Gordon Lafer

Gordon Lafer is political economist writer who has served as Senior Labor Policy Advisor for the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Education and Labor and has a history of Labor Union activism. He has written widely on labor and employment policy issues^[1] and is the author of The Job Training Charade.^[2]

Biography

Gordon Lafer started his political work as an economic policy analyst in the Office of the Mayor in New York City under Mayor Ed Koch.^[3]

He was one of the leaders of the Graduate Employees and Students Organization at Yale, which was on strike several times in the 1990s.^[4][5]

Lafer served as Research and Communications Director for the Federation of University Employees at Yale.^[6]

He ran a hotel workers' campaign with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, Local 142, in Hawaii,^[7][8] and wrote about the campaign in the magazine Dissent.^[9]

At the University of Oregon, Lafer and mathematician Marie A. Vitulli led an effort to unionize faculty at the University of Oregon beginning in the spring of 2007.^[10] This effort eventually led to the formation of the United Academics at the University of Oregon.^[11]

He worked for ILWU Local 142, helping coordinate the boycott of the Pacific Beach Hotel,^[12] which was found guilty of multiple labor law violations in federal court.^[13] After a ten-year struggle, the hotel unionized in 2013.^[14]

Lafer has served as Senior Labor Policy Advisor for the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Education and the Workforce,^[15] a position that made him the top congressional staff member responsible for upholding labor standards in international trade treaties,^[16] and he has been called to testify as an expert witness before multiple state legislatures.^[17] He was the primary Congressional staff person responsible for the Local Jobs for America Act,^[18] a bill that would have created one million decently-paid jobs and restored essential public services that were cut during the Great Recession. The bill was introduced by Rep. George Miller (D-CA), chair of the United States House Committee on Education and the Workforce, but never became law.^[19][20]

Lafer is a member of the Scholars' Advisory Council of in the Public Interest,^[21] a research and policy center promoting democratic control of public goods and services.^[22]

He is the founding co-chair of the American Political Science Association's Labor Project,^[23] and serves on the board of directors of the Shalom Hartman Institute,^[24] a pluralistic center of research and education deepening and elevating the quality of Jewish life in Israel and around the world.^[25]

Works

Lafer's work has appeared in The Nation^[26] and U.S. News & World Report^[27] and has been featured in The Washington Post,^[28] The New York Times,^[29] Fortune magazine,^[30] and other publications.

He is currently an Associate Professor in the Labor Education & Research Center at the University of Oregon and a Research Associate of the Economic Policy Institute.^[31]

Lafer's 2017 book is The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time.^[32][33]

References