gabriela Quintanilla, Xiomara Loarte, Liana Kallman, and Frida Garza, won a 2021 New Scholars Research Grant from the Labor Research Action Network for their project titled “A Research Project and Short Film on the Experiences of Poultry Workers in the Hudson Valley During the Pandemic.”

• Eric Blanc, “Why Minneapolis Educators Are on Strike, “ Jacobin

• Time Out reviews A Peoples’ Guide by Penny Lewis et al

A few news stories that quote or mention our faculty:

• Ellen Dichner quoted in “U.S. business casts a wary eye at the surging labor movement led by young and optimistic activists,” Fortune
• Arcy Reilly Collins is mentioned in this story about a recent union victory she worked on
• Ruth Milkman, Stephanie Luce and Isaac Jabola-Carolus’ study of home care work mentioned in the New York Times
• Ruth Milkman quoted in “Amazon, Starbucks and REI: A new crop of NYC union organizers may be having a moment,” Gothamist
• John Mollenkopf quoted in “Park Slope and Staten Island: An Unlikely Political Marriage,” New York Times

• Minju Bae, “In Struggle and In Love,” NYU Skirball, 2021

• Michael Rymer.  Humming with Your Mouth Open: An Experiential Staff Education Pilot for Freelance Professional Tutors, WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, P. 18-26, September/October 2021

• Kevin Simowitz, Connie Razza, Deepak Bhargava, and Jamila Michener, Building Power Through Policy. The Forge. October 21, 2021.

• Rebecca Lurie and Bernadette King Fitzsimmons, A Union Toolkit for Cooperative Solutions

• Mimi Abramovitz and Jennifer Zelnick ( 2021), Structural Racism, Managerialism and the Future of the Human Services: Rewriting the Rules, Social Work, November 22, 202. Free open access

• Deepak Bhargava and Ruth Milkman on Tocqueville 21 Podcast, October 2021

• Deepak Bhargava on Behind the News with Doug Henwood, a podcast. 10/28/21

• Tammy Kim, “The Supply-Chain Crisis Is Creating a Rare Opportunity for Truck Drivers,” New York Times, Nov. 18. 2021

• Ruth Milkman is quoted about the State of the Unions Report in “New York City’s Jobs Picture Grows Cloudier as Fall Approaches” for The City

• Stephanie Luce, “Racial Justice is Vital to Union Growth,” Democratic Left Fall 2021

• Steve Fraser and Josh Freeman, “Hope for Labor at the End of History,” Dissent, Fall 2021.

• Sean Sweeney, “Sustaining the Unsustainable: Why Renewable Energy Companies Are Not Climate Warriors,” New Labor Forum, Volume 30 Issue 3, September 2021

• Stephanie Luce, “The Living Wage, Fight for $15, and Low Wage Worker Campaigns in the U.S.,” in The Living Wage: Advancing a Global Movement, Edited by Tony Dobbins and Peter Prowse, Routledge, 2021.

• Deepak Bhargava, “Social Democracy or Fortress Democracy? A Twenty-First Century Immigration Plan” New Labor Forum, Volume 30 Issue 3, September 2021

• Ellen Dichner, “How a Biden Labor Board Could Advance Workers’ Rights,” New Labor Forum, Volume 30 Issue 3, September 2021

• Stephanie Luce hosted a forum for SLU’s The Murphy Institute on the legacy of the Occupy Movement. Ruth Milkman hosted a forum at The CUNY Graduate Center, “Occupy Wall Street: Its Impact 10 Years Later”.

• Ellen Dichner in Wallet Hub’s Labor Day Fun Facts

• Samir Sonti, “The Crisis of US Labor,” Socialist Register 2022

• Listen to Ruth Milkman and Stephanie Luce on The Nation Podcast, “Occupy Wall Street, 10 Years Later” about the Occupy movement and its legacy.

• Ruth Milkman was on Make me Smart with Kai and Molly, the Marketplace podcast to discuss Occupy movement and its legacy.

• Ruth Milkman, Penny Lewis, and Stephanie Luce wrote an article for The Nation, “Did Occupy Wall Street Make a Difference?” about the Occupy movement ten years later.

• Marianne Garneau (LeNabat), has written “Workplace Struggles are Political,” for Organizing Work,

• Ellen Dichner was interviewed at Wallet Hub for an article about Labor Day and Workers Rights. Read it here

• Ellen Dichner is quoted in “Joe Biden’s Labor Board Picks Have Been Surprisingly Encouraging”  for Jacobin.

• Michael Rymer has written, “The Linguist in the Writing Center: A Primer on Textual Analysis in Writing Center Studies,”  for The Writing Center Journal

• Ruth Milkman (with Veronica Terriquez), has written “Immigrant and Refugee Youth Organizing in Solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives,” for Gender and Society

• Ellen Dichner is quoted in “A New Day For Workers’ Rights” at the Daily Poster.

• Deepak Bhargava and Ruth Milkman, co-wrote “Why Mass Immigration Is the Key to American Renewal,” for The American Prospect,”

• Ruth Milkman, “New York City’s Retail Grocery Industry Economic Restructuring and its Impact on Organized Labor,”

• Erica Smiley, “Domestic Workers Are Using the Gig Economy Against Itself,”  for The Nation

• Eric Blanc, Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire (1882-1917),

• Marianne Garneau (LeNabat) and Catherine Kemp, “There Oughta Be a Law,” Organizing Work,

• Nadia Rahman, U.S. Health Care: Undocumented Immigrants Shut Out, New Labor Forum spring 2021 issue

• SLU faculty helped write and circulate this open letter opposing the draft legislation concerning app-based workers in New York State

• SLU faculty helped write and circulate this open letter opposing the draft legislation concerning app-based workers in New York State

• Union semester alum, former SLU staff and SLU Adjunct Sarah Hughes authored “Massachusetts Nurses Face Down For-Profit Health Care Giant Tenet in Daring Strike,” in Labor Notes

• SLU Labor Studies alum Kressent Pottenger, “A Passion for Teaching and a Vision for Change,” New Labor Forum Spring 2021

• Stephanie Luce, wrote “Unions Take Up the Fight for Racial Justice,” for Organizing Upgrade

• Sean Sweeney, along with Dominic Brown and Sinead Mercier have a trio of articles in the latest issue of New Labor Forum on the climate crisis: A Public Energy Response to the Climate Emergency. There is also a corresponding podcast episode of Reinventing Solidarity; EP. 16 – A PUBLIC ENERGY RESPONSE TO THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY

• Jennifer Zenick, Mimi Abramovitz and Steven Pirutinsky, “Assessing the Business Model in Social Work: A validation of the Organizational Commitment to Managerialism Scale,” Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research

• Deepak Bhargava and Dorian Warren, “Expanded tax credit for kids will greatly reduce child poverty. Let’s make it permanent.” USA Today. April 26, 2021

• Joshua B. Freeman, “Red London.” A review of Red Metropolis: Socialism and the Government of London. In Dissent, Spring 2021

• SLU Labor Studies student writes about direct action on the job in Organizing Work, “‘I Live for That Shit: A Worker Recalls Successful Direct Action in the Workplace” (writing under a pseudonym)

• Mimi Abramovitz, “Government Is the Solution, Not the Problem,” Letter to the Editor, New York Times, March 21 2021

• A different kind of work outcome: SLU adjunct instructor and Writers Guild of America East staff negotiator and organizer Arcy Reilly-Collins helped the union at Gimlet Media settle their first contract! https://prospect.org/labor/union-bargaining-at-podcasting-giant-gimlet-media/

• Professors Stephanie Luce, Ruth Milkman and Isaac Jabola-Carolus have written “The Case for Public Investment in Higher Pay for New York State Home Care Workers: Estimated Costs and Savings,” March 2021. Conducted in partnership with the Association on Aging in New York. (The results of this study support the Fair Pay Act currently in the NY State legislature which would raise wages for home care workers in the state. For more on that, click HERE.

• Professor Samir Sonti has written a report “Lifting the Curtain on Private Equity: A Guide for Institutional Investors and Policymakers.”  for the AFT and Americans for Financial Reform. Read about it HERE.

• Professors Deepak Bhargava and Dorian Warren,  have written “The ‘Progressive Multiplier’: How Democrats Can Defeat Trumpism,” for The American Prospect.

• Professors Mimi Abramovitz and Deepak Bhargava, have written “A Real Chance to End Poverty: We Can Build on Progress in the COVID Recovery Act With Permanent Income Support for All,” The Medium  3-10-21, The Thought Project /CUNY Graduate  Center,

• Professor Mimi Abramovitz was recently on the Podcast Social Work & the Future of Democracy, Social Work Day on the Hill, Congressional Research Institute for Social Policy

• Professor Ruth Milkman has been quoted in the NYT article “Biden May Be the Most Pro-Labor President Ever; That May Not Save Unions“

• Professor Josh Freeman was interviewed for the New York Times  article “Organizing Gravediggers, Cereal Makers and, Maybe, Amazon Employees“

• Professor Deepak Bhargava was interviewed in the Forbes article “House Immigration Reform Measures Now To Be Considered By Senate” by Andy J. Semotiuk

• Professor Deepak Bhargava has written a moving piece on Medium about the murder of Srinivas Kuchibhotla and how Trump’s hate speech for the past four years ignited this death, the Jan. 6^th insurrection (and so much more). Read Here.

• Jeremy Blasi and Samir Sonti, “Private Equity, Human Rights Due Diligence, and Global Labour Rights: The Case of ‘Hotel California,’” The Global Labour Rights Reporter 1, no. 1 (2021): 44-48.

• Listen to Professor Mimi Abramovitz, on the podcast. “Social Security for Everyone: Mimi Abramovitz on “The Thought Project.” CUNY Graduate Center,

• Stephanie Luce, “Building Class Power by Fighting for the Common Good,” Organizing Upgrade, Jan 6, 2021.

• Kressent Pottenger, “Backstage with a Makeup Artist,” New Labor Forum, Jan 2021

• Sean Sweeney, “Five Years On, the Paris Climate Agreement Needs an Overhaul,” New Labor Forum, Dec, 2020,

• Professor Deepak Bhargava, has written “Of Ducks and Democracy”, for The Forge. December 8, 2020.

• In a new study published by @FISOnline, Mimi Abramovitz and Richard Smith analyze historical federal #housing policy in the US. They found residential segregation remained higher in 2010 than in 1940. Their study underscores the urgency for advocate to mobilize for more just social polices. Free to access through Open Access. “The Persistence of Residential Segregation by Race, 1940 to 2010: The Role of Federal Housing Policy Families in Society”

• Ruth Milkman, Luke Elliott-Negri, Kathleen Griesbach and Adam Reich write. “Gender, Class, and the Gig Economy: The Case of Platform- Based Food Delivery.” Critical Sociology 1-16.

• Listen to Michelle Chen Belabored podcast (Dissent magazine)“Labor at the Ballot Box”. Including an interview with Stephanie Luce.

• Read Sean Sweeney “Five Years On, the Paris Climate Agreement Needs an Overhaul.” New Labor Forum

• Read Marc Kagan’s “More Austerity Coming? Lessons from New York’s 1970s Fiscal Crisis.” in the New Labor Forum.

• Professor Andy Sparberg was quoted in Newsday about his work at LIRR.

• Read H. Jacob Carlson and Gianpaolo Baiocchi, “The Case for a Social Housing Authority”, Nov. 2020,

• Read Professor Samir Sonti, “Philadelphia’s Election Results Are a Warning to the Democratic Party,” The New Republic. Nov 13

• Professor Stephanie Luce says it’s imperative for the New York State Senate to press on millionaire tax ideas. Read about it here.

• In “Coalition and Confrontation: A Response to Jared Abbott,” Luke Elliott-Negri pushes back against Abbott’s analysis of Democratic “coalition strategy” and a “confrontation strategy.” Read it here in Organizing Upgrade.

• Ruth Milkman has published “Old wine in new bottles: gender and the gig economy” about her study (along with Luke Elliott-Negri, Kathleen Griesbach, and Adam Reich) of the platform-based food economy, which had an explosion in demand when COVID-19 hit. She found that the majority of the workers were white women, and describes the “class-gender nexus” of this element of the gig economy. Read about it in WorkinProgress.

• Stephanie Luce writes about organizing in the labor movement to defend democracy in the event of a contested election. She notes that some unions are trying to connect their core activists with local “protect the vote” groupings in key states and cities to show up to polls and fight to make sure every vote is counted. Read it here in Organizing Upgrade.

• In this piece from Organizing Work, Marianne Garneau debates with labor organizer and journalist Chris Brooks and veteran union negotiator Joe Burns about Bargaining for the Common Good and its use as a model for connecting workplace fights with broader social demands. Read part one and part two here.

• In “How Does the Past Look From Here? Notes from a historian” Joshua Freeman compares today’s pandemic and politics to the events preceding and following the flu epidemic of 1918, and argues that this time, the yearning for a return to “normality” may be misplaced. Read it here in Moyers on Democracy.

• Deepak Bhargava discussed economic, racial and immigrant justice with Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal in the latest installment of SLU’s ongoing series “COVID Capitalism. Watch it.

• In Work in Progress, Ruth Milkman talks about how her research came to reveal that working-class women dominate the sector of the gig economy. Old wine in new bottles: gender and the gig economy

• Josh Freeman, “How Does the Past Look From Here? Notes from a historian.” Moyers on Democracy.
  https://billmoyers.com/story/how-does-the-past-look-from-here/

• Deepak Bhargava talks with Mike Gilliam of Mike Gilliam: Let It Rip to examine the Presidential election.

• H. Jacob Carlson, “Measuring Displacement: Assessing Proxies for Involuntary Residential Mobility,” City & Community, Sept 2020,

• Luke Elliott-Negri, “Coalition and Confrontation: A Response to Jared Abbott,” Organizing Upgrade
  https://organizingupgrade.com/coalition-and-confrontation-a-response-to-jared-abbott/

• Mimi Abramovitz and Deepak Bhargava on how the pandemic has exposed the systemic failures of America’s inadequate welfare state, in Social Security for All.

• Mimi Abramovitz, Deepak Bhargava and Tammy Thomas Miles penned this piece in the Nation, The US Safety Net is Degrading by Design – focusing on the inadequacies of the social safety net.

• Marianne (Garneau) LeNabat and Lexi Owens, “Between Schylla and Charybdis,” Organizing Work.

• Ruth Milkman and Stephanie Luce,  The State of the Unions 2020: A Profile of Organized Labor in New York City, New York State, and the US

• Marianne (Garneau) LeNabat, “A History of the IWW’s Organizer Training Program,” Organizing Work.

• An interview with Mimi Abramovitz  and Jennifer Zelnick  was the lead article in the  9-2-20 issue of the NYN  Media an online newspaper.  The article  The drawbacks of treating social work like a business  is based findings of their research published in the  August 2020 Issue of Social Work.

•  Jennifer Zelnick and Mimi Abramovitz ( 2020). “The Perils of Privatization: Bringing the Business Model into the Human Services” Social Work. August, 2020

• Josh Freeman, “New York Socialists in the Legislature—and Out,”

• Ruth Milkman and Stephanie Luce are quoted in this piece, Report: 20% of Union Member Got Sick of Lost Jobs Due to Virus, which takes a closer look at the impact of COVID-19 on union workers.

• Ruth Milkman has also penned this piece in the Gotham Gazette entitled, “On Labor Day, New Reason Not to Fall for Trump’s Immigrant Threat Narrative.”

• Mimi Abramowitz and Steve Fraser have a chapter in An Inheritance for Our Times: Principles and Politics of Democratic Socialism, edited by Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker and Michael J. Thompson (O/R Books, 2020)

• Kafui Attoh has co-authored “‘Just-in-Place’ labor: Driver organizing in the Uber workplace” in Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. In this scholarly paper, Kafui and his co-authors, Katie J. Wells and Declan Cullen, posit that that Uber’s attempts to keep its workers “just-in-place,” which generally isolate and disempower drivers, can actually enable new modes of organization. Read it here.

• Steve Brier and Michael Fabricant co-authored a piece in the Gothan Gazette entitled “Racialized Austerity: The Case of CUNY” in which they chronicle the steady erosion of public funding for higher education from the New York State and City government, and how it has affected CUNY.

• Marianne LeNabat authored “Bargaining for the Common Good in the Coronavirus Era” for Organizing Work.(under the pen name Marianne Garneau).

• Andrew Sparburg, who teaches regularly in SLU’s transit program, wrote about the Queensboro Bridge, which appeared in the daily blog of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society. Read it here.

• Sean Sweeney has a new piece that is co-published by Jacobin and New Labor Forum, entitled “There May Be No Choice but to Nationalize Oil and Gas — and Renewables, Too.” Read it here.

• A moving piece from The New Yorker featuring an SLU alum, MTA bus driver Terence Layne, in which he mentions taking Andy Sparberg’s class on the history of transit. Read “A Transit Worker’s Survival Story.”.

• An article in the latest edition of New Labor Forum takes a look inside an Amazon fulfillment center.  Get a firsthand view how workers are handling the pandemic, worker safety and organizing themselves in the demanding environment of a booming business.

• Stephanie Luce authored two articles: one in LaborNotes on workers and housing, and another in Portside on how unions are organizing for racial justice.

• Gladys Palma de Shrynemakers is co-hosting Next Gen Assessment: A Series for Educators Transitioning Online for the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AACU). This is an ongoing series of blog posts complemented by brief video discussions designed to help educators exchange information about assessment challenges and emerging best practices in digital delivery.

• Newly appointed Assistant Professor of Labor Studies Joel Suarez discusses two recent books about anti-immigrant sentiment in an article entitled “The Nativist Tradition” in Dissent magazine.

• David Unger has authored a piece on police unions and the Black Lives Matter movement for the fall issue of New Labor Forum, which has been released early due to its timeliness. Read it here.

• Sofya Aptekar, Associate Professor of Urban Studies, co-authored an article with Shannon Gleeson titled, “All Undocumented Immigrants Deserve Citizenship—Not Just ‘Essential Workers’.” https://inthesetimes.com/article/undocumented-immigrants-citizenship-essential-workers-covid-19

• Mike Menser, has a piece out in Non-Profit Quarterly on how the call to “defund the police” is not just a call to transform policing and rethink “safety,” but also a call to transform budgeting. Read it here.

• Professor Kafui Attoh writes an important op-ed “Protests Lay Bare Structural Racism in Mass-Transit Policing“

• Stephanie Luce and SLU M.A. Graduate Student Haley Shaffer co-wrote a white paper “Digital Media Rising – 5 Years of organizing Digital Media” that takes a look at the Writers Guild of America, East and their efforts to organize for better pay and workplaces for Digital media Workers.

• December 11, 2019 – CUNY SLU Professor Ruth Milkman talks to Teen Vogue about workers rights to unionize https://www.teenvogue.com/story/what-know-rights-union

• August 12, 2019 – CUNY SLU Graduate Student Bob Master Speaks with Jacobin Magazine about Rebuilding the Labor Movement https://jacobinmag.com/2019/08/labor-movement-bob-master-communications-workers-america-strike?fbclid=IwAR0nSIEIsWIDxjEyT9TDq0j1jD4Frzu4rD4e0U5tHdC1d_4nVEbe6LIljH0

• August 1, 2019 – Rally at East Meadow Best Market Targets Gender Equity Issues https://www.newsday.com/business/best-market-workers-inequality-rally-x32370

• June 30, 2019 –  CUNY SLU Graduate Nicolas Pineda Featured on DC 37 Radio http://www.dc37.net/news/radioshows/radioshows

• June 25, 2019 – CUNY Labor School Advances Worker Careers and Solidarity https://dc37blog.wordpress.com/2019/06/25/cuny-labor-school-advances-worker-careers-and-solidarity/

• June 24, 2019 – School of Labor and Urban Studies Marks Freshman Year ‘Successful’ https://thechiefleader.com/news/news_of_the_week/school-of-labor-and-urban-studies-marks-freshman-year-successful/article_62563b26-935d-11e9-b9dd-13904a493215.html

• June 10, 2019 – CUNY SLU Professor Stephanie Luce Sits Down With Sheryl McCarthy of CUNY TV to Discuss the State of Labor Unions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2xWDqaAKTc

• May 9, 2019 – CUNY SLU Faculty Frances Fox Piven Has Become the Intellectual Guru of Activist Progressives https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/nyregion/frances-fox-piven-democratic-socialism.html