Date/Time
Date(s) - April 15, 2024
4:30 pm - 5:30 pm
Categories
Monday, April 15,
4:30-5:30 pm
Longs Peak
Workplace Democracy: Inequality and the Future of U.S. Labor
Lane Windham, Georgetown University
A revived union movement strengthens democracy by giving workers a voice on the job, curbing inequality, and helping provide a bulwark against right-wing extremism. Yet labor has been shrinking since the 1970s, enervating working-class power and strength. How and why did U.S. unions weaken? What does the current wave of post-pandemic worker action, including in the higher education sector, signal about labor’s path forward?
Lane Windham is Associate Director of Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor and co-director of WILL Empower (Women Innovating Labor Leadership). She is author of Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing and the Roots of a New Economic Divide (UNC Press, 2017), winner of the 2018 David Montgomery Award, Organization of American Historians (OAH). Windham spent nearly twenty years working in the union movement, including as a union organizer in the South. She is a frequent commenter in the media, and has published widely including in The Washington Post, The American Prospect, The Hill, the Baltimore Sun, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and elsewhere. She earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of Maryland and a B.A. from Duke University.