Category Archives: Events

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Event: Organizing 2.0 (4/13-14)

Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 9:00 AM –
Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 4:00 PM

Murphy Institute
25 West 43rd Street
19th Floor
New York, NY 10036

REGISTER HERE

Organizing 2.0 is the New York region’s premier skills training conference for organizers, communicators, techies and activists of all levels.

Join hundreds of staff and members of unions, community organizations, grassroots campaigns and local nonprofits, independent activists too, for workshops, trainings, discussions, consulting and networking opportunities. We feature visionary speakers, and provocative debates around strategy and practices.

Trainings include: online to offline organizing, digital strategy, member engagement, visual storytelling and much more.

Events, Home

Book Talk: Joshua Freeman and Louis Uchitelle (3/23)

Join us for book talks from Joshua Freeman, author of “Behemoth: The Factory and the Making of the Modern World” and Louis Uchitelle, author of “Making It: Why Manufacturing Still Matters”.

Friday, March 23rd, 6:00-8:00pm
CUNY Murphy Institute 
25 W. 43rd Street, 18A-D
New York, NY 10036

Speakers:

  • Joshua Freeman-Distinguished Professor of History, CUNY Graduate Center; Murphy Institute Consortial Faculty
  • Louis Uchitelle-Journalist and author; lead reporter for award-winning NY Times Series The Downsizing of America
  • Introduced by Ruth Milkman-Professor of Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center; Director of Research, Murphy Institute

RSVP HERE

Photo by Peter Miller via flickr (CC-BY-NC-ND)

Events, Home

Event: Promising Practices: Labor and Community Fighting Sexual Harassment in the Era of #MeToo (3/23)

Friday, March 23rd, 2018, 9am
The Murphy Institute
25 W 43rd Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY, 10036 

RSVP HERE

Friday, March 23, 9am-12:30pm
Co-sponsored by the Murphy Institute, CUNY and The Worker Institute at Cornell ILR

An interactive program bringing strategies, resources, and creativity together to create an equity framework for fighting harassment in the workplace and community.

9:00-9:15 am – Welcome and Intro Exercise

  • KC Wagner, The Worker Institute, Cornell ILR, NYC
  • Jenny DeBower, Center for Anti-Violence Education – Finding and Raising your Voice!

9:15-9:30 am – Cultural, Legal & Legislative Landscapes

  • Maya Raghu, National Women’s Law Center

9:30-9:40 am – Participant Witness and Share

9:40-10:40 am Panel – Promising Practices

  • Unions and Legislative Strategies – Sarah Lyons and Roushaunda Williams, UNITE HERE Local 1, Chicago
  • Community and Union Engagement – Quentin Walcott, CONNECT
  • Leveraging Worker Voice – Catherine Barnett, ROCU and One Fair Wage
  • Catalysts for Change – Ana Avendaño, The United Way World Wide

10:40-10:50 am – Participant Pair Dialouge

10:50-11:20 am – Q & A with Panel

1:00-3:00pm– Break Out Sessions (These are concurrent sessions. See registration to join one; RSVP is needed in addition to the main program)

  • Break Out A: Upstander Training: Upstander workshops are designed to equip those facing hate and violence with de-escalation skills and basic self-defense techniques. Additionally, this training empowers bystanders with the tools they need to help those facing harassment by choosing intentionally from a continuum of tactics. These two approaches combined offer New Yorkers unique and critical options for keeping our communities as safe as possible and mitigating violence. Led by The Center for Anti-Violence Education
  • Break Out B: Sexual Harassment in the Workplace: This presentation gives a general overview of discrimination in employment and then addresses the topic of sexual harassment in the workplace. The presentation coverers the form, impact and components of sexual harassment; liability; what can a victim or witness of sexual harassment do. In addition, case scenarios are presented for group discussion. Lastly, penalties, remedies and the Commission’s complaint process are explained. Led by NYC Commission on Human Rights
Events, Home, New Labor Forum

The Unmet Promise of Labor’s Resuscitation (12/8)

December 8th, 2017
5:30-8pm
Murphy Institute
25 W. 43rd St., 18th Floor, New York, NY

RSVP HERE

New Labor Forum, first published in September 1997, was founded to contribute to the new possibilities for debate and discussion among labor and its allies in the wake of the AFL-CIO’s first ever contested elections in 1995. In those heady days, the New Voice leadership at the federation proclaimed its commitment to large-scale union organizing and ambitious coalition building with working-class communities, and particularly communities of color. It simultaneously engaged in a rapprochement spurred by Left intellectuals and progressive political activists who had for decades been excluded from the AFL-CIO’s strategic discussions. These efforts gave rise to widespread hopes that organized labor might help ignite a broad, national movement for social and economic justice. On the twentieth anniversary of the journal’s founding, we will host an assessment of those earlier ambitions, examining the complex reasons why they have borne such meager results. We will also examine the current challenges and possibilities for building a progressive movement capable of confronting a thoroughly financialized economy of highly concentrated wealth, precarious work and unabated racial disparity, and a political system in the vice grip of corporate interests in which a multi-racial working-class alliance remains a distant hope.

Speakers:

Stephen Lerner – Organizing in the New Economy: What are the principal features of the new economy that workers and working-class communities must now confront? What does this suggest about new forms that organizing should take?

Phil Thompson and Liza Featherstone – Debate: What is required to build a multi-racial working-class political movement?

Events, Home, Urban Studies

Event: Divided Results: Voting and Partisan Gerrymandering (9/15)

Update: missed the event and want to watch it online? Catch the video here.

Friday, September 15

8:30am-10:30am

Murphy Institute, 18 Floor

RSVP: https://the-politics-of-voting.eventbrite.com

In light of the Supreme Court’s decision to hear Gill v. Whitford, this panel will explore the history of gerrymandering and the effects of recent changes in technology, data mining, and dark money, to understand the implications of potential Supreme Court decisions.  Before this case made it to the Supreme Court, what work had been taking place on the ground to address the effects of gerrymandering? How has the US Census influenced redistricting?  What can we expect from the Supreme Court and how will this impact the future of electoral politics?

Speakers

  • David Daley, author, Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy and former Editor in chief of Salon.com
  • Lauren Jones, National Civil Rights Counsel, Anti-Defamation League
  • Michael Li, Senior Counsel for the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program
  • Deuel Ross, Assistant Counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund
  • Jerry G. Vattamala, Director, Democracy Program,  Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF)
  • Moderator: John Mollenkopf, Distinguished Professor of Political Science, CUNY Graduate School and consortial faculty, Murphy Institute
Events, Home, Labor Studies, Murphy News, New Labor Forum

Announcing: JSMI Fall 2017 Public Programming Season

Each season, the Murphy Institute brings incisive public programming about the political and social issues facing our city, our country and our world. This fall, we’re going deep on our democracy, our history and ourselves, exploring where we’ve been and where we might go from here.

We begin this season with debate and strategic thinking regarding two major cases before the Supreme Court, opening with Gill v. Whitford on the practice of redistricting through partisan gerrymandering.  We will then turn to the future of public sector unions, made precarious by the pending Janus v. AFSCME case. We will also be looking closer to home by examining, together with Hunter College’s National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, the 50th anniversary of the the Public Employees Fair Employment Act, commonly known as the Taylor Law. Also of special concern to New Yorkers is the City’s current transit crisis, an issue we’ll explore in a forum that will discuss solutions to enable New York to sustain itself as a world-class city.  We will round out the year by marking the 20th anniversary of the Murphy Institute’s journal, New Labor Forum, and use this occasion to assess efforts to rebuild a working-class movement that the journal has for two decades debated and discussed.

It all kicks off on Friday, September 15th with Divided Results: Voting and Partisan Gerrymandering. Then, look forward to The Taylor Law in Perspective at 50, to be held September 26 at Roosevelt House, Hunter College.

Stay tuned for more details as the fall gets underway!

Photo by Stephen Melkisethian via flickr (CC-BY-NC-ND)