Immanuel Ness

Immanuel Ness is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He was born on 17 June 1958 in Denver, Colorado, USA. He is a labour activist who founded the New York Unemployed Committee, Lower East Side Community-Labor Coalition and labor organiser for several unions. He is author and editor of numerous articles and academic and popular books on labour, worker insurgencies, community public and social health, and trade unions. Notably, he worked with Mexican workers, unions, and community organizations in New York City to establish a Code of Conduct for migrant laborers in 2001 who were paid below minimum wage.

Since January 2000, Ness has edited WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society, WUSA/JLS, a quarterly peer-review social science publication founded in 1997 that examines the political economy of workers and labor organizations from a critical, socialist, and democratic perspective. WUSA's editorial board includes schlars in academia and activists in labour movements throughout the world. In 2006, he was the recipient of the Christian Bay Award for best paper presented at the New Political Science Section. Ness is general editor of the eight-volume Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 to the Present a scholarly reference published in 2009 by Wiley-Blackwell, a finalist for the 2009 Dartmouth Medal and in the same year received honorable mention from the American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence. He writes on the working class, the poor, and low-wage labour, and precarious workers.

His research is on worker resistance, including rank-and-file action, unemployed movements, and autonomist labour organizations. His works include Immigrants, Unions and the New U.S. Labor Market (Temple University Press 1995) and Guest Workers and U.S. Corporate Despotism (University of Illinois Press 2011). His numerous editing projects include the Encyclopedia of American Social Movements (M.E Sharpe). The four volume work was recipient of the American Library Association, Best Reference Source.

In 2009 he co-edited "Real World Labor" for the Dollars and Sense Collective. The work is now in its second volume. In 2011, he co-edited Ours to Master and to Own: Workers Councils from the Commune to the Present (Haymarket Books 2011/Neuer ISP Verlag 2013). The volume covers 22 case histories of worker factory occupations and workers' councils over the past 150 years. His publications appear in English, Spanish, German, Italian, French, Chinese, and Japanese. Ness is general editor of Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration (Wiley Blackwell 2013), a 5 volume examination of human mobility from prehistory to the present. In 2014, Ness authored a book titled Southern Insurgency: the Rise of the Global Working Class.

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