# Immanuel Ness

Immanuel Ness (born June 17, 1958) is an American academic, and Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York (CUNY), Brooklyn, School of Humanities and Social Sciences. His academic focus is on workers' organization, migration, mobilization and politics. He is also a labour activist.
Ness is known for his contributions regarding worker's movements and party formation in the Global South, and has worked with leading activists in India, Southern Africa, East and Southeast Asia. In 1990, he founded the New York Unemployed Committee. He is author and editor of numerous articles and academic and popular books on labour, worker insurgencies and trade unions. Most notably, he worked with Mexican workers, unions, and community organizations in New York City to establish a Code of Conduct for migrant laborers in 2001 who were paid below minimum wage.

## Published work

Ness is editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Labor and Society, (JLSO), a quarterly peer-review social science publication founded in 1997 that examines global political economy, imperialism, workers and labor organisations, and assesses transformative social movements. JLSO editorial board includes scholars in academia and activists in labour movements throughout the world, including Marcel van der Linden, Frances Fox Piven, Amiya Kumar Bagchi and Samir Amin. Ness is general editor of the eight-volume International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 to the Present, Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, and the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, published from 2009 to 2016. His research primarily concerns the situation and politics of the international working class and, more generally, "the global poor", low-wage migrant labour or contractual and informal workers, mainly in the Global South. In 2013, he was a member of an eight-member delegation of the International Commission for Labor Rights investigation of worker repression in India’s auto industry. Brill, Studies in Political Economy of Global Labor and Work, Great Transition Initiative, Toward a Transformative Vision and Praxis, Planetizing the Labor Movement, April 2019, His works include Migration as Economic Imperialism: How International Labour Mobility Undermines Economic Development in Poor Countries, Organizing Insurgency: Workers Movements in the Global South, Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class (Pluto 2015). Immigrants, Unions and the New U.S. Labor Market, and Guest Workers and U.S. Corporate Despotism (University of Illinois Press 2011). His numerous editing projects include the Encyclopedia of American Social Movements (Routledge). The four volume work was recipient of the American Library Association, Best Reference Source.
This numerous edited volumes include: The Oxford Handbook of Economic Imperialism (2021) with Zak Cope, Routledge Handbook of the Gig Economy 2022, and The Oxford Handbook of Migration Crisis, with Cecilia Menjívar and Marie Ruiz, Choke Points: Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain with/ Jake
Alimahomed-Wilson (Pluto Press 2018), Ours to Master and to Own: Workers Councils from the Commune to the Present (Haymarket Books 2011/Neuer ISP Verlag 2013). The volume covers 22 case histories of factory occupations and workers' councils over the past 150 years. His publications appear in English, Spanish, German, Italian, French, Turkish, Chinese, and Japanese. Ness is general editor of Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration (Wiley Blackwell 2013), a 5-volume examination of human mobility from prehistory to the present.

### Practice and Theory

He was a trade union organizer in the U.S. and labour activist in the Global South from 1989 to 2021. 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 the New York Unemployed Committee (1990–1993), which successfully organized 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 in August 1991.

## Lower East Side Community labor coalition

Ness' work is rooted in understanding production and manufacturing as essential to understanding the labour movement and capitalism. Fordism is viewed as an exceptional period which is not the norm; rather the dispersal of industry has pushed the development of contractors and dispersed work sites. In this way, in 1998, he co-founded the Lower East Side Community Labor Coalition in New York City with members of progressive and leftist local groups, which mobilized low-wage workers with support of UNITE Local 169, a labor union in the neighborhood that was previously affiliated with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union. The campaign expanded into a successful effort to mobilise Mexican and Latino immigrant workers along with Mexican workers and the Mexican American Workers Association (AMAT), a workers' center in New York. 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 organization of the annual worldwide labour holiday.
Ness has been a consistent advocate for opening admission to colleges and universities and lowering tuition and fees at City University of New York (CUNY). Following appointment as visiting professor at the University of Hyderabad in January 2016, Ness refused the academic position upon his arrival and actively joined a student strike, mass pickets, and demonstrations at an outdoor encampment to protest structural discrimination against Dalit students that was the cause of the suicide of Rohit Vemula, a graduate student. His refusal to serve as a visiting professor gained national attention in India. Yet Ness maintained,
   “In India, the major contradiction and division is the difference between permanent and contract, and it plays itself out in furthering the super exploitation of the labour force of this country.”
Ness was elected chair of the Professional Staff Congress City University of New York (PSC/CUNY) International Committee in September 2016 and has been chair of the United States Peace Council in May 2018, advocating for working-class solidarity and against war and imperialism. In May 2021, as PS International Committee Chair, Ness sponsored the passage of a ‘No Cold War with China Resolution, now official policy of Professional Staff Congress, the faculty and staff union of City University of New York. In addition, Ness, helped shepherd a resolution condemning Israel for its intolerance and violence towards Palestinians.

## Working class spontaneity and Marxism–Leninism

In 1990s, his research became more critical of traditional unions, and he began to participate in advancing rank-and-file self-activity outside of traditional structures through new forms of autonomist Marxist unions. His advocacy included solidarity efforts with new and independent unions that had few or limited links to trade union centers and affiliates. Much of his organizing, advocacy, and research since 2015 has focused on a rejection of utopian and idealist notions propounded by social democrats, anarchists, Western Marxists, and through applying an anti-imperialist state-centered Marxist approach rooted in unequal exchange between the rich countries of the Global North and poor countries of the Global South, which comprise 85% of the world’s population. Ness is formulating a reconceptualization of the centrality of the working class as a social force in building disciplined workers parties, accountable to mass workers and actually existing socialist states (AES).