Featured News

Student co-conveners Manfred Elfstrom and Mark Gough, both from Cornell University, invite all interested doctoral students to attend the 15^th Annual PhD Consortium on June 8, 2013 at the LERA 65^th Annual Meeting in St. Louis. In keeping with the Annual Meeting’s theme, “The Future of Work,” this year’s Consortium is entitled “Conflict and Conflict Resolution: New Trends and Actors.” Students, faculty, and invited panelists will discuss the dynamic changes occurring in the workplace as American union membership continues to decline and workers’ centers, employment lawyers and arbitrators and consumer and student groups are coming to play important roles.  In addition to exploring developments like these that have important implications for the field, participants will make new academic connections and receive valuable professional preparation.

As in the past, the program will be short but intensive. It will begin with a breakfast meeting with Deans and Directors from HR/IR schools. This will be followed by presentations of papers from the University Council of HR/IR Programs Best Student Paper Competition—for which the Deans and Directors panel also serve as reviewers—and a panel on this year’s consortium theme including both academics and practitioners (to be determined). Students will join LERA’s Presidential Luncheon and socialize over an informal dinner in the evening. Consortium details will be updated under “15th Annual PhD Student Consortium” in the Annual Meeting section of the LERA website. Students planning to attend need to register for the meeting with LERA but may have a portion of the $115 registration fee (early-bird price for LERA student members) reimbursed after the conference, given available funds. Breakfast, lunch and dinner will be provided.

For additional information please contact consortium co-chairs: Mark Gough (mdg235@cornell.edu) and Manfred Elfstrom (ime8@cornell.edu). To attend the event, students need to 1) register for the LERA 65th Annual Meeting, and 2) RSVP to the Consortium Co-Chairs using the online form.

(Editor's note: This story appears in the April LERA e-newsletter. To access the complete newsletter, click here.)

In case you haven’t received your invitation yet, you need to know that your venerable Labor and Employment Relations Association is celebrating the occasion of its 65^th Annual Meeting, The Future of Work, June 6-9 in St. Louis by stepping out and hosting our own Annual Meeting.

Building on our very successful past, the calendar change from LERA’s traditional January meeting to June is only most obvious change. Yes, LERA has chosen to go independent from its traditional mid-winter

American Economic Association meeting partner. The reasons, says new LERA Executive Director Eric Duchinsky (pictured right): More programming, service, options, and focus one LERA member experiences.

• Meeting programs start at 8 a.m. Thursday, June 6, and wrap up at 12:15 p.m. on Sunday, June 9.
• More specific attention to the needs of all of LERA's constituencies: practitioners, chapter members, managers, H.R. professionals, arbitrators-mediators and academics.

Take a look at this year’s program. There are fresh sessions you will notice if you attended our first 64 annual get togethers: Bullying in the workplace, chaired by past LERA president Marlene Heyser; a mock arbitration hearing; 21^st century apprenticeship programs in St. Louis; building a local LERA chapter, presented by the host St. Louis Gateway LERA chapter; and finding and using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, presented by longtime LERA sponsor BNA (now Bloomberg BNA).

Click here to register for LERA's 65th Annual Meeting.

Click here to make your hotel registration. Reservation code for discount rate: "LERA 65th Annual Meeting."

Editor's note: This story appears in the LERA e-newsletter. Click here to access the newsletter.

The St. Louis Gateway LERA chapter members, says Gateway Chapter treasurer Eric Mooshegian (pictured left), have taken it as a matter of pride to be great hosts and to set the standard for other chapters to host future meetings. This reflects a conscious effort on the parts of the LERA Executive Board and the Program Committee to not only better connect our researchers to members’ needs but also to make our chapters more central to LERA as an organization.

In addition, Mooshgian et al. are enthusiastically and proudly introducing their city, its baseball team and cuisine to its LERA visitors.  The Arizona Diamondbacks are in to play hometown Cardinals on Wednesday (June 5) and Thursday (June 6) with group-priced tickets available at registration and the ballpark a 10-min. walk from the hotel. On-your-own activities include a Budweiser brewery tour, a visit to the Arch and a night out downtown (Laclede’s Landing) with a riverfront walking tour, riverboat cruises, dining and shopping, with many other options available.

On Friday there's a Sheet Metal Workers' Apprenticeship Training Center tour. The training school is a partnership between Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors National Association (SMACNA) St. Louis and the Sheet Metal Workers' International Association (SMWIA) Local 36. It provides apprentices and experienced tradesmen the ongoing training they need to stay competitive. See a brief video presentation about the Center, read an article that appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for more information.

A special Friday evening culinary experience compliments of the Gateway chapter: Go to dinner at St. Louis' finest dining venues — Carmine's Steak House, Lobardo Trattoria, Maggie O'Brien's Restaurant and Irish Pub, Bogart's (BBQ) and Zia's — with Gateway chapter member hosts. The food will be great, and the hosts' St. Louis insider local color is free.

This year's program also includes the traditional LERA Annual Meeting faves. The National Policy Forum Friday lunch speaker is Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-Mo., ret., pictured right).

Gephartdt served in Congress from 1977 to 2005 and was House Majority Leader from 1989 to 1995. He was a Democratic candidate for the presidential nomination in 1988 and 2004. Gephardt was considered an economic populist, favoring fair trade, progressive taxation, universal health care and the rights of labor unions.

On Saturday morning the 15 Annual Ph.D. Consortium takes place. Co chairs are Cornell doctoral degree candidates Manfred Elfstrom and Mark Gough. The theme of the meeting of LERA's next generation of leaders is "Conflict and Conflict Resolution: New Trends and Actors." The all-morning session will include breakfast with LERA deans and program heads, a student paper competition roundtable, and a panel discussion.

On Saturday is the President's Lunch with the traditional keynote speech by LERA's outgoing president. When the gavel closes this year's meeting President David Lewin (UCLA) will pass LERA's leadership torch to LERA President-elect Lisa Lynch, Brandeis University dean.

 

 

 

The Cornell University School of Industrial Relations' David Lipsky, a past LERA president and longtime member, was one of three university-wide recipent of Cornell's prestigious Steven H. Weiss Presidential Fellowship awards in recognition of inspiring teaching of undergraduates.

From the Cornell Jan. 15 award announcement on the Weiss Presidential Fellowship: "The fellowships, established in 1993 by the board, recognizes tenured faculty members with "sustained records of effective, inspiring and distinguished teaching of undergraduate students and contributions to undergraduate education." Named for former board chair Stephen H. Weiss '57, who endowed the program, the award includes $5,000 per year for five years to be used for any university-related purpose."

Editor's note: This story appears in the LERA e-newsletter. Click here to access the newsletter.

Ariel Avgar, (pictured at left) an assistant professor at the University of Illinois' School of Labor and Employment Relations who met Lipsky while doing his doctoral studies at Cornell says the Weiss award "is a huge deal at Cornell, a big, big deal campus wide at Cornell." Such a huge deal that Avgar said Cornell president David J. Skorton called Lipsky up to inform him that he had won the award.

"What makes David such a phenomenal teacher — and I've co-taught course with him — is his insatiable curiousity about peeople, about what motivates people, what they've done, what they're going to do ... His mind is a steel trap — there's nothing he doesn't remember, he knows so much about so many things — he's very much a renaissance man — a great, great guy."

Who is still excited to come to work each day, Avgar says: "Every year [for the eight years] I've known him he's taken on more and more new projects on new things, and he's always excited about the new things."

Avgar and Lipsky have done research together, one an ambitious sutdy of nursing homes and the effects of introducing high-tech tools into the health care workplace and their effects on workers.

"The organizations we studies used the new IT equipment in one of three ways," Avgar says. "Some organizations used the equipment to gain more control over their workers; others focused on efficiency, using the new tools to save money; and some organizations used the equipment to empower their workers and upscale what they were able to do."

The takeaway, says Avgar: "How different organizations used new IT equipment is more important than the informational power of the equipment itself."

The message to industry decision makers and health care policy makers: "Merely adding or upgrading technology is insufficent in itself to improve care delivery."  

Avgar says students recognize and respond to Lipsky's knowledge and enthusiasm: "Any time you go to his office, there are students waiting." And not just current students, either, also students returning 20-30 years after graduation. One of Lipsky's messages to his students, Avgar says, is the importance of joining and maintaining their LERA memberships as they advance in their careers.

One of Lipsky's former students, Marty Scheinmen, provided the funds for the Scheinmen Instititute on Conflict that Lipsky now directs.

Lipsky is the Anne Evans Estabrook Professor of Dispute Resolution and former dean (1988-97) of Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. He joined the Cornell faculty in 1969. Lipsky is the author or co-authoer or more than 70 articles and book chapters and author/editor of 15 books and monographs. In 1997, the New York State Senate passed a resolution honoring Lipsky "for his distinguished contributions as dean of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations [at] Cornell University." Click here to access Lipsky's academic vita.