2005
I am a researcher in the social sciences with a key interest in labor. I am a professor at the University of Louvain, senior tenured fellow of the Belgium National Fund for Scientific Research, and a senior research associate of the Labor and Worklife program at Harvard Law School. I am currently the President of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium.
After studying at MIT and a post-doc at the Labor and Worklife Program, I came back to Brussels in 2005, right after the TUP, as a fellow of the Belgian equivalent of the national science foundation and lecturer at the University of Louvain. I have remained affiliated with the Labor and Worklife Program, traveling back to Cambridge MA every year and maintining close collaborations ever since. My critical focus is on democratizing the workplace, and doing so is pursued through workers rights and the central agency of unions. I have developed a proposal of corporate governance that enables to shift from the current capitalist corporate governance system where workers have no rights, to the worker-governed and owned cooperative firm, which I call Economic Bicameralism. You can access my work via www.isabelleferreras.net and check-out the global effort that I am co-leading: www.DemocratizingWork.org
What impact has the HTUP had on your life/career? I was a fresh post-doctoral Wertheim Fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program during the academic year 2004-05 when Elaine Bernard insisted on the fact that I attended the TUP. I couldn’t have anticipated how much this experience would come to shape my own understanding and views. The perspective that the TUP offered to me on the particular problems faced by the anglo-saxon labor movement radicalized my own understanding: if one let an economy be governed by capitalists, the State being their ally, the fate of workers’ rights is very dark, plus, the fate of the Planet lies in the balance… For my young European eyes, it was a wake-up call to realize that the contemporary weakness of the US labor movement was the result of intentional work carried out by the business community and its academic allies over decades. And this could potentially happen anywhere on the surface of the globe… even in Europe where the labor movement feels still powerful… what union leaders back home were certainly not imagining at the time. My perspective at economic issues has been enormously impacted by the fantastic union leaders I met at the TUP in 2005, and the lecturers of the program (Elaine, David Weil, Richard Freeman, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn,…). And I completed the TUP with the resolve that my work contribute to addressing the root causes of workers’s situation, in order to bring structural solutions, not temporary fixes.
I really want to express here my deepest gratitude to Elaine for the really amazing opportunity that attending the TUP meant to me.
Do you have an interesting/funny story of when you attended the program? I have many memories of fun and interesting times spent with Elaine in particular, but also Jack, Greg, and Lorette, and then all the TUP ’05 participants. If I have to pick one, I will choose one speaking to this web-generated Alumni Report which could « potentially become a book » (!), a memory speaking to the fact that anticipating the use of technologies, developing original uses, has always been central to the TUP concerns. I remember very fondly that Howard Zinn after his -fantastic- lecture told Elaine and me that he had to cancel a conference abroad but wanted to send a message to the organizers nevertheless. This was 2005, a time without iphone nor zoom. I had a camera that I used for my field research —in the context of my PhD dissertation I had been interviewing supermarkets’ check-out clerks. So I shoot this video with Howard, and had it sent to the conference organizers. And this is just one way to illustrate the fact that it was well beyond my initial understanding that the TUP led me to …new places, to the place where I am today, and which I would never have been able to anticipate, but with a clear focus: still trying to contribute to making workers and their unions central to the government of their own (work-)lifes.
CONTACT INFORMATION
Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium, 1190
isabelle.ferreras@uclouvain.be