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The Work and Labor Idea Lab investigates the forces, institutions and ideas that shape and regulate labor markets. It focuses on modes of collective action and interactions among workers, employers, markets and society at large, paying particular attention to the future of labor movements at home and abroad and how they address and are shaped by technological and other transformations.
Launched in Fall 2022, the Work and Labor Idea Lab builds on and expands the Columbia Labor Lab at the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics, a research center at Columbia that has a mission to create knowledge for public action. The Lab is co-led by Professors Kate Andrias, Alex Hertel-Fernandez, Suresh Naidu and Adam Reich. Each professor engages with unions and labor organizations at the level of organizing and collective bargaining as well with federal and state policymaking. They spearhead randomized controlled trials studying organizational and technological solutions to collective action problems and help develop legal frameworks to transform the background rules-of-the-game labor organizations face.
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Events
Grants
The Faculty Grant opportunity is now closed. The next application cycle will open in December 2025.
The Graduate Student Grant opportunity is now closed. The next application cycle will open in September 2025.
Faculty Leadership
Suresh Naidu is Jack Wang and Echo Ren Professor of Economics and Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.
He has a B.Math in Pure Mathematics from the Unversity of Waterloo, a MA in economics from the University of Massachussetts-Amherst, and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. He was a Harvard Academy fellow from 2008-2010, and has been at Columbia since 2010. He works on political economy and historical labor markets. He has interests in the economic effects of democracy and non-democracy, monopsony in labor markets, the economics of American slavery, guest worker migration, and labor unions and labor organizing. In addition to being a faculty Co-director for the Center for Political Economy, he is external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Kate Andrias teaches and writes in the fields of constitutional law, labor law, and administrative law. Her scholarship probes the failures of U.S. law to protect workers’ rights, examines the efforts of historical and contemporary worker movements to transform legal structures, and analyzes how labor law and constitutional governance might be reformed to enable greater political and economic democracy. Drawing from constitutional law, administrative law, and legal history perspectives, she also has explored the relationship between law and the perpetuation of economic inequality. She frequently provides advice on policy initiatives to legislators and workers’ rights organizations and works on related litigation. Andrias is a co-director of the Columbia Labor Lab and the Columbia Law School Center for Constitutional Governance.
Prior to law school, Andrias worked for several years as an organizer with the Service Employees International Union. After receiving a J.D. from Yale Law School, she clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit and for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’59 on the U.S. Supreme Court. Andrias practiced political law at Perkins Coie and served as associate counsel and special assistant to President Barack Obama and as chief of staff in the White House Counsel’s Office.
She joined the faculty of Michigan Law School in 2013 and was the recipient of its L. Hart Wright Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2016. She joined the faculty of Columbia Law School in 2021 and also has served as an academic fellow at Columbia Law School and taught American Constitutional Law as a visiting professor at L’Institut d’Études Politiques (Sciences Po) in Paris. Andrias served as a commissioner and the rapporteur for the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court, is a member of the American Law Institute, and sits on the Board of Academic Advisors of the American Constitution Society.