Virginia Doellgast

Virginia Doellgast is Professor of Comparative Employment Relations in the ILR School at Cornell University. Her research examines the relationship between labor market and collective bargaining institutions, inequality, and job quality, with a focus on the US and Europe. Past research projects have compared labor responses to restructuring in incumbent telecommunications firms; employer collective action in the telecom and ICT sectors; and worker voice and well-being in call centers. She is currently studying the politics of technological change in the US, Canada, Germany, and Norway, based on case studies in the ICT services, telecom, and auto industries. This research is funded by grants from the SSHRC (Canada), the DAAD (Germany), and the Norwegian Research Council.

Professor Doellgast is co-editor of International and Comparative Employment Relations (Sage, 2021) and Reconstructing Solidarity: Labour unions, precarious work, and the politics of institutional change in Europe (Oxford University Press, 2018); and author of Disintegrating Democracy at Work: Labor Unions and the Future of Good Jobs in the Service Economy (Cornell University Press, 2012). Her research has been published in the British Journal of Industrial Relations, Human Resource Management Journal, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Industrial Relations, Politics and Society, and Socio-Economic Review, among other journals. She was Associate Editor of the British Journal of Industrial Relations, has served on the editorial boards of Work, Employment and Society and Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, and is on the international editorial boards for ILR Review, Industrielle Beziehungen – The German Journal of Industrial Relations, Socio-Economic Review, and Work in the Global Economy.

Professor Doellgast has worked with a range of international research institutions, policy organizations, and labor unions in her research, teaching, and outreach. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the Wirtschafts- und Sozial-wissenschaftliches Institut (Hans Böckler Stiftung, Germany), and has been a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute für Gesellschaftsforschung (MPIfG), Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB), Freie Universität Berlin, Laboratoire d'Economie et de Sociologie du Travail (LEST), and the University of New South Wales (UNSW). She was previously a faculty member at the London School of Economics and Political Science and at King’s College London. She has presented her research at over 20 practitioner-focused meetings or conferences, including those organized by the ILO, the European Commission, and UNI-ICTS. She has been interviewed on the BBC, and been quoted in articles in the Guardian, New York Times, and the New York Review of Books.