R Milkman
Biographic Data
| ID | 17425 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R Milkman |
| GIVEN NAMES | R |
| FAMILY NAME | Milkman |
| SIGNATURE | MILKMAN R |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Graduate Center, CUNY |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8859-4541 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 78 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 365 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 77 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
A New Political Generation: Post-2008 U.S. Social Movements and The Revival Of Union Activism
This article analyses the emergence of a new political generation of progressive activists in the U.S. since 2008, and documents their growing engagement in labor organizing. It is argue that this development has inverted the dynamic Alain Touraine wrote about in the 1980s: rather than the new social movements learning from the traditional workers' movement, activists with experience in those movements are building on those political experiences …
How exceptional is the USA? Carework and inequality
Countering the popular claim that what differentiates the USA for other wealthy countries in regard to the labor market dynamics of paid domestic labor is its relatively large immigrant population, this article argues that the critical factors are instead the USA’s minimal system of social provision and its extreme level of economic inequality (including inequality among women) which drives up both the supply of and the demand for paid domestic w…
Labor's Long Road to Immigrant Inclusion
The history of the US labor movement's relationship to immigrant workers has bent toward justice, but with many twists and turns. Until the year 2000, when the AFL-CIO took a decisive stance in support of immigrant workers’ rights and comprehensive immigration reform, the House of Labor was deeply divided over the issue. In a settler-colonial context, with a working class overwhelmingly composed of foreign-born workers and their descendants, US u…
Stratification Among In-Home Care Workers in the United States
Domestic workers-specifically in-home health care workers, childcare providers, and house cleaners-are generally concentrated at the bottom of the US labor market. Yet, there is also substantial stratification among and within each of these occupations. This article explores the heterogeneity in pay and working conditions among domestic workers in the 21st-century United States, which has been understudied to date. After sketching national patter…
Grocery Unions under the Gun in New York City and the Nation
Work Intensification in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Gender, Class, and the Gig Economy: The Case of Platform-Based Food Delivery
Drawing on original survey and interview data on platform-based food delivery workers, we deploy an intersectional lens to analyze the ways in which the white working-class women who predominate in this sector of the gig economy interpret their work experience. With a focus on the gender-class nexus, we explore the reasons why these workers, especially mothers and other caregivers, self-select into this sector. These include: scheduling flexibili…
Immigrant and Refugee Youth Organizing in Solidarity With the Movement for Black Lives
In recent years, politically active Latinx and Asian American Pacific Islander youth have addressed anti-Black racism within their own immigrant and refugee communities, engaged in protests against police violence, and expressed support for #SAYHERNAME. Reflecting the broader patterns of a new political generation and of progressive social movement leadership, women and nonbinary youth have disproportionately committed to inclusive fights for rac…
Miseducation
Trump and the future of U.S. labor: An intersectional perspective
This article analyzes the class, race, and gender voting patterns that propelled Trump’s 2016 victory, highlighting his popularity among non-college-educated white voters, and especially white males, including many union members and others in labor union households. White working-class disaffection from the established political system was among the many byproducts of the neoliberal economic transformations that unfolded over the previous four de…
The Senior Precariat
Immigrants are not the cause of labour degradation
Trabalho, Sindicatos E Movimentos Sociais Nos Estados Unidos Hoje: Uma Entrevista Com Ruth Milkman
Labor Unions and the Great Recession
Ruth Milkman, Stephanie Luce, Labor Unions and the Great Recession, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 3, No. 3, The U.S. Labor Market During and After the Great Recession (April 2017), pp. 145-165
Response to reviews of On Gender, Labor, and Inequality
A New Political Generation: Millennials and the Post-2008 Wave of Protest
Building on Karl Mannheim's theory of generations, this address argues that U.S. Millennials comprise a new political generation with lived experiences and worldviews that set them apart from their elders. Not only are they the first generation of "digital natives," but, although they are more educated than any previous U.S. generation, they face a labor market in which precarity is increasingly the norm. And despite proclamations to the contrary…
On Gender, Labor, and Inequality
The author's groundbreaking research in women's labor history has contributed important perspectives on work and unionism in the United States. This book presents four decades of the author's essential writings, tracing the parallel evolutions of her ideas and the field she helped define. The book's introduction frames a career-spanning scholarly project: the interrogation of historical and contemporary intersections of class and gender inequalit…
Enough Blame to Go Around: The Labor Pains of New York City's Public Employee Unions
Book Review| February 01 2016 Enough Blame to Go Around: The Labor Pains of New York City's Public Employee Unions Enough Blame to Go Around: The Labor Pains of New York City's Public Employee Unions. Steier, Richard. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014xx + 281 pp., $24.95 (paper); $24.95 (e-book) Ruth Milkman Ruth Milkman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2016) 13 (1): 158–160. https://doi.org/10.1215…
Celebrating the Enduring Contribution of Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies
Precariat Organizing in India: A Politics of Recognition and Redistribution: Informal Labor, Formal Politics, and Dignified Discontent in India
The Double Game of Unions and the Labor Movement
Unfinished Business: Paid Family Leave in California and the Future of U.S. Work-Family Policy
Unfinished Business documents the history and impact of California's paid family leave program, the first of its kind in the United States, which began in 2004. Drawing on original data from fieldwork and surveys of employers, workers, and the larger California adult population, Ruth Milkman and Eileen Appelbaum analyze in detail the effect of the state’s landmark paid family leave on employers and workers. They also explore the implications of C…
The Genie's Out of the Bottle: Insiders' Perspectives on Occupy Wall Street
A year after Occupy Wall Street (OWS)'s spectacular appearance in lower Manhattan, assessments of its impact range from the view that it was an ephemeral “flash movement” (Plotke 2012) to claims th
The legacy and lessons of the Patco strike after 30 years: A dialogue
On 1 December 2011, Ruth Milkman, Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies at the City University of New York, hosted a forum on
We Are the Ones Who Are Out in Front: Women's Leadership in the Immigrant Rights Movement
"We Are the Ones Who Are Out in Front": Women'sLeadership in the ImmigrantRightsMovement RuthMilkman and VeronicaTernquez A striking feature of the contemporary immigrant rights move ment in the United States is the extensive presence of women in formal leadership roles. Women are not only highly visible as grass roots and mid-level leaders but also as executive directors of lead ing immigrant rights organizations and in other high-level position…
A New Political Generation: Millennials and the Post-2008 Wave of Protest
Building on Karl Mannheim's theory of generations, this address argues that U.S. Millennials comprise a new political generation with lived experiences and worldviews that set them apart from their elders. Not only are they the first generation of "digital natives," but, although they are more educated than any previous U.S. generation, they face a labor market in which precarity is increasingly the norm. And despite proclamations to the contrary…
Gender, Class, and the Gig Economy: The Case of Platform-Based Food Delivery
Drawing on original survey and interview data on platform-based food delivery workers, we deploy an intersectional lens to analyze the ways in which the white working-class women who predominate in this sector of the gig economy interpret their work experience. With a focus on the gender-class nexus, we explore the reasons why these workers, especially mothers and other caregivers, self-select into this sector. These include: scheduling flexibili…
The Macrosociology of Paid Domestic Labor
This article poses the question: What explains variation in the proportion of the labor force employed in paid domestic labor? In contrast to an older, modernization-theory-based literature that argued that paid domestic labor declines and ultimately disappears in the course of economic development, the authors note the occupation's recent expansion in southern California and the wide variations among rich, developed countries in the proportion o…
Immigrant Workers, Precarious Work, and the US Labor Movement
This article argues that the immigrant labor movement in the contemporary United States has three distinctive strands. The first involves traditional trade unionism. Although US unions once supported restrictive immigration policies, that has changed dramatically in the twenty-first century. Several leading US unions have recruited Latino immigrants employed in low-wage janitorial, retail, and hospitality work, and to a lesser extent in residenti…
Female Factory Labor and Industrial Structure: Control and Conflict over 'Woman's Place' in Auto and Electrical Manufacturing
Immigrant Organizing and the New Labor Movement in Los Angeles
This article traces the transformation of Los Angeles, which was considered a showcase of anti-unionism a century ago, into a key site of labor movement revitalization and a model of successful immigrant organizing. It traces the history of unionization in L.A. over time, and analyzes data from the 1990s on the characteristics of L.A.'s union members. Although immigrants are still less likely to be union members than native-born workers, this is …
We Are the Ones Who Are Out in Front: Women's Leadership in the Immigrant Rights Movement
"We Are the Ones Who Are Out in Front": Women'sLeadership in the ImmigrantRightsMovement RuthMilkman and VeronicaTernquez A striking feature of the contemporary immigrant rights move ment in the United States is the extensive presence of women in formal leadership roles. Women are not only highly visible as grass roots and mid-level leaders but also as executive directors of lead ing immigrant rights organizations and in other high-level position…
Immigrant and Refugee Youth Organizing in Solidarity With the Movement for Black Lives
In recent years, politically active Latinx and Asian American Pacific Islander youth have addressed anti-Black racism within their own immigrant and refugee communities, engaged in protests against police violence, and expressed support for #SAYHERNAME. Reflecting the broader patterns of a new political generation and of progressive social movement leadership, women and nonbinary youth have disproportionately committed to inclusive fights for rac…
Women's History and the Sears Case
positively and seek greater recognition and status for traditionally female values and forms of behavior? This tension between equality and difference has divided feminists in a variety of contexts. It is central to the debates over culture in feminist historical scholarship, for example.' Scholars analyzing women's experience, of course, can hedge on the issue, aiming for a balanced perspective that incorporates the insights of both positions. B…
Labour and the global financial crisis
At the 21st SASE Conference in Paris, in July 2009, a group of political economy and industrial relations scholars discussed whether the current legitimation crisis of financial capitalism could be viewed as a turning point for labour internationally. Following are an introduction by the panel organizer, Lucio Baccaro, and revised versions of presentations by Robert Boyer, Colin Crouch, Marino Regini, Paul Marginson, Richard Hyman and Rebecca Gum…
Technological Change in an Auto Assembly Plant: The Impact on Workers' Tasks and Skills
This article explores the impact of technological change and organizational restructuring on workers at the General Motors assembly plant in Linden, New Jersey. An in-plant worker survey was conducted as well as extensive interviews with workers, managers, and union officials. Changes in the plant polarized the work force: Skilled trades workers have experienced skill upgrading and gained more responsibility for maintaining and managing the new e…
Women, Work and Protest: A Century of US Women's Labor History
Journal Article Women, Work and Protest: A Century of US Women's Labor History. Ed. by Ruth Milkman. (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985. xiv + 333 pp. Tables, notes, and index. Paper, $14.95.) Get access Maurine Weiner Greenwald Maurine Weiner Greenwald University of Pittsburgh Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 73, Issue 1, June 1986, Page 166, https://doi.org/10.2307/1…
Women, Work and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women's Labor History
Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II
"Redefining "Women's Work: The Sexual Division of Labor in the Auto Industry during World War II
Labor Organizing among Mexican-born Workers in the United States: Recent Trends and Future Prospects
This article surveys unionization patterns and other workplace-oriented organizing among Mexican-born workers since the mid-1990s. Although the number of Mexican-born union members grew during that decade, the unionized proportion declined, especially among noncitizens. The decline reflects the large proportion of new immigrants in the Mexican-born population and the increased geographic dispersion of immigration in recent years away from highly …
Farewell to the Factory: Auto Workers in the Late Twentieth Century
Stratification Among In-Home Care Workers in the United States
Domestic workers-specifically in-home health care workers, childcare providers, and house cleaners-are generally concentrated at the bottom of the US labor market. Yet, there is also substantial stratification among and within each of these occupations. This article explores the heterogeneity in pay and working conditions among domestic workers in the 21st-century United States, which has been understudied to date. After sketching national patter…
Labor Unions and the Great Recession
Ruth Milkman, Stephanie Luce, Labor Unions and the Great Recession, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 3, No. 3, The U.S. Labor Market During and After the Great Recession (April 2017), pp. 145-165
Celebrating the Enduring Contribution of Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies
Grocery Unions under the Gun in New York City and the Nation
The Senior Precariat
New Unity for Labor
From the ?Editor?s Introduction?: Within today?s AFL-CIO, a different set of frustrations with the bureaucratic structure and leadership is simmering. The relative lack of new organizing and the continuous toll of jurisdictional rivalries have produced a call for radical restructuring, or ?New Unity Partnership? (NUP). As articulated by the leaders of some of the most powerful and dynamic of federation affiliates, including the Service Employees …
The New Labor Movement: Possibilities and Limits
The New American Workplace: Transforming Work Systems in the United States
The Pity of It All: Polarisation of Racial and Ethnic Relations.Leo Kuper
"Redefining "Women's Work: The Sexual Division of Labor in the Auto Industry during World War II
Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States
First published in 1982, this pioneering traces the transformation of women's work into wage labor in the United States, identifying the social, economic, and ideological forces that have shaped our expectations of what women do. Basing her observations upon the personal experience of individual American women set against the backdrop of American society, Alice Kessler-Harris examines the effects of class, ethnic and racial patterns, changing per…
Female Factory Labor and Industrial Structure: Control and Conflict over 'Woman's Place' in Auto and Electrical Manufacturing
Women's Work and Family Values, 1920-1940. Winifred D. Wandersee Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women During World War II. Karen Anderson
Women, Work and Protest: A Century of US Women's Labor History
Journal Article Women, Work and Protest: A Century of US Women's Labor History. Ed. by Ruth Milkman. (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985. xiv + 333 pp. Tables, notes, and index. Paper, $14.95.) Get access Maurine Weiner Greenwald Maurine Weiner Greenwald University of Pittsburgh Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 73, Issue 1, June 1986, Page 166, https://doi.org/10.2307/1…
Women, Work and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women's Labor History
Women's History and the Sears Case
positively and seek greater recognition and status for traditionally female values and forms of behavior? This tension between equality and difference has divided feminists in a variety of contexts. It is central to the debates over culture in feminist historical scholarship, for example.' Scholars analyzing women's experience, of course, can hedge on the issue, aiming for a balanced perspective that incorporates the insights of both positions. B…
Women, Work and Protest: A Century of Women's Labor History
Consolidating the Spheres: Exploring the History of Twentieth-Century American Women
Gender, Consciousness, and Social Change: Rethinking Women's World War II Experience
Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II
Work, Protest, and Culture: New Work on Working Women's History
David Montgomery's The Fall of the House of Labor . A Roundtable Symposium
Research Article| January 01 1988 David Montgomery's The Fall of the House of Labor. A Roundtable Symposium Ruth Milkman; Ruth Milkman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Staughton Lynd; Staughton Lynd Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Alan Dawley Alan Dawley Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Radical History Review (1988) 1988 (40): 89–114. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-1…
Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II
Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II
Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II
The Process of Occupational Sex-Typing: The Feminization of Clerical Labor in Great Britain
Women's Quest for Economic Equality
Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II
Pleasure, Power, and Technology: Some Tales of nder, Engineering, and the Cooperative Workplace.Sally Hacker
Technological Change in an Auto Assembly Plant: The Impact on Workers' Tasks and Skills
This article explores the impact of technological change and organizational restructuring on workers at the General Motors assembly plant in Linden, New Jersey. An in-plant worker survey was conducted as well as extensive interviews with workers, managers, and union officials. Changes in the plant polarized the work force: Skilled trades workers have experienced skill upgrading and gained more responsibility for maintaining and managing the new e…
Labor's Future in the Global Economy
New Research in Women's Labor History Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor . Ava Baron Dishing It out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century . Dorothy Sue Cobble Sons…
American Enterprise in Japan
Political science (56 works) · Sociology (49 works) · Economics (42 works) · Labor Movements and Unions (39 works) · Law (32 works) · Labour economics (26 works) · Gender Studies (24 works) · Engineering (18 works) · History (17 works) · Demographic economics (16 works)