Given the turmoil unfolding currently in the federal workforce and the ramifications for civil servants at every level of government—particularly those working in health and educational services—now would be an apt time to talk about what’s happening in terms of organizing and advocacy for public-sector workers, to help put these struggles in historical context, and to think broadly about the impact of these attacks on the public workforce and social services. This conversation will yield ideas about how communities, educational institutions, and labor groups might defend crucial public resources going forward. Speakers: A professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, Eric Blanc is author of the substack Labor Politics as well as the new book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big. Joseph McCartin is a professor of American history at Georgetown University and Executive Director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. McCartin's scholarship focuses on the intersection of labor organization, politics, and public policy. He is the author of more than 130 articles, chapters, and reviews in the fields of labor history and labor studies. Todd Dickey is an assistant professor of public administration and international affairs at Syracuse University where his research and teaching centers on workplace conflict management, federal sector labor relations, and labor-management partnership in the public and nonprofit sectors. From 2022-2024, Todd served as Advisor to the Chairman at the Federal Labor Relations Authority where he assisted with the implementation of the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment’s federal sector labor relations recommendations. Aurora Rojer is a public school social studies teacher and secretary of the Ithaca Teachers Association (ITA). She is also co-chair of the ITA Contract Action Team, who are currently bargaining a contract. MT Snyder is a MILR graduate, a federal worker, and an organizer with the Federal Unionists Network. She joins the conversation in a personal capacity. This event is part of the ILR School's Union Days 2025.

Eric Chyn Can Gifted Education Help Higher-Ability Boys from Disadvantaged Backgrounds? Boys are less likely than girls to enter college, a gap that is often attributed to a lack of non-cognitive skills such as motivation and self-discipline. We study how being classified as gifted – determined by having an IQ score of 116 or higher – affects college entry rates of disadvantaged children in a large urban school district. For boys with IQ’s around the cutoff, gifted identification raises the college entry rate by 25-30 percentage points – enough to catch up with girls in the same IQ range. In contrast, we find small effects for girls. Looking at course-taking and grade outcomes in middle and high school, we find large effects of gifted status for boys that close most of the gaps with girls, but no detectable effects on standardized tests scores of either gender. Overall, we interpret the evidence as demonstrating that gifted services raise the non-cognitive skills of boys conditional on their cognitive skills, leading to gains in educational attainment.