Professor Katherine Newman

Katherine Newman is the Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on low-wage labour markets, poverty, social mobility, household structure and inequality. She has authored 16 books and dozens of articles drawing on qualitative research in the United States, South Africa, Japan, and Western Europe. Before joining the Berkeley faculty, Professor Newman served as an academic leader and faculty member at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Johns Hopkins and the University of Massachusetts. Together with colleagues in Sociology, Political Science, Economics and Psychology, she developed the graduate programs on Inequality and Social Policy at Harvard and Princeton. She most recently served as Provost and Chief Academic Officer of the University of California system. Professor Newman is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and various honours from the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association.

As a scholar of social inequality, her most recent research interests focus on labour unions as institutions whose efforts play a critical role in raising wages, increasing benefits and raising recognition for social rights among blue and white collar workers. They are, of course, engaged in a contested terrain where a history of de-industrialisation and plant closures (in the US and the UK), offshoring, and automation have reduced the appeal of unions and diminished union density. At the same time, and in some of the most unlikely places, the appeal of collective bargaining remains strong or has rebounded.

Her most recent contribution to this intellectual landscape will be a book on the unionisation of foreign auto manufacturing plants in Alabama, a region of the United States legendary for its anti-union political culture. The book will connect this ongoing struggle against a long (but often forgotten) tradition of unionisation in the steel, coal and textile industries in the region, the long-term impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement (which has not been studied in the southern US), and the nascent stirring of progressive politics in a deep “red” region.

The fieldwork for this book was conducted between 2024 and 2026 in Vance, Alabama, the site of a nearly successful (but ultimately failed) attempt to unionise the Mercedes-Benz plant, and Anniston, Alabama, the site of the first successful union drive in decades in the New Flyer Bus manufacturing plant. These campaigns took place against the backdrop of the successful attempt by the United Auto Workers to unionise the Volkswagen plant in Tennessee, the first such victory in the history of foreign auto manufacture in the southern US.

She expects to publish this book in the Autumn of 2028, which coincides with the next national election in the US where the disposition of the southern states will play a key role in the outcome, the first of the “post Trump” era, where organising the south is a central goal of the UAW and making inroads into a deeply conservative region, a major agenda item for the Democratic Party. There can be no greater challenge to this vision than the state of Alabama, the heart of the Confederacy, where racial divisions are deep, and conservative political agendas dominate in the legislature and the governor’s office. At the same time, national organisations like the United Auto Workers have targeted the region and developed these notable successes.

When not on sabbatical, Professor Newman’s courses at UC Berkeley include classical sociological theory, the sociology of work and labour, and the contributions of sociology to public policy. She will be actively supervising PhD students at UC Berkeley starting in the Autumn of 2027, but would be very happy to help LSE students in any way she can.