Ian Greer directs the ILR Ithaca Co-Lab and is a Research Professor. He carries out engaged research and teaching in Ithaca and the surrounding region. Before he moved to Ithaca, he worked for 10 years based in England, first as a Research Fellow at Leeds University and then as Professor of Comparative Employment Relations and Director of the Work and Employment Research Unit at the University of Greenwich. He has had visiting positions in Aix-en-Provence, Berlin, Cologne, Chemnitz, Manchester, Jena, Paris, and Sydney.
He first encountered the world of work in summer jobs as a field laborer, factory worker, and call center worker. After undergraduate study at Bard College, he spent a year in Berlin funded by a Fulbright grant. Before coming to academia, he worked for the Seattle Musicians Association, the Service Employees International Union Local 250, and the New England Regional Council of Carpenters. He completed his PhD at the ILR School in 2005.
Research Statement
His academic work has used qualitative comparative methods to examine marketization and its effects in industrial relations and welfare states. His early work explored how German and US trade unions were coping with intensified price-based competition, through international solidarity, collective bargaining, coalitions with civil society, and organizing the unorganized. Over the years, he has extended this line of questioning to examine how managers and policymakers stage competition across Europe, in multinational automakers, welfare-to-work schemes, social work, health care, and live music. Based on this work, he coauthored two books: The Marketization of Employment Services (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Marketization: How capitalist exchange disciplines workers and subverts democracy (Bloomsbury, 2022).
Since moving to Ithaca in 2015, his research has been increasingly driven by public policy debates in Ithaca, Tompkins County, and New York State. Minimum wage, living wage, unemployment insurance, workforce development, just-cause employment, and decarbonization and "just transition" in automotive manufacturing are among the topics he has tackled as director of the Ithaca Co-Lab. He also involves Undergraduate, MS, and PhD research assistants in this work. His research streams on unemployment and just transition build on his past international comparative research, and he is working on books on both topics.
Findings have been published in Industrial & Labor Relations Review, Industrial Relations, Politics & Society, Social Science & Medicine, the British Journal of Industrial Relations, the European Journal of Industrial Relations, Human Relations, Organization Studies, and Work Employment & Society, among others. Funding has come from his employers, Tompkins County, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Hans Boeckler Foundation, and the European Research Council.