Two years into the pandemic, American workers supposedly have record leverage. But workers’ increasing power is running up against inflation, declining union membership, a lack of paid sick leave, and generally poor working conditions and low pay. 

Is the so-called Great Resignation a turning point for workers and organized labor, or simply a temporary reshuffling? What would it take for workers to use this moment as the start of a genuine transformation of working conditions? 

Join us on Wednesday, April 20, 3:00–4:00 PM ET, as panelists lift the curtain on what’s really going on with the Great Resignation, and discuss ways that workers can translate their rising power into concrete improvements and better pay. 

Featuring:

  • Moderator: Steven Greenhouse, senior fellow, The Century Foundation
  • Lisa Lynch, professor of social and economic policy, Heller School for Social Policy and Management Brandeis University
  • Rakeen Mabud, chief economist and managing director of policy and research, Groundwork Collaborative

Please register to obtain the Zoom link, which will be sent twenty-four hours before the event.

Presented by NYU Wagner and The Century Foundation.

Speaker Bios

Steven Greenhouse is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, where he writes about wages and working conditions, labor organizing, and other workplace issues. Before coming to The Century Foundation, he was a reporter for the New York Times for thirty-one years, spending his last nineteen years there as its labor and workplace reporter, before retiring from the paper in December 2014. He is the author of Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2019.

Lisa M. Lynch, is the Maurice B. Hexter Professor of Social and Economic Policy in Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management. Previously, she served as Brandeis University’s provost and executive vice president of academic affairs, 2014–15 and 2016–20, as well as interim president, 2015–16, and dean of the Heller School, 2008–14.

Lynch is currently a member of the Economic Advisory Panel of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and the International Advisory Council of Bocconi University. She has served as chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor (1995–97); director (2004–09), chair (2007–09) of the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston; chair of the Conference of Chairmen of the Federal Reserve System (2009); and president of the Labor and Employment Relations Association (2013–14). She has published extensively on the impact of technological change and organizational innovation (especially training) on productivity and wages, the determinants of youth unemployment, and the school-to-work transition, among other issues.

Rakeen Mabud is the chief economist and managing director of policy and research at the Groundwork Collaborative. Rakeen is an expert on economic inequality and the twenty-first century workplace, with a particular focus on how structural factors such as racism and sexism perpetuate inequities. Most recently, Rakeen was the senior director of research and strategy at TIME’S UP Foundation, where she spearheaded the organization’s signature Time’s Up, Measure Up initiative. Prior to TIME’S UP, Rakeen was a Fellow and the director of 21st Century Economy and Economic Inclusion Programs at the Roosevelt Institute, where she wrote about how structural inequities interact with the distribution of power in the economy. Rakeen also served in the Obama administration in the Office of Economic Policy at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Rakeen’s writing has been published in The Guardian, Forbes, Teen Vogue, Morning Consult, The Hill and Ms. Magazine, among other outlets, and she has testified in front of the House Financial Services Committee and the House Subcommittee on Consumer Protection. Rakeen holds a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University, and received her B.A. in economics and political science from Wellesley College.