Scholars' Library: Jaz Brisack on 'Get on the Job and Organize'
Description
Wednesday, 22 October - 6pm (UK)/ 1pm (ET)/10am (PT).
This event is free and open to the public.
In our October event, Jaz Brisack (Mississippi & Wadham 2019), in conversation with Shruti Iyer (India and St Antony’s, 2019), will discuss their book Get on the Job and Organize: Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World.
Read more about their book here
Jaz is a union organizer and cofounder of the Inside Organizer School, which trains workers to unionize. After spending one year at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, they got a job as a barista at the Elmwood Starbucks in Buffalo, NewYork, becoming a founding member of Starbucks Workers United and helping organize the first unionized Starbucks in the United States. They have also worked with organizing committees at companies ranging from Nissan to Tesla to Ben & Jerry’s. Jaz’s first book, Get on the Job and Organize: Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World, is out this year from One Signal Press.
Shruti is completing her DPhil in Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford. Her current research concerns informal workers’ organising, occupational health and safety, and the Indian welfare state. Her doctoral project is a sixteen month ethnography of a stone-carvers’ trade union in Rajasthan, where she traces how labour activists organised around a rising epidemic of silicosis in the natural stone industry.
Q & A:
Please feel free to submit any questions in advance to alumni@rhodeshouse.ox.ac.uk or you can use the Q&A function within Zoom to ask questions directly during the live event.
Part of the Lifelong Fellowship portfolio, The Scholars’ Library is a monthly book talk series, where Rhodes alumni can come together to present, discover and debate their literary works. If you’re interested in getting involved, please reach out to Nayana Niji at alumni@rhodeshouse.ox.ac.uk