Union Strategy Research Group (USRG)

Faced with fundamental transformations in the nature of work, the employment relationship and the strategies of governments and employers, unions are being forced to reinvent themselves. In Australia, as elsewhere, union leaders, labour activists and academic researchers are seeking to understand and mould the future of the union movement and its relationship with other social forces and communities. The USRG provides local and international studies of these questions and encourages studies of changes in employee representation, collective bargaining and labour organisation, strategy and ideology.

Lecture - ‘L.A Story: Low paid workers and the future of labour’

Presenter: Professor Ruth Milkman (UCLA)

Ruth Milkman is Professor of Sociology at UCLA, where from 2001 through 2008 she also served as Director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, before moving to UCLA in 1988. Her research and writing has ranged over a variety of issues surrounding work and labor organization in the U.S. She has written scores of peerreviewed articles in leading journals and has published many well-received books on gender and work, immigrant workers and unions, women’s contributions to the labour movement and to union revitalization. Her most recent book is L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the future of the U.S. Labor Movement (2006).