What makes a wage just or unjust?
Mon, Oct 09
Guest Speaker: Dr. Daniel Graff
Dr. Graff has been the director of the Higgins Labor Program since 2014. Dedicated to encouraging the Notre Dame community to realize the centrality of “the labor question” — Who does the work, who gets the fruits, and who makes the rules? — to all human endeavors, Graff has initiated projects like the Labor Cafe, Lunchtime Labor RAPS, HFAN (the Higgins Friends & Alumni Network), and the Just Wage Working Group (with Professor Clemens Sedmak). He also writes and curates original online content, including the Labor Song of the Month, Work of Art/Art of Work, and The Labor Question Today blog.
Graff holds a joint faculty appointment as professor of the practice in the department of history, where he served as director of Undergraduate Studies for fifteen years, winning a 2011 Edmund P. Joyce Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and a 2013 Dockweiler Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Advising. His current research projects include labor licensing codes of conduct in contemporary American universities; race, labor, and citizenship in nineteenth-century St. Louis; and representations of the chronic crisis facing workers in the US since 1981.
Today, he will take you back to basics in raising the question: What makes a wage just or unjust?
Read This:
Unless otherwise noted, access readings on the course's Perusall page via Canvas.
- Daniel A. Graff and Kelli Reagan Hickey, "Just Wages for the Workforce: Why Health Care Should Lead the Way" (2022)
- Also read Dr. Graff's Observer columns: "What's up with wages? Nothing, and that's a problem (not a puzzle)" (2018), "How to wage war on low pay" (2018), and "Envisioning a just wage economy" (2018)