Please join us on Wednesday, January 16, for a talk by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez entitled “Bread and Butter or Bread and Roses? Dilemmas of Solidarity in the Public Sector Labor Movement”.  Dr. Hertel-Fernandez is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University’s School of International and Political Affairs.  His focus in on US political economy, with an emphasis on the politics of organized interests and public policy. In recent work, Hertel-Fernandez has examined the strategies that businesses have developed to lobby across the states, the ways that wealthy individuals are intervening in politics and their effect on the US political terrain, and the politics of social programs, including unemployment insurance and Medicaid.

Hertel-Fernandez’s 2018 book, Politics at Work, published by Oxford University Press, examined how American businesses are increasingly recruiting their workers into politics and how that practice is shaping American politics and policy. While in residence at the Foundation, he will be writing a book tentatively titled Labor Under Pressure: Consequences of Anti-Union Advocacy and Possibilities for New Mobilization. The book will document the political effects of anti-union legislation pursued across the US in recent decades, with an emphasis on two significant reforms: right-to-work laws and cutbacks to government employee organizing and bargaining rights. He plans to utilize the academic debates over labor unions and labor law in political science, sociology, and labor economics and explore the possible new forms of labor mobilization that unions could deploy in the wake of these restrictions.

His monograph co-authored with Theda Skocpol, of Harvard University, on the development and evolution of the Koch political network, The Koch Effect, is currently under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

Hertel-Fernandez received his PhD in government and social policy from Harvard University in 2016.   In 2016 he was also named one of Pacific Standard’s “30 under 30 Thinkers.”