Joseph van der Naald

CUNY Graduate Center | CUNY · Program in Sociology

The popular and scholarly imagination considers Americans—especially those from the US South—to be averse to working-class politics. The South, in particular, is regarded as having especially low levels of class consciousness, hopelessly mired in racist or racialized ideologies which effectively eliminate the possibility of working-class solidarity...

The popular and scholarly imagination considers Americans—especially those from the US South—to be averse to working-class politics. The South, in particular, is regarded as having especially low levels of class consciousness, hopelessly mired in racist or racialized ideologies which effectively eliminate the possibility of working-class solidarity...

This report released by the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, State of the Unions 2023: A Profile of Organized Labor in New York City, New York State, and the United States, is a part of an annual publication series, documents recent trends in unionization patterns. The overall level of unionization in both the City and State has been roughly...

The efficacy of the US anti poverty policy is shaped both by its reliance on categorical sorting and by its decentralized structure. To examine the implications of these features, this study introduces a novel disaggregation of poverty reduction instruments into four mechanisms: federal taxes and federal transfers (centralized) and state taxes and...

In recent years, “inequality” has received an extraordinary amount of attention in political, policy, and academic circles. In the U.S., this attention has been overwhelmingly national in scope. The national focus misses a crucial axis of American inequality, one that has received inadequate attention – that is inequality by geography, specifically...

The efficacy of U.S. antipoverty policy is shaped both by its reliance on categorical sorting and by its decentralized structure. To examine the implications of these features, this study introduces a novel disaggregation of U.S. poverty reduction instruments into four mechanisms: taxes and transfers at the (centralized) federal level, and taxes an...

This analysis probes the relationship between individuals' preferences for redistribution and their economic self-interest. We analyze personal finance and preferences data from 30 countries included in the 2009 ISSP to analyze whether respondents’ personal income, financial wealth, or housing wealth are related to their opinions about economic red...

New York City leads the recent uptick in private-sector union organizing at companies like Starbucks and Amazon. A new report released by the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, State of the Unions 2022: A Profile of Organized Labor in New York City, New York State, and the United States, analyzes new union membership and union election wins ac...

In debates on the future of work, a common theme has been how work became less secure through the denial of employee status. Though much of the attention has focused on other industries, precarity has also affected those working in higher education, including graduate student employees, contributing to what is now called the "gig academy." While un...

The 2020 Supplementary Directory of New Bargaining Agents and Contracts in Institutions of Higher Education, 2013-2019 is an analysis of data for the period 2013-2019 of new bargaining units, bargaining agents, and contracts in higher education in the United States following publication of our last directory in 2012. The 2020 Supplementary Director...

One of the most significant shifts in the study of inequality is a growing appreciation of geographic inequality, specifically inequality across the 50 U.S. states. We assess the role of state governments in social policy provision, directing attention to the consequences of policy decentralization. Using unique data from the State Safety Net Polic...

This article presents data, precedent, and empirical evidence relevant to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) proposal to issue a new rule to exclude graduate assistants and other student employees from coverage under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). The analysis in three parts. First, the authors show through an analysis of informati...

This thesis investigates how call center agents in Belgrade, Serbia’s ICT sector understand their class identities. Due to their relatively well paid jobs, the stability of their work, as well as their consumptive activities, call center agents embody some aspects of the middle class; however, their work is neither fulfilling nor is their pay suffi...

This field note explores the ways in which the documentary MIND ZONE: Therapists Behind the Front Lines (2014), directed by Dr. Jan Haaken, moves viewers into innovative and critical stances towards the U.S. military mental health program. Using a discourse analysis of the film and transcripts of interviews conducted by Haaken, I trace the deployme...

The "spirit of gravity" and all of its connotations is central to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. In Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, Zarathustra proclaims that the spirit of gravity is his devil and that it can only be vanquished through laughter. In this explication, I will show that Nietzsche uses intertextual allusion to place this laug...