Cook-Gray Lecture Will Examine Transformative Labor Movement

Annelise Orleck, professor of history and co-chair of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College, will deliver the 2025 Alice Cook-Lois Gray Distinguished Lecture on April 15.

“Poverty Wages, 'We're Not Lovin' It': Gender, Race and Inequality Rising in the 21st Century” begins at 4:30 p.m. in the ILR Conference Center, 423 King-Shaw Hall, at 140 Garden Avenue. 

The public is invited and can register here. In-person attendance is encouraged. For those who can only attend via Zoom, a link will be included in the registration confirmation email.

The talk will examine the transformative moment in labor history that began around 2010, when low-wage workers in service, retail, garment, and farm work began organizing global labor actions of unprecedented scale involving workers on six continents and in scores of countries. 

The new movement, heavily led by women of color and queer people, was sparked not just by widespread discontent with poverty wages, but also by issues such as sexual harassment, pregnancy discrimination, the gender wage gap and discrimination against queer and trans workers, and racial justice, Orleck said.

Orleck’s lecture will examine this period and reflect on how it led to the latest wave of labor uprisings at Starbucks, Amazon, Google and college campuses. 

Many activists in this 21st-century labor movement are self-taught labor historians, keenly aware of "whose shoulders they stand on," according to Orleck, noting the inspiring impact of early 20th-century U.S. garment worker-activists on 21st-century garment worker-activists in Bangladesh and Cambodia. 

Orleck is the author of five books on labor, immigration, women's and poor people's movements. They include “Common Sense and a Little Fire; Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States” (1995), for which she did research at the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives in Catherwood Library, part of Cornell University Library and located in the ILR School; “Soviet Jewish Americans” (1999); “Storming Caesars' Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty” (2005); “Rethinking American Women's Activism” (2014); and “We Are All Fast Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages” (2018).

The annual ILR lecture is named after deceased ILR faculty members Alice Hanson Cook and Lois Spier Gray and is held to advance their visions of social justice and equality. This year’s event was organized by Rosemary Batt, ILR’s Alice Hanson Cook Professor of Women and Work, and Pamela Tolbert, the Lois S. Gray Professor of ILR and Social Sciences.

This year’s lecture is co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Inequality; Cornell Center for Social Sciences; Cornell Population Center; Department of Sociology; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program; and the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy.