Immanuel Ness teaches political science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He is a labour activist, organiser, and author and editor of numerous articles and academic and popular books on labour, worker insurgencies, public health and trade unions, migration, and social transformtion.
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Since 2000, Ness has edited WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society a quarterly peer-review social science publication founded in 1997 and listed on leading indexing services that examines workers and labour organizations from a critical, socialist, perspective. WUSA's editorial board includes: Dario Azzellini, Stanley Aronowitz, Debdas Banerjee, Steve Early, Ralf Hoffrogge, Robin D.G. Kelley, Frances Fox Piven, Gigi Roggero, Saskia Sassen, Ben Trott, and Lucien van der Walt, among others. Ness is general editor of the eight-volume Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 to the Present a scholarly reference published in 2009 by Wiley-Blackwell, recipient of numerous awards from leading libraries, and academic institutions, and accolades from reviewers. He writes on the working class, the poor, and low-wage labour, and precarious workers. His major collaborators included Paul Le Blanc, Dario Azzellini, Peter Rousset, Beverly Tomek, Geoffroy de Laforcade, Soma Marik, and Cliff Conner.
His research is on worker resistance, including rank-and-file action, unemployed movements, and autonomist labour organizations. His works include Immigrants, Unions and the New U.S. Labor Market (Temple University Press 1995) and Guest Workers and U.S. Corporate Despotism (University of Illinois Press 2011). His numerous editing projects include the Encyclopedia of American Social Movements. The four volume work was recipient of the American Library Association, Best Reference Source.
He has recently co-edited with Dario Azzellini, covering 22 case histories of worker factory occupations and workers' councils since the Paris Commune: Ours to Master and to Own: Workers Councils from the Commune to the Present (Haymarket Books 2011/Nuerer ISP Verlag 2011). His publications appear in English, Spanish, German, Italian, French, Chinese, and Japanese.
He was a trade union organiser and labour activist from 1990 to 2011. During this period, he learned to advocate on behalf of disconnected jobless workers to organize their own association directly at New York State unemployed offices. In 1990, he co-founded with Keith Brooks the New York Unemployed Committee (1990–1993), which successfully organised jobless workers at New York State unemployment centers to press for federal unemployment benefit extensions through public protests and demonstrations directed at national and state elected officials, in many cases, often members of the Democratic Party who had surrendered to Republicans during the presidency of George H.W. Bush. Rallies were held in New York City, and with other jobless organizations in Washington, DC., and Kennebunkport, Maine, vacation home of George Bush I.
In 1998, he co-founded the Lower East Side Community Labor Coalition, which mobilised low-wage workers with support of labour organisations. The campaign expanded into a successful effort to mobilise Mexican and Latino immigrant workers along with Gerardo Dominguez, a labour activist, and the Mexican American Workers Association (AMAT).
He helped organise large Mayday demonstrations in New York City, centered around authentic-worker led mobilizations for immigrant rights from 1999 to 2001, often culminating in mass arrests of street theatre and protests by New York City police, setting a precedent of immigrant leadership and participation in the US organisation of the annual worldwide labour holiday. In 2002, when the greengrocer workers campaign ended as part of a trade union brokered deal between two rival unions, Ness vocally opposed the bureaucratic arrangement, and became disenchanted with the failure of established and traditional labour unions to defend worker interests at a time when the power of immigrant workers were at a peak in New York. At the time he also withdrawn and criticised progressive local Democratic Party operatives for their entrance into mainstream politics, and failure to move beyond conventional electoral politics to community-based organizing.
His belief that bureaucratic unions were mostly ineffective, if not counterproductive in mobilizing the working class, caused him to shift his focus to new forms of union organizing rooted in rank-and-file self activity, anarcho-syndicalism, cooperatives and workers councils, and protest movements directed against traditional political parties, mainstream trade unions unions and their conservative liberal-democratic allies. Established unions have frequently eschewed his calls for working class democracy and a return to rank and file led-syndicalism rooted in new forms of worker organizing that he has called "parallel unions" of democratic organisation.
As he initiated in a campaign in New York city to advance the rights of the most exploited migrant workers, his scholarly output also centred on migration and labour, including a five-year comprehensive project tracing global human population movements from pre-history to the present. He is general editor of the The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, with leading scholars throughout the world, including archaeologists, classicists, historians, sociologists, and immigrant advocates across disciplines. He has collaborated with Saër Maty Bâ, Stephen Castles, Raúl Delgado Wise, Donna Gabaccia, Michael Borgolte, Alex Julca, Hye-Kyung Lee, Greg Woolf, Dirk Hoerder, among other migration scholars. Ness speaks widely on working class organizing in the U.S., Caribbean, Africa, and South Asia, labour militancy, the foundation of cooperative workers' councils, and migrant worker struggles at socialist and left conferences, labour research institutes, universities, and worker centers in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and South America. He is working with independent workers organisations and documenting mobilizations outside of traditional labour models--including efforts by workers to democratically organise autonomous unions outside of traditional labour jurisdictions throughout the world, the rights of disenfranchised migrant workers, anti-capitalism, and opposition to global neoliberal governance.
Biography written by Rank-And-File Publishers and updated by International Solidarity Movement. Centre for Labour Renewal