As Cathy Creighton ’87 and Patricia Campos-Medina ’96, MPS ’97, moved through ILR as undergraduates and into their careers in labor, U.S. unions steadily declined.
Organized labor was seen by many to be a thing of the past.
Well, labor is having a moment.
Creighton and Campos-Medina, who went to work in different facets of the labor movement, say their ILR education taught them that transforming the future of work also meant transforming labor relations in a manner that advances the welfare and rights of workers.
Spurred by pandemic-related issues, many workers organized to protect themselves from unsafe working conditions. After two years of working as essential workers, in March, the unimaginable occurred when Amazon workers at a Staten Island warehouse voted to unionize. Workers at more than 200 Starbucks’ locations filed petitions to organize.
During these developments, Creighton, director of the ILR Buffalo Co-Lab, and Campos-Medina, executive director of ILR’s Worker Institute, have been putting their education and experience to work in roles they now hold at ILR after years in other positions elsewhere that tapped into their educational background.
After graduating from ILR, Campos-Medina joined the labor movement as a strategic campaign researcher for the labor union UNITE. It was the key union fighting for workers rights in the U.S.-based apparel and textile industry, with a work force mainly of women immigrant workers. That job led to a 15-year career as a...
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