How Class Works 2008 Conference

Newswise — "How Class Works," a major conference examining issues related to the American labor movement, and the working class takes place Thursday, June 5 through Saturday, June 7 at Stony Brook University. The conference, which is sponsored by Stony Brook's Center for Study of Working Class Life, has attracted leading thinkers on labor issues from across the nation.

Stony Brook University will present two major public policy addresses, on national health care and on the economy, as part of the conference.

Dr. Claudia Fegan will address "Bringing Single-Payer Health Care into the Mix" on Thursday evening, June 5 at 7:30 p.m. at the conference opening plenary session in the Student Activities Center Auditorium. Dr. Fegan, immediate past-president of Physicians for a National Health Program, will challenge the leading contenders in the presidential campaign to embrace a single-payer universal health care system that excludes the private insurance industry. Dr. Fegan will urge support instead for a "Medicare for All" alternative. Dr. Fegan's talk is part of the Stony Brook University Provost Lecture Series and is open to the public.

Richard Trumka, national secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, the nation's largest worker organization with over eight million members, will be the conference banquet speaker on Friday, June 6 at 8 p.m. in Ballroom A of the Student Activities Center. Mr. Trumka will discuss "An Economy that Works for All: Labor's Answer to Neo-Liberalism," a new initiative to build a broad and strategic response to the corporate economic agenda that has dominated the United States for a generation. Going beyond single-issue politics, Mr. Trumka will present a more comprehensive alternative framework for economic policy that strengthens the economy by advancing the interests of working people.

The How Class Works - 2008 conference, sponsored by the Center for Study of Working Class Life at Stony Brook University, will host over 180 presentations in the new field of working class studies by academics and union and community activists from across the United States, and Australia, Canada, France, Greece, Ireland, New Zealand, Nigeria, Turkey, and the UK. The conference will also include film, music, and poetry. The How Class Works - 2008 conference begins in the Stony Brook Union at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, June 5 and continues through Friday and Saturday in the Student Activities Center. Sliding-scale admission fees apply.

The full conference schedule is available on line at http://www.stonybrook.edu/workingclass/conference/2008/schedule.shtml.

The Center for Study of Working Class Life, led by Michael Zweig, Professor of Economics at Stony Brook, examines issues related to labor. Stony Brook is also home to the Working Class Studies Association, which promotes awareness, growth, and legitimacy of working-class studies internationally; promotes models of working-class studies that actively involve and serve the interests of working-class people; and promotes critical discussions of the relationships among class, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and other structures of inequality.