Archive: Events
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Disparities, Workers, and Community Responses to COVID 19: A Public Forum (Video)
On April 29, 2020, KI hosted a virtual discussion on the role of inequality in the COVID 19 pandemic that featured local perspectives on workers and community responses. Longstanding inequalities – i
Categories: Events, Our Staff, Race and Economic Empowerment Project, Race and Economic Empowerment Project
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KI Marks ILO Centenary with Major Convening Featuring Speakers from Six Continents
The KI convened a major international labor conference to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the International Labor Organization (ILO) in Washington, D.C. on November 21 and 22.
Categories: Events, Labor Studies
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Academics, Organizers, and Activists Gather to Address Bank Worker Organizing
On Thursday, July 19, the AFL-CIO, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, the CWA, the Committee for Better Banks, Rutgers’ Center for Innovation in Worker Organization, and the Kalmanovitz Initiative hosted a discussion on the importance of organizing bank workers. The event featured introductory remarks from the KI’s Director Joseph McCartin and Sara Burke from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, followed by an overview of Bargaining for the Common Good presented by KI fellow Stephen Lerner and Lisa Donner from Americans for Financial Reform and a panel discussion featuring organizers, bank employees, and union staff members who have been deeply engaged in this work.
Categories: Bargaining for the Common Good, Events
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Scholars, Formerly Incarcerated Citizens Discuss Reforming Prison Labor
Chaired by Marc Howard, Professor of Government and Law, this timely gathering touched upon an enormous segment of the workforce whom are largely hidden from public view. Besides cleaning, cooking, and doing the laundry within prisons themselves, many are leased out to state owned or private companies where they may be manufacturing a highly diverse array of products including clothing, processed foods, office supplies, license plates, and even American flags, often for less than $2 per day. During the recent California wildfires, as many as forty percent of the firefighters that were drafted in to beat back the flames would have listed a prison as their present residence.
Category: Events
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Worker Organizing Roundtable features Lane Windham’s Knocking on Labor’s Door
How can working people build power today when organizing a union is so difficult? That question was at the heart of a KI roundtable discussion on strategic twenty-first century worker organizing with AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer Elissa McBride, Jobs with Justice Organizing Director Erica Smiley, and KI Associate Director Lane Windham.
Categories: Events, Our Staff, Women Innovating Labor Leadership
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KI Luncheon Shines Spotlight on Workers’ Retirement Security
On Tuesday, July 18, the Kalmanovitz Initiative hosted a luncheon discussion on a fundamental challenge facing working people in America: retirement security. More specifically, the event focused on the enormous fees paid to Wall Street fund managers who invest workers’ pensions in risky alternative assets such as private equity and hedge funds.
Categories: Bargaining for the Common Good, Events
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KI Holds Undergraduate Research Conference on Work, Organizing, and Struggle
The conference featured student work confronting the theme “Work, Organize, Struggle: Student Perspectives”. The day included panels addressing the topics of Envisioning Just Economies, States of Existence/States of Resistance, and Latinx Metropolitanisms.
Categories: Events, Labor Studies, People, Student Leaders
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KI Director Reflects on 125th Anniversary of Rerum Novarum
Exactly 125 years ago, in 1891, the industrializing world was going through a traumatic transformation that should seem familiar to us today: new technologies were transforming work; people were being uprooted by economic process from the lands of their birth and their traditional ways of life and drawn to the centers of the new economy, fleeing the collapsing worlds their parents had known and seeking new and better ones; millions of immigrants, emigrants, and migrants were crossing borders and seeking new homes; cities were growing and their problems were multiplying; tensions were emerging as cultures clashed; xenophobia was ignited (in the US it took the form of the American Protective Association, which sought to ban Catholic immigrants to this country); inequality was surging as some reaped enormous, unprecedented, and obscene profits from the new economy while others suffered egregious exploitation.
Categories: Events, Just Employment Policy, Our Staff
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KI Fellow Launches Podcast on Work and Wealth
Dawn is the creator and host of the podcast, which she developed as a KI Practitioner Fellow and doctoral candidate in liberal studies at Georgetown University. The show is produced by KI undergraduate research assistant Sonia Adjroud.
Categories: Events, Our Staff, Practitioner Fellows
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KI Fellow Amy Goldstein Discusses “Janesville: an American Story”
One day after the release of her new book, Janesville: an American Story, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and KI Practitioner Fellow Amy Goldstein returned to campus for an intimate discussion with Dr. Sherry Linkon and members of the Georgetown community.
Categories: Events, Practitioner Fellows