On June 12th, 2015, the Murphy Institute Blog Arts & Culture Editors hosted the first ever Creative Arts Night at the Murphy Institute. In the coming weeks, we’ll be posting some footage from our esteemed panelists and performers.
Here, activist, filmmaker and writer Agunda Okeyo discusses her unique role in the world of art, social justice and the imagination. Agunda was also featured in this month’s issue of Time Out NYC in a section featuring Best Comedy Shows run by females.
It’s all happening. Last Wednesday, the New York state wage board appointed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo recommended a state-wide minimum wage of $15 for fast food workers in NYC and throughout the state. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has voted for a $15 minimum wage for those working in its unincorporated areas by 2020, which will complement the minimum wage hike for workers in the City passed in May.
Who else is making moves in the $15 direction? The UC system, Kansas City (well, $13), Washington, DC.
Justin Miller wrote up a nice roundup of these developments over at the American Prospect on Friday. As he writes, “All in all, it has been a highly successful week for minimum wage campaigns around the country.”
Indeed.
The Murphy Institute has had a long and storied past, from its roots in 1984 as a collaboration between CUNY and NYC municipal unions to where it stands today: en route to becoming its own freestanding school within CUNY.
In an article by Marc Bussinch in Labor Press last week entitled The Murphy Institute Survives Bloomberg Era; Pursuing Autonomy within CUNY , Murphy Director Greg Mantsios describes existing Murphy programs and where things might be headed:
A resolution passed at the New York State AFL-CIO convention calls on the university and public officials to reconstitute the Murphy into its own school and there’s been a major push to do that. Close to two dozen labor leaders have written letters to public officials and the CUNY Chancellor urging them to do this. The Assembly Speaker, Carl Heastie, has been pushing hard, as has been Senator Dianne Savino. The legislature allocated $1.5 M in this year’s budget to establish a new school for labor. Hopefully, two or three years from now we’ll be our own school with our own degree programs and hiring our own faculty and controlling our own budget, policy and procedures.
He continues:
[O]ur faculty is engaged in research. We want to start a research rewards program that extends beyond our faculty and offers financial awards to scholars and practitioners outside of our own orbit who are engaged in strategic thinking about the future of the labor movement. In addition, we issue an annual report on union density that looks at national, state and New York City figures and breaks down union density by geography, occupation, race, gender, profession, which unions find very useful for organizing drives. And I think we can play an important role in attracting social justice activists to the labor movement. There are some things we can’t control—like Supreme Court decisions or the economy—but we can control how well we organize ourselves. So we’re trying to provide activists with the skills they need to better fight the good fight whether at the workplace or in the public policy arena.
Read the full article at Labor Press.
Murphy Institute Professor Sean Sweeney just returned from Athens, where he delivered a presentation entitled Third Memorandum or Grexit: What are the implications for the Future of Greece’s Energy System? at the Democracy Rising conference. In his talk, Sweeney explained:
…[E]nergy will be at the heart of the struggles in Greece in the years ahead, Memorandum or Grexit. Energy poverty has grown with austerity and recession, and Syriza has taken measures to protect the poorest and most vulnerable from, for example, electricity disconnections.
But it is clear that the structure of Greece’s energy system also needs to change. The “Institutions”, through the Memorandum, have a clear sense of what restructuring energy means for them—full-on privatization. However, a left restructuring would seek to address two major challenges: firstly, Greece’s dependence on fossil fuel imports and, secondly, how to take advantage of its potential to generate large amounts of renewable energy.
Sweeney presents a thorough analysis of Greece’s choices given the country’s uncertain future and the real, pressing need for “a new economy and a new society.”
Access the full presentation at Trade Unions for Energy Democracy.
This post was originally featured at alrexchange.org.
China’s Mingde Institute of Labor Relations and CUNY’s Advancing the Field of Labor Relations (ALR) program collaborated for the second time to present a Comparative Collective Labor Disputes Conference between the U.S. and China in Changsha in April 2015. More than 40 Chinese leading scholars, local union officials, governmental arbitrators, and labor attorneys attended the conference. Many active figures in China’s labor relations field participated as speakers and discussants, including professors from Peking University, Wuhan University, Shanghai Business and Finance, Capital University of Business and Economics, China Institute of Industrial Relations, Nanjing University, Sun Yat-san University, and researchers from the local MOHRSS arbitration department from Hunan, Shanghai, Guizhou, etc. Representatives from ILO also commented at the conference.
Representing the U.S. was Diane Frey, Senior Research Consultant at CUNY ALR, who spoke on labor organizing in the U.S., and Richard Fincher, Fellow and Instructor at the Scheinman Institute on Conflict Resolution at Cornell University, who presented on the U.S. arbitration and mediation system.
You can read more (in Chinese) at:
Murphy’s Advancing the Field of Labor Relations Program seeks to broaden and strengthen communications and exchanges between China and U.S. universities and unions.
www.ALRexchange.org is an English-Chinese bilingual website, developed by Murphy’s Advancing the Field of Labor Relations Program to serve as a hub of resources for both academics and practitioners in the field of Labor Relations. More than five hundred searchable bilingual bibliographies, contract languages, training materials, relevant Labor Relations articles and U.S.-China comparative curriculum materials for the study of labor relations have been posted and shared in our website. Find it on our resource page.
The website also includes “Labor in the News”, featuring news from the labor field in the U.S., China, and worldwide on a weekly basis. To further this unique comparative perspective, the team also tweets these updates via Chinese social media, Weibo, to interact with our Chinese audience directly. Continue reading Introducing: ALRexchange.org
