I am a PhD candidate in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. My research falls into the domains of political, labor, and economic sociology, and is concerned primarily with labor movement dynamics, social policy, and inequality.

My work is driven by the question of how the state ameliorates or constrains organized efforts to address systemic inequalities. I have explored this question through two avenues. The first looks at the conditions that foster the growth of labor unions. My dissertation, titled Organizing Without and Under the Law: Public Sector Unions and the State in Michigan and Ohio, 1950-1985, examines the factors that shaped historical emergence of public employees’ unions of public sector labor movements in the Midwestern United States, focusing on the interplay between state-level collective bargaining laws and government worker union power.

The second concerns the downstream consequences of social policy federalism for the reproduction of socioeconomic and racial inequities. This research, conducted in collaboration with Sarah K. Bruch and Janet C. Gornick has been published in Social Service Review and in a collected volume by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

I am also engaged in several ongoing research projects on the extent of labor union membership and collective bargaining coverage in the United States. With colleagues at the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College, I help to maintain a dataset of union coverage and collective bargaining agreements among academic workers. With Ruth Milkman at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, I collect data on and co-author a report on union membership in New York City. Research from these projects has been featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Gothamist among other places.

With Cody R. Melcher at Loyola University of New Orleans, I am in the beginning stages of research project on the contemporary labor unionism and class consciousness in the U.S. South.

In my free time, I like to edit the Wikipedia. I contribute by writing and editing mostly sociology articles and articles about CUNY. You can find my user profile and list of contributions here. I am also an amateur iNaturalist. You can find my observations using the app here.

Find me on Google Scholar, Keybase, Twitter, ResearchGate, or ORCID.

Email: jvandernaald [at] gradcenter.cuny.com