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Webinar: Enabling Workers to Govern Their Work - 26 January, 2024

Event summary

While some proposals for democratizing work focus on representative forms of democracy, e.g. board members elected by employees, others focus on the direct involvement of workers on the ground. Skeptics often hold, however, that this is only feasible - if at all - for highly skilled employees. But is this really so, or is it a prejudice based on misguided ideas about meritocracy? What does it take to enable workers to truly participate in the governance of their own work? What frictions must be expected, and how can they be overcome? And what role can unions and other actors (activists, researchers, etc.) play in enabling the government of work by workers themselves?

Date: 26th January, 2024

Time: 2 PM CET

Our speakers for this event will be:

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Moderator: Isabelle Ferreras

Isabelle Ferreras is a senior tenured fellow of the Belgian National Science Foundation . She is professor of sociology at the Université catholique de Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium) where she teaches at the Department of Social and Political Sciences, at the Institut des sciences du travail and at the Economics School of Louvain. Isabelle is involved as a permanent researcher of the Centre de recherches interdisciplinaires Democracy, Institutions, Subjectivity)  and since 2004, she has been an associate of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School where she is now a Senior Research Associate. In the Spring 2017, Ferreras was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts of Belgium.

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Panelist: Antoine bonnemain

Antoine Bonnemain is a lecturer at the University of Clermont Auvergne, France. His work in occupational psychology and ergonomics focusses on the relationship between work, health and empowerment. For the past 12 years, he has been working on
these issues in cooperation with the Psychologie du Travail et Clinique de l'Activité team at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris. In his research work, he is experimenting with the generalization of "conflictual cooperation" between professional groups and their entire hierarchical line, based on requests from companies, in order to develop the quality of work. Recent publications of his show how conflictual cooperation could help redefine professional relations around the quality of work in organizations, to develop deliberation.

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Panelist: Denise Kasparian

Denise Kasparian is a researcher of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council and an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. She is a sociologist and holds a Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires. Her latest book Co-operative Struggles (Brill, 2022) expands the theoretical horizons regarding labour unrest by proposing new categories to make visible and conceptualize conflicts in the new worker cooperativism of the twenty-first century.

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Panelist: Michelle Miller

Michelle Miller is the Director of Innovation for the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School. She joined the Center after a decade as the co-founder and co-director of Coworker, an organization that nurtures early-stage worker-led organizing across multiple industries. Coworker’s support for workers at companies like Starbucks, Google, Uber, and REI, among many others, secured wins for wage increases, scheduling reform and hazard pay. During this time, Michelle also pioneered the labor movement’s research and response to the proliferation of software and technology tools being used to manage and surveil workers and working class people. In 2015, Michelle was honored to co-host the first ever White House Town Hall on Worker Voice with President Barack Obama. Michelle is also a Visiting Social Innovator with the Social Innovation + Change Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is on the boards of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and Arts and Democracy and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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