Immanuel Ness

Picture of Immanuel Ness

Immanuel Ness

 Immanuel Ness is Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, United States. He is also the Director of the Graduate Political Science Program at the Brooklyn College Graduate Center for Worker Education in New York City, and has taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Union Leadership Program and Cornell University Institute for Labor Relations. His current research examines the working class and labor unions from an historical-comparative perspective in a regional, national, and global context.Ness is a graduate of New York University and Columbia University, and holds a PhD in Political Science from the City University of New York. He is author of scholarly articles, chapters, review essays, and books on labor organizing, trade unions, migration, and unemployment, including Immigrants, Unions, and the New U.S. Labor Market (Temple University Press, 2005), is co-editor of Real World Labor (Dollars & Sense, 2009), and Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History, and Chains of Migration (forthcoming), and (as editor) the Encyclopedia of American Social Movements, recipient of an American Library Association Best Reference Award in 2005. In 2006, Ness received the Christian Bay Award for best written paper presentation in New Political Science from the American Political Science Association. Ness is currently working on research projects on workers councils and workers control (with Dario Azzellini) and Organizing Anarchy, with Jeff Shantz.  He is conducting a major historical research project on global migration.  Since 1999, Ness has been editor of Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society, a peer-review quarterly social science journal on labor and class. He is founder of the Lower East Side Community Labor Coalition, which received a Proclamation from the City Council of New York in 2001 for advancing labor standards in low-wage occupations.Ness lectures widely at universities and research institutes in the United States, Caribbean, Europe, East and South Asia.

By embracing collective bargaining through the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935, or Wagner Act, organized labor deprived workers of their capacity to contest private and state power.

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