Immanuel Ness

Faculty Fellow

Immanuel Ness is professor of political science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. His research and writing focuses on social and revolutionary movements, labor militancy, and migrant worker resistance to oppression. Ness just completed Guest Workers, Corporate Despotism and Resistance to Corporate Despotism (University of Illinois Press 2011) and is coeditor of Ours to Master and to Own: Worker Control from The Commune to the Present (Haymarket 2011). His book, Immigrants, Unions, and the U.S. Labor Market (Temple University Press) examines struggles among autonomous worker organizations in New York. He is editor of the peer-review quarterly journal, Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society and General Editor of the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration (forthcoming, Wiley Blackwell 2013). He edited the eight-volume International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 to the Present (Blackwell, 2009). Currently he is writing a book on new forms of worker organizing.

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?