When conducting research on this chapter of history for his acclaimed book Klansville, Professor David Cunningham encountered the work of a journalist named Pete Young, who in the 1960s attempted to understand what was happening in North Carolina. He shares some of this history and describes how Young's insights could hold lessons for today.
After Donald Trump’s presidential victory, many left-leaning politicians and commentators started considering what sort of message would help them regain political power. Professor Adia Harvey Wingfield discusses about this topic.
The sociology department is ahead of schedule in its faculty recruitment plan, with six tenured and tenured-track faculty members and three postdoctoral fellows hired within the first two years of the department’s reestablishment.
Missouri became the 28th US state Monday to adopt so-called right to work legislation, whereby employees can no longer be required to pay dues to a labor union, yet are still able to benefit from any deals procured by such a union. Professor Jake Rosenfeld comments that “right to work doesn’t seem to have much of an impact one way or another.”
When it comes to “right to work,” there’s widespread disagreement about the policy’s potential effects on Missouri’s economy. But there’s no question that Missouri’s unions are about to experience seismic change. Ptrofessor Jake Rosenfeld discusses the practical implications of right to work – and why the policy may not be a death knell to organized labor in Missouri.
The Missouri Legislature on Thursday sent a "right-to-work" proposal to Gov. Eric Greitens, a Republican who campaigned on a promise to sign it. Professor Jake Rosenfeld comments that right to work doesn’t seem to have much of an impact one way or another, both in improving the state’s business climate or in terms of devastating the health of organized labor.
Professor Jake Rosenfeld argues that unions at their prime helped create a “moral economy” in which wages rose both in firms with unions and those without them, and in which the average worker had a notable voice—however compromised back then by nativism and other exclusionary tendencies—lobbying on their behalf in Washington
Although U.S. employers cannot legally prohibit employees from discussing their pay, many employers implement a formal or informal policy against employees discussing their salaries. Such policies help employers maintain complete control over wages, thus preventing employee demands for higher pay and wage equality, according to a 2015 study by Jake Rosenfeld and Patrick Denice, two of the few sociologists to study pay secrecy.
In 2013, Germany declared that every child over the age of 1 has the legal right to a space in a public daycare facility. This past fall, while America’s election unfolded, Germany’s highest court took this mandate one step further: It ruled that parents may sue for lost wages if they can’t find a place for their child in a public daycare center.
In the past few weeks, black-owned banks have gotten a huge boost from a movement called #bankblack, with thousands of new accounts opened and assets that have grown by as much as $6 million. Professor John Robinson says that the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act had a major impact on black-owned banks, funneling much of their previous business toward larger, whiter banks.
Greater stress and anxiety resulting from economic insecurity may be at least partly to blame for the U.S. death rate that the government announced Dec. 8 has increased for the first time in a decade, says an expert on poverty and inequality at Washington University in St. Louis.
Missouri will become a right-to-work state. The chief question is how soon the General Assembly will put a version of the anti-union measure on the desk of soon-to-be Gov. Eric Greitens. Professor Jake Rosenfeld who has studied the effect of right-to-work laws for more than a decade said that its restrictions don’t have to be devastating for unions, if they adapt.