Made with Equity: Advancing Technology, Racial Equity and Job Quality in U.S. Manufacturing

New technologies have the potential to position U.S. manufacturing for a resurgence. This is great news for manufacturers, especially given current labor shortages. But could investments in technology and innovation also benefit frontline manufacturing workers and if so, how can institutional actors, including workforce development and manufacturing extension programs, influence that outcome in ways that are also racially inclusive? This question is at the heart of my on-going collaboration with Portland State University, RTI International and the Urban Manufacturing Alliance. Our research focuses on place-based initiatives in order to understand how they jointly pursue inclusion and innovation through a mix of worker and firm-centered supports. These cases will offer a roadmap for advancing racial equity within US manufacturing, promoting fairer wages, while forging career pathways that give workers of color the chance to meaningfully participate in a more innovative manufacturing future.

See my evaluation of IMEC’s Genesis program in Chicago with Greg Schrock (Portland State University), Ranita Jain (Annie E. Casey Foundation) and Maureen Conway (Aspen Institute).

My report with UNC graduate students on Manufacturing Extension center responses to COVID-19 is also available here (pdf)

Climate Change and Work

Climate warming is the fundamental challenge of our time, not only because it will radically transform our natural environment but also because it will redefine jobs and livelihoods. Natasha Iskander (NYU) and I explore how climate change pressures affect work, production and technology in the US construction industry. We are centering this research on innovations in low carbon concrete and the mostly immigrant frontline workforce tasked with using these new materials to construct urban buildings. Our project digs deeper than a concern with numbers of jobs destroyed or created to consider the way that climate pressures will define and redefine the structure of work, the conditions under which workers perform it, the skills they use, and the ways that the organization of work enables the adoption and development of new technologies. Building on themes raised in an article we published in the Annual Review of Political Science, we use this project to contemplate the conditions under which worker interests are foregrounded or instead marginalized as industries mobilize in response to climate change.

COVID-19 Retooling

Factories are adapting to the new conditions and needs the pandemic has introduced by retooling production lines and repurposing knowledge and technology to manufacture essential items for COVID‑19 management. Tara Vinodrai (University of Toronto) and I explore the nature and scale of these retooling efforts by manufacturing firms in the US and Canada and explore the national and regional institutional supports that turn this crisis response into a resource for economic regeneration.