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eCornell Keynote: HR analytics has evolved from a novel approach to a fundamental business necessity, with 2025 bringing heightened expectations and capabilities. Organizations are now leveraging advanced analytical platforms to not only drive real-time talent management but also help guide leadership decisions that drive business success. Host Lisa Csencsits from Cornell’s ILR School will lead this discussion with Merck’s Beth Perrone, SVP of Talent, and Jeremy Shapiro, AVP of Workforce Analytics. The three will focus on practical applications of cutting-edge analytical tools that are reshaping talent management and leadership decision-making in 2025. What You'll Learn How leading-edge analytical tools are changing the HR landscapeWays to integrate analytics into leadership conversations, engaging senior leadership and boards of directorsHow and where to place guardrails when leveraging analyticsStrategies for building on insights and using them to inform decisions at your organization Speakers Lisa Csencsits, Director, Leadership Development and Human Capital Management Professional Programs, CAHRS, Cornell ILR School Beth Perrone, Senior Vice President, HR, and Chief Talent & Strategy Officer, Merck & Co. Jeremy Shapiro, Associate Vice President, Workforce Analytics, Merck & Co.

ILR Union Days 2025 event: Up against one of the most powerful companies on the planet, a group of Amazon workers embark on an unprecedented campaign to unionize their warehouse in Staten Island, New York. After the screening, there will be a Q&A with film participant and former Amazon worker Natalie Monarrez hosted by ILR’s Global Labor & Work Professors Andrew Wolf and Duanyi Yang.

Francesca Miserocchi Title: Unveiling Discrimination in Teachers' Expectations Abstract: Using a unique combination of administrative data, surveys, and incentivized experiments, we provide evidence of discrimination in teachers' career advice based on students' family backgrounds in a tracked high school system. Keeping students' capabilities and interests constant, teachers hold lower expectations for the academic and labor market achievements of students from economically disadvantaged families. These biases persist despite the absence of information on parental involvement or financial constraints for each student. We conducted a field experiment where we provided teachers with personalized information about the socioeconomic status (SES) gaps in their past recommendations and corrected their misperceptions about the success probabilities of high-ability, low-SES students in competitive high school tracks. The intervention reduced the SES gap in top-track recommendations for high-ability students, illustrating how teachers' biased expectations can create a self-fulfilling prophecy of low intergenerational mobility.

Join us for our Wednesday Lunch Series, featuring guest speakers from Cornell's faculty and staff as well as the surrounding community. Enjoy an informal discussion where you can learn more about the speaker’s work or research, how they ended up doing what they are doing, current issues in higher education and local community. A free lunch will be served. Tejasvi Nagaraja is Assistant Professor of History at Cornell University’s ILR School. He received his Ph.D. from New York University, and has held fellowships at Harvard University, the New School and the New York Historical Society. His writing has been published in the journal American Historical Review. Nagaraja’s research and teaching explores the intersections of U.S. labor and African American and foreign relations history. Investigating both ‘top-down’ public policy and ‘bottom-up’ social movements, his work considers how class, gender and race evolve within a changing global division of labor and geopolitics. As a scholar of empire, he interprets the United States both in and of the world, across both connection and comparison, especially through a focus on war and the military. As a historian of labor and racial capitalism, he finds the study of social movements particularly illuminating. In addition to labor and working-class history, Nagaraja’s teaching has highlighted the Black freedom movement and U.S. wars, including interdisciplinary courses on global capitalism, on race and war — as well as, gender and geopolitics; the military- and prison- industrial complex; freedom struggles in geopolitics; intersectional and international social movements. Nagaraja is writing a book about America’s World War II experience and generation. It reconstructs a far-flung war within the war, among Americans themselves. This transnational story braids military-industrial labor battles, Black soldiers’ protest against policing and incarceration, and veterans’ debates about America’s role in the world. Diverse war workers led a ‘greatest generation’ of labor, Black freedom and other social movements, which linked racial and economic and global contentions. These struggles took place from Pennsylvania to Panama, Georgia to Germany, Michigan to Manila. From WWII into the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy’s statecraft was entangled and embattled in relation with domestic social movements, which were themselves embedded within the new global war machine. This process took shape amidst a singular peak momentum in the organization and intersection of the U.S. labor and Black movements, as they intersected with a singular peak momentum in the organization of U.S. global military power. As Americans today grapple with the overlapping trajectories from New Deal to neo-liberalism, from Jim Crow to a prison-industrial complex, from American primacy to a military-industrial complex—this book finds the WWII generation’s war-within-war to be critically foundational and revealing.

Join us for a talk by Professor Dana Frank, based on her new book, What Can We Learn From the Great Depression? Ordinary People and Collective Action in Hard Times. She explores a range of activism during the era, from mutual aid and labor strikes to resistance against racial and political oppression. The talk highlights 1937 sit-down strike by seven African American wet nurses in Chicago, examining their sources of power in the workplace, their communities, and the broader labor movement. Refreshments will be served. This event is geared toward an in-person audience, so we strongly prefer you join us on our Ithaca campus. If this is not possible, please register to join us via Zoom, and information will be included in the registration confirmation email. Dana Frank is Professor of History Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of seven books on US and Honduran labor and working-class history, including Buy American, The Long Honduran Night, and, with Robin D.G. Kelley and Howard Zinn, Three Strikes. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Hammer & Hope, New Left Review, Foreign Affairs, The Jacobin, The Baffler, Literary Hub, The Progressive, and many other publications. She is a regular guest on Democracy Now.