Alumni Bio-Bursts
See all Bio-BurstsThe ILR Alumni Association Bio Burst project, a monthly video series that introduces you to members of ILR's recent alumni community.
Events
Matthew Johnson, Duke Management Practices, Workplace Injuries, and the Effects of Government Safety Regulations (with Nick Bloom, David I. Levine, and Alison Pei) Abstract: Workplace injuries are a massive economic burden, yet they persist across a wide range of workplaces. Why? Reducing injury risk entails financial and opportunity cost, but it may also require adoption of management practices that are slow to diffuse. Linking confidential data from the Census Bureau with data on workplace injuries, we find that establishments with more structured management practices (monitoring production, setting targets, and establishing incentives) have substantially lower injury rates, a relationship that holds within industries and within establishments over time. We then examine how this variation in management influences the effects of government safety regulations on workers and firms. Enforcement inspections by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration reduce injuries, but only at establishments with few structured management practices. Inspections also lead to an increase in establishments’ use of structured management practices. Inspections have no detectable effect on establishments’ survival, investment, or productivity.
Discover internships and full-time opportunities with labor unions, law firms representing unions and/or individuals, and other organizations dedicated to workers’ rights. The Labor Advocacy Career Fair (formerly known as the Social Justice Career Fair) is open to all Ithaca-based Cornell students and will be a featured event during the university's annual Union Days series, sponsored by the ILR School.
Ralf Ruckus will present central arguments from the book The Left in China. A Political Cartography (Pluto Press, 2023): All over the world, progressive forces debate the nature of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). While some consider them to be socialist, others recognize the critical role of the current CCP government in facilitating capitalist exploitation and the suppression of social struggles. Often, little or no attention is given to leftwing oppositional movements and groups in the PRC. Since the founding of the PRC in 1949, changing class divisions have led to waves of social protests by workers, migrants, and women, which inspired several generations of leftwing opposition against CCP rule. The dialectic of social struggles and leftwing oppositional movements has shaped the history of the PRC, from the socialist build-up in the 1950s to the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, the democracy movements in the 1970s and 1980s, the resistance of the socialist working class against capitalist restructuring in the 1990s and 2000s, and the struggles of migrant workers and women since. This event is co-sponsored by the East Asia Program.
The future of work is hot. Literally. Unpredictable seasons, droughts, floods, warming temperatures, rising seas, and a host of other climatic factors are changing what work is, what it means, and what it does to the body. These effects are unevenly felt across geographies, forms of difference, and inequalities. The impacts of climate change – extreme temperatures and changing agricultural cycles - on agrarian environments demand new frameworks to analyze work in the agrarian present and future. We invite abstracts that conceptualize climate change as a problem of work. Rather than restricting a changing climate to new weather patterns, shifting topographies, and techno-fixes, this conference opens a conversation to think about climate change through other anthropogenic changes, such as sociopolitical and economic transformations. This graduate conference will bring graduate students across disciplines to speak on a variety of topics including agrarian change, urban and rural relations, infrastructural transitions, uneven geographies of risk, and the politics of scale and temporality. We invite graduate students to send abstracts of up to 250 words to hak78@cornell.edu by March 1st, 2024.