Diana Polson

Student Fellow

Diana Polson is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. For over six years, Diana has served as Project Coordinator, Policy Analyst and Research Associate for several funded research studies on a range of issues, including workplace violations in low-wage industries, ageing services in New York state, human rights and discrimination in N.Y.C., cross-national working time and family leave policies, and conservative and liberal think tanks. Between 2007 and 2010, Diana coordinated the New York City component of the 2008 Unregulated Work Survey, a survey of over 4,300 low-wage workers in New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles through her work with the National Employment Law Project and the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. Her dissertation examines how public policies and funding shape the working conditions of home-based care workers in the three largest U.S. cities. Previously, Diana worked as an economic justice organizer in California.

Participating Years

2010–2011

Labor/Crisis/Protest

Labor processes and conditions of employment in almost all sectors of the economy and most of the world have been revolutionized over the last thirty years. Generally, the share of wages in gross domestic product has declined while the share taken by capital (finance in particular) has soared. The response (or lack of it) to these new conditions has been patchy, raising questions of the state of political consciousness and political subjectivity among affected populations. Where, many ask, is the outrage and why the lack of mass protest and mass movement?