Contemporary work and the conditions for worker organizing are changing dramatically due to the diffusion of new digital and data driven technologies. In his talk, Brishen Rogers explored how major companies have used advanced information technologies to limit worker power, and how labor law reform could reverse that trend. Rogers drew on his recent book, Data and Workplace Democracy: Advanced Information Technologies, Labor Law, and the New Working Class (MIT Press 2023), as well as recent ethnographic work on new organizing strategies among baristas to point to emergent possibilities for labor success.

This event was organized by the Economic Planning and Democracy Politics research project at the Neubauer Collegium.

About the Speaker

Brishen Rogers is a professor of law at Georgetown University. His scholarship focuses on how labor and employment laws shape class formation, especially among low-wage and marginalized workers. Rogers’s law review articles have been published in various journals and have been cited in at least two landmark cases. He has taught at Temple University and Harvard Law School, has held visiting positions at Washington University in St. Louis and at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and was previously a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. Rogers worked in the labor movement both before and after law school, including as part of SEIU’s Justice for Janitors campaign.