Archive: 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
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Community and Labor Organizers Plot to Bargain for Racial Justice
Attendees of the three-day conference converged at the old National Labor College, which has been renovated as the Tommy Douglas Conference Center. The gathering was hosted by a steering committee of representatives from labor and community organizations and convened by Georgetown’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, the Rutgers School of Management Labor Relations’ Center for Innovation in Worker Organization, and the Action Center on Race and the Economy.
Categories: Bargaining for the Common Good, Events
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Sugarcane Workers in Nicaragua & Human Rights
Sugarcane workers in Nicaragua have struggled for more than two decades for safer working conditions. They are fighting to receive medical treatment and compensation for a deadly kidney disease believed to be caused by their work in the sugarcane fields.
Category: Events
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Rerum Novarum: Worker Justice in the Church and on Campus
This year marks the 125th Anniversary of Rerum Novarum (new window), Pope Leo XIII’s pivotal 19th century encyclical that laid the foundation for Catholic teaching on labor and the dignity of work. More than a century later, these principles remain profoundly relevant to our society and our campus community on the Hilltop.
Categories: Events, Just Employment Policy