Katy Habr

Katy Habr is a Ph.D. student and Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in the Sociology Department at Columbia University. She is a fellow at the INCITE Labor Lab and part of the Worker Empowerment Research Network.

Katy focuses on labor and political economy. Her research interests include precarious work, the gig economy, underemployment, labor organizing, and political education. She uses quantitative and qualitative methods to study changes in the nature of employment and strategies for building worker power. Her dissertation focuses on underemployment and employer cost cutting through insecure scheduling. She is also currently working on a project examining the impact of the gig economy on retail work, as well as projects studying the impact of political education on union members and examining changes in union organizing and employer anti-union tactics. She is the recipient of the  Mayer N. Zald Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Student Paper Award from the ASA Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements and the  Daniel Bell Award for Publicly-Minded Sociology. 

Katy graduated from Cornell University in 2018 as a Hunter R. Rawlings III Presidential Research Scholar with a B.S. with Honors in Industrial and Labor Relations. Before coming to Columbia University, Katy was a researcher for the United Steelworkers Union in Pittsburgh.