ILR Welcomes Four to Faculty

Four new faculty members will begin teaching at ILR this fall. The new faculty hires will enable ILR to continue to offer an outstanding curriculum for its undergraduate and graduate students, as well as expand its course offerings into important new world of work topics.

The Human Resource Studies Department will welcome Alex Kowalski and Caitlin Ray, while the Labor Relations, Law, & History Department will welcome Gali Racabi and Yiran Zhang.

Faculty beginning at ILR this fall and their departments are:

Alex Kowalski, Human Resource Studies
Education
• Ph.D., Management, MIT
• M.C.P., Housing, Community, and Economic Development, University of California, Berkeley
• B.A., Journalism and Mass Communication, University of North Carolina

Research
Kowalski’s research explores ways to support good quality jobs in challenging business environments. He currently studies work inside e-commerce fulfillment centers, where many businesses are attempting to handle fluctuating consumer demand by adjusting employee schedules in real time. Using a variety of research methods ranging from interviews to field experiments, Kowalski shows how certain managerial cultures generate problematic schedules, how these schedules tend to accrue to already disadvantaged employees, and how these schedules are costly to employers.

Gali Racabi, Labor Relations, Law, & History
Education
• S.J.D., Harvard Law School
• B.A./LL.B, Haifa University

Research
Racabi studies employment and labor law. His two main research streams focus on anti-discrimination law, and student-worker unions. Racabi’s dissertation, “Law and Power in Uber as a Workplace: How did the law affect the strategies of organizers, regulators, and drivers in their interactions with Uber?” focused on Uber drivers in the United States.

Caitlin Ray, Human Resource Studies
Education
• Ph.D., Business Administration, University of South Carolina
• MBA, Finance, Fayetteville State University
• B.A., Music, University of New Hampshire

Research
Ray’s research focuses on understanding how, when, and why employees collectively bring value to their organizations. It often centers on the dynamic properties that alter group composition, such as employee mobility, and the relational properties that influence the value that forms between individuals within groups, such as social capital and fit.

Yiran Zhang, Labor Relations, Law, & History
Education
• S.J.D., Harvard Law School
• LL.B., Tsinghua University

Research
Zhang’s research studies the governance of care work at the intersection of the often-informal labor markets and the economic household. She is interested in the ways in which law and policies shape the power dynamics affecting paid and unpaid social reproductive labor, especially the labor that is traditionally associated with “women’s work.” Zhang’s first stream of research uses interview-based methods to study how law and market norms impacts informal workers’ workplace, family and migration strategies in Asia. Her second stream of research examines how U.S. public spending programs shape the care economy, the life of workers, care recipients, their families and work law.