Workplace Protections “Part of the American Dream”
Growing up in Nigeria, Ifeoma Ajunwa saw America as a land of opportunity.
Today, as assistant professor of labor and employment law at the ILR School and associate member of the Cornell Law faculty, Ajunwa works to ensure that the U.S. remains a place of opportunity for workers.
“To me, making sure there are laws in the workplace to protect against bias and discrimination and that allow people of all races and genders to achieve economic progress, that’s part of the American dream,” she says. “That’s why I’m passionate about what I do.”
Ajunwa, who emigrated to the United States at age 14 has had a long-standing appreciation for the law. Witnessing Nigeria’s political turbulence at a young age, “it struck me that having strong laws could make people’s lives better,” she says.
Her research, at the intersection of law and technology, focuses on the ethical governance of workplace technologies. Ajunwa studies such topics as worker privacy, productivity applications, wearable technology in the workplace, and hiring platforms.
One of her papers, “Limitless Worker Surveillance” which surveyed existing technology and business practices of tracking workers and which made proposals for new laws to protect employee data, has been downloaded more than 3,000 times and was endorsed in a published opinion of the NY Times Editorial Board.
In a TEDx Cornell University talk in May, she discussed how new tech is compounding hiring discrimination.
Ajunwa joined the ILR School in 2017, finding it “the embodiment of multidisciplinary research for the public good.”
In 2018, Ajunwa won a Cornell grant for a collaborative project through the Institute for the Social Sciences where she is part of a team of Cornell professors who are conducting multidisciplinary research on Algorithms, Big Data and Inequality.
“We’re looking at how issues of inequality may arise from the use of algorithms in the workplace,” she says. “We want to ensure that algorithms are used in a way that is beneficial to society, not detrimental.”
“When we think about hiring algorithms, or even algorithms in general,” she says, “there’s a tendency to think that because they’re artificial intelligence, they’re more objective than humans. My research shows that’s not always the case. Algorithms are created by humans, and, as a result, they have the biases of humans baked in.”
Her forthcoming book, “The Quantified Worker,” examines how technology has changed the nature and experience of work, and how laws can moderate the impact of technology on workers and on society. The book is due out later this year from Cambridge University Press.
Ajunwa, who hopes her work will have practical applications for both companies and lawmakers, presents widely at professional conferences and to governmental agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
She has also been published in top academic journals in both sociology and law and in popular media such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Atlantic. She is frequently called upon as an academic expert by the media to comment on law and technology issues and employment debates.
In January, Ajunwa received the 2018 Derrick A. Bell Jr. Award from the Association of American Law Schools. The award, presented by the organization’s Section on Minority Groups, recognizes “a junior faculty member who, through activism, mentoring, colleagueship, teaching and scholarship, has made an extraordinary contribution to legal education, the legal system or social justice.”
Before joining Cornell, Ajunwa was a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, where she remains a faculty associate. She earned a doctorate in sociology, with a focus on organizational theory and law and society, from Columbia University.
“The Cornell motto of ‘Any person … any study’ resonates with me deeply,” Ajunwa says. “It’s the type of mission I want to stand behind.”