Events

The Future of Worker Rights and Welfare Policies in Germany and America (Video)

July 17th, 2020

The Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung co-sponsored the webinar “A German-American Dialogue on Worker Rights and Welfare.” This July 7 panel was moderated by Lane Windham, Associate Director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative and co-director of WILL Empower.

Intersectionality and Women’s Voting Rights Over the Past Century (Video)

July 17th, 2020

The Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, the National Parks Service, and WILL Empower co-sponsored the webinar “Gender, Race, Class, and the Vote: From the 19th Amendment to COVID-19” to discuss how race and class have shaped womens’ ability to vote over the past century. This June 23 panel was moderated by Lane Windham, Associate Director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative and co-director of WILL Empower.

Latin American Workers and COVID 19 (Video)

May 20th, 2020

On Friday, May 8, 2020, the Kalmanovitz Initiative, the Global Health Initiative, and the Center for Latin American Studies hosted a seminar on government responses to the global pandemic in Latin America, particularly as they relate to Latin American workers. 

Academics, Organizers, and Activists Gather to Address Bank Worker Organizing

August 21st, 2018

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.

Scholars, Formerly Incarcerated Citizens Discuss Reforming Prison Labor

December 7th, 2017

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.

Worker Organizing Roundtable features Lane Windham’s Knocking on Labor’s Door

November 2nd, 2017

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.

KI Luncheon Shines Spotlight on Workers’ Retirement Security

July 24th, 2017

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.

KI Director Reflects on 125th Anniversary of Rerum Novarum

May 5th, 2017

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.

KI Fellow Launches Podcast on Work and Wealth

May 2nd, 2017

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.

Community and Labor Organizers Plot to Bargain for Racial Justice

April 24th, 2017

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.

Sugarcane Workers in Nicaragua & Human Rights

November 21st, 2016

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.

Rerum Novarum: Worker Justice in the Church and on Campus

November 8th, 2016

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.

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