Premilla Nadasen

Faculty Fellow

Premilla Nadasen is associate professor of history at Queens College (CUNY). Her first book, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (Routledge 2005), outlines the ways in which African American women on welfare forged a feminism of their own out of the political and cultural circumstances of the late 1960s and 1970s. It won the John Hope Franklin Prize awarded by the American Studies Association. A longtime community activist and scholar, she has worked with numerous social justice organizations, including Domestic Workers United and the National Domestic Workers Alliance. She has written for Feminist Studies, the Women’s Review of Books, Race and Reason, Ms. Magazine, and the Progressive Media Project. In addition, she has given numerous public talks about African-American women’s history, welfare policy, and labor organizing. Her current book on the history of domestic worker organizing in the United States examines how domestic workers have reshaped the landscape of labor organizing over the past forty years.

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?