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Autonomous Choices and Patriotic Professionalism:
On Governmentality in Late-Socialist China

Lisa Hoffman, Urban Studies, UW Tacoma

In China, where college students once received job assignments from the government upon graduation, graduates now attend job fairs where they have more choice over their future professions. Yet young professionals are still highly influenced by notions of social responsibility and patriotism. Lisa Hoffman looks at the new "patriotic professionalism" of young Chinese professionals in the modern economy.

Funded by Faculty Research Grant, 2003-2004

Published in Economy and Society, Vol. 35, No. 4. (November 2006), pp. 550-570.

Healthy Concessions: Wellness, work, unions
and the 'Healthy Incentives' program

Emily Lynch, Department of Anthropology

The debate around healthcare in the United States has raged for decades. What is the role of unions in that debate? In Martin Luther King, Jr. County, county employee unions have recently negotiated health insurance programs based on members "taking responsibility" for their health in order to "earn" access to the best health coverage. Looking at the case of ML King County, Emily Lynch explores the role of organized labor in healthcare reform today.

Funded by Graduate Studuent Research Grant, 2007-2008

Living Wage Campaigns and Laws

Margaret Levi and David Olson, Department of Political Science, and Erich Steinman, Department of Sociology

Bridges Chair Emeriti, David Olson and Margaret Levi, led a research program focusing on the living wage movement in the U.S. examining the political and economic implications of living wage campaigns. These campaigns generally advocate establishing a base wage rate (above the minimum wage) for employees working on local, publicly funded contracts. The core idea advanced by the movement is that individuals who work for the public should not be living in poverty, but should at least be earning a living wage.

Funded by a grant from the Russel Sage Foundation to the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, 2000-2001

Published in WorkingUSA, Vol. 6, No. 3. (Winter 2002–3), pp. 111–132.

'The More Things Change...': The Declining Relative Status of Black Women Workers

Raine Dozier, Department of Sociology

Since the 1970s, workers in the United States have faced increasing wage inequality as the economy has shifted away from manufacturing and towards the service sector – the rich have gotten richer, and the poor have gotten poorer. While women have not been hit as hard due to increased education and other factors, the wage gap between African American and white women has increased significantly. Raine Dozier explores the causes behind this increasing racial inequality.

Funded in part by the Duggan Fellowship, 2006-2007

Labor Studies Research

A complete listing of all labor research grants awarded by the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, in reverse chronological order from the present to 1994.

Complete Listing

2008-2009

Faculty Grants

Workplace Hazards and Conditions Associated with Child Labor in Vietnam
Nancy Beaudet, Occupational and Environmental Medicine
Dan Jacoby, Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Bothell
Catherine Karr, Occupational and Environmental Medicine
Religious Preferences and Economic Views in Contemporary America: The Potential for Interfaith Alliances
Mark Smith, Political Science

Graduate Student Grants

Recruitment Abuses in the United States Guest Worker Program
Christopher Benoit, School of Law
The Contradictions of Reproductive Labor in Bahia, Brazil
Coleen Carrigan, Department of Anthropology
Intercultural Customer Service in Indian Call Centers
Tabitha Hart, Department of Communication
An exploratory study of the perception and reality of workplace physical and emotional violence against correctional nurses
Sarah Veele-Brice, Department of Health Services

2007-2008

Faculty Grants

African American Longshore Workers
Mike Honey, Labor and Ethnic Studies and American History, UW Tacoma
Cotton Body Politics and Social Reproduction in Andhra Pradesh, India
Priti Ramamurthy, Women Studies

Graduate Student Grants

Spaces of Survival: Daily-wage Labor Markets in India
Srinivas Chokkula, Department of Geography
'Integrating a Burning House:' Black Worker Struggles for Affirmative Action in the Age of Deindustrialization
Trevor Griffey, Department of History
The Role of Caring Labor for African American Grandmothers
Janet Jones, School of Social Work
Union Power and Technological Change
Devin Kelly, Department of Sociology
Collaboration and Variation among Nonprofit Organizations and Unions in Hong Kong
Jaime Kelly, Department of Geography
Health Insurance Reform and Self Care in Washington State
Emily Lynch, Department of Anthropology

2006-2007

Faculty Grants

Race Radicals: Asian American radical struggles
Moon-Ho Jung, Department of History
Sweatshop Labor and Subjective Agency in a Globalizing World
Divya C. McMillin, Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Tacoma
Workforce Challenges and Emerging Labor Structures in the U.S. Video Game Industry
Gina Neff, Department of Communications

Graduate Student Grants

The Unionization of Future Activists?: The Biographical Impact of ILWU Membership
Jon Agnone, Department of Sociology
Public Health and the Migrant Workers: A Comparative Study of Anti-Tuberculosis Efforts in Seattle and San Francisco
Alex Morrow, Department of History
Echoes of Mutiny: Migration, Empire, and Indian Revolutionaries on the Pacific Coast
Seema Sohi, Department of History

Staff Research Grants

Broken Lives: Living and Losing the American Dream
Kellus Stone, Administrator in Industrial Engineering

2005-2006

Faculty Grants

Victory through Justice: Mobilizing Labor for Total War
Elizabeth Kier, Department of Political Science

Graduate Student Grants

Punishment and Profit: the Politics of Prisons and Neoliberal Restructuring in the American West
Ann Bonds, Department of Geography
'Race, Economic Development, and the Remaking of Urban Liberalism in San Francisco, 1950-1980
Robert Cruickshank, Department of History
Standing at the Crossroads: Intersectional Roots, Realities, and Responses of the Welfare Rights Movement to Racial Frames
Rose Ernst, Department of Political Science
Examining the geographies of reproductive health care in Canada and France, focusing specifically on the practice of Midwifery
Maria Fannin, Department of Geography
Socializing Future Faculty to the Norms of Work and Family in Academe
Kate Quinn, Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, College of Education
Disciplining the Managerial Subject: Discourses of Political Economy in the United States, 1820-1920
Joseph Wycoff, Department of History

2004-2005

Faculty Grants

Field work in Moscow, Russia to research the working conditions in Russian hospice
Jose Alaniz, Slavic Languages and Literatures
Research on the significance of labor law for the realization of workers' rights in China
Susan Whiting, Department of Political Science

Graduate Student Grants

Common Women: Class and Labor in Nineteenth Century Philadelphia
Karla Kelling, Department of History
How workforce intermediaries such as temp agencies, training programs, unions, and industry associations structure the labor market and effect workers' career paths
Nicolas Velluzzi, Department of Geography

2003-2004

Faculty Grants

Book project that addresses labor, class, and ethnicity in the movement to expel Chinese workers from the American west
Gail Dubrow, Urban Design & Planning, Architecture
Research for book "The Southern Diaspora: How Black Workers & White Southerners Transformed America"
James Gregory, Department of History

Published as The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (University of North Carolina Press, 2005)
Martin Luther King Jr. and the Memphis Sanitation Strike
Michael Honey, Ethnic, Gender, and Labor Studies, UW Tacoma

Published as Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (W.W. Norton & Company, 2008)
Managing Labor in Our Neoliberal Times: Educated Workers & Career Planning in Late-Socialist China
Lisa Hoffman, Urban Studies, UW Tacoma

Published as "Autonomous Choices and Patriotic Professionalism: On Governmentality in Late-Socialist China," Economy and Society, Vol. 35, No. 4. (November 2006), pp. 550-570

Graduate Student Grants

Bangkok Taxi Drivers: Workers, Migrants and Men in the 'Global' City
Maureen Hickey, Department of Geograpy
Comparative study of the impacts of English, American and Turkish labor movements on state-society relations during the period of initial, national labor federation formation
Brian Mellow, Department of Political Science

2002-2003

Faculty Grants

Union Democracy Reexamined: The Case of the ILWU
Margaret Levi and David Olson, Political Science
Making Insurgent Communities: A Study of Suicide Protest and the Unionization of Taxi Drivers in South Korea
Hyojoung Kim, Department of Sociology
Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar Production in the Age of Emancipation
Moon-Ho Jung, Department of History

Published as Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2006)

Graduate Student Grants

Research investigating the sense of belonging by different racial groups in their high-tech workplaces
Meredith Reitman, Department of Geography
Research on post-World War II tenant activism in New York City
Roberta Gold, Department of History
Research on whether unionization has an impact on Teaching Assistant stipends
Kisa Watanabe and Evren Damar

2001-2002

Faculty Grants

Union Democracy Reexamined
Margaret Levi and David Olson, Political Science
Contingent Academic Labor in Washington State's Community Colleges
Dan Jacoby, Economics, UW Bothell
Labor Rights of Sex Workers
Patrick Rivers, American Ethnic Studies
Interpreting Japanese American Labor History in the Northwest Through Historic Properties
Gail Dubrow, Associate Dean, Architecture and Urban Planning

Published as Sento at Sixth and Main: Preserving Landmarks of Japanese American Heritage (Seattle Arts Commission, 2002)

Graduate Student Grants

Negotiating Gender, Work, and Family: Unpacking the Family Wage Gap
Penelope Huang, Department of Sociology
The Impact of Neoliberal Transition Processes on Female Labor in Mexico and Turkey
Izik Ozel, Department of Political Science
Neoliberalism and Democracy? The Gendered Restructuring of Work, Unions and Colombian Public Sphere
Kim Wan Eyck, Department of Geography

2000-2001

Faculty Grants

Work, Landscape, and Culture in the Hispanic Farming Communities of Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado
Greg Hicks, School of Law
Devon Peña, Department of Anthropology
A Labor-based Perspective on Martin Luther King
Michael Honey, African-American, Labor, and Ethnic Studies, UW Tacoma

Graduate Student Grants

The Organization of Production in the Southern California-Tijuana Region
Nicholas Velluzzi, Department of Geography
Postwar Tenant Activism in New York City
Roberta Gold, Department of History
The Role of Unions in Port Competition
Betsi Beem, Department of Political Science
Attitudes of Unemployed Chinese Workers Toward Recent Chinese History
David Davies, Department of Anthropology

Staff Research Grants

The Effectiveness of Non-affiliation: The Coalition of University Employees Representing Classified Staff of the University of California
Karen Long, Fiscal Specialist Supervisor

1999-2000

Faculty Grants

Research exploring the influence of the Newspaper Guild 1937-1941
Roger Simpson, Department of Communications
Research focusing on the relationship between high school student employment and their educational performance
John Robert Warren and Paul C. LePore, Department of Sociology

Graduate Student Grants

Research on gaining a more systematic understanding of the conditions under which transnational litigation on behalf of workers might act as a catalyst for transnational labor organizing
Anne Bloom, Department of Political Science
Research regarding children's gender-specific work patterns
Isabelle Sarton-Miller, Department of Anthropology
'Green Havoc': Environment, Labor, and the State in Costa Rica's Pacific Banana Industry, 1938-1984
Steve Marquart, Department of History
Research in support of Light and Rosenstein's hypothesis of specific demand, that immigration generates specific demands for the services and products of immigrant labor
April Linton Eaton, Department of Sociology

1998-1999

Graduate Student Grants

Research seeking to understand how Pacific Coast salmon cannery labor movements encountered the law during the New Deal and McCarthy eras
Doug Baker, Department of Political Science
Research on gaining a more systematic understanding of the conditions under which transnational litigation on behalf of workers might act as a catalyst for transnational labor organizing
Anne Bloom, Department of Political Science
Fieldwork in the autonomous community of Cataloñia examining the dynamic interdependencies between local labor market institutions and regional economic restructuring and development
Deron Ferguson, Department of Geography
Research exploring the history of industrial engineering from regional perspectives
Moran Tompkins, Department of History

1997-1998

Faculty Grants

Secretary of Labor's Task Force on "Excellence in State and Local Government Through Labor-Management Cooperation"
Jon Brock, Cascade Center, Graduate School of Public Affairs
Research on the work and social culture of the bracero railroad workers contracted to six carriers operating in the Pacific Northwest
Erasmo Gamboa, American Ethnic Studies

Graduate Student Grants

Research on female domestic workers in China
Hairong Yan, Department of Anthropology
The historic significance of Seattle's Waitresses' Union, Local 240
Carole Davison, Urban Planning
Research on the importance of labor market relations between Protestants and Catholics to changing patterns of communal conflict in Northern Ireland
Niall O Murchu, Department of Political Science
The Making of the Second Reconstruction: Race, Class, and Power in Alabama, 1941-1963
Ken Lang, Department of History

1995-1996

Graduate Student Grants

Research on how tactics of organizational dispute affect the development of unions
Doug Baker, Department of Political Science
Research on how neo-liberal reforms in Mexico have affected clientele networks involving skilled labor
Tom Lewis, Department of Political Science
Research on the relations between U.S. and Mexican labor and civil rights groups during the 1930s and 1940s
Gigi Peterson, Department of History
The Making of the Second Reconstruction: Race, Class, and Power in Alabama, 1941-1963
Ken Lang, Department of History

1994-1995

Faculty Grants

A Mexican Immigrant Community on Puget Sound: An Exploratory Study of Labor Market Integration and Community Formation
Guadalupe Friaz, American Ethnic Studies
Labor and Law at the Margins: Alaskan Cannery Workers and the Politics of Legal Mobilization
Michael McCann, Department of Political Science
Oral History Project on E.D. Nixon
Michael Honey, Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Tacoma
Transnationalization and Industrial Location: Labor and Local Politics in West Bengal, India
Anthony D'Costa, Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Tacoma

Graduate Student Grants

Research on the international politics of labor in the post-Cold War period
Tom Berry, Department of Political Science
Labor in the shipbuilding industry in South Korea
Hwasook Nam, Department of History
Research on labor and political culture in the San Francisco Bay Area in the post-World War II period
Robert Self, Department of History