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Patrick Oakford is the Senior Manager for Programs and Engagement at JUST Capital. He is responsible for JUST’s programmatic work on workplace issues, focusing on increasing economic opportunities for frontline and contract workers. Prior to joining JUST, Patrick was a Senior Policy Advisor in Governor Cuomo’s office. There he developed and advanced employment policies, including on issues relating to portable benefits, retirement security, and workforce development. As a Policy Advisor at the U.S. Department of Labor under Secretary Tom Perez, he worked closely with senior leadership to implement the Department’s regulatory agenda and help develop policies to strengthen labor protections for workers.

Patrick received a BS in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University and an MSc in Migration Studies from the University of Oxford.

Alison Omens is the Chief Strategy Officer at JUST Capital. She is responsible for setting and implementing strategy to achieve mission impact for the organization. Her work includes overseeing programs, revenue, partnerships, development, and strategic engagement with companies, investors, foundations, and nonprofits. She has orchestrated program collaborations with BlackRock, the Aspen Institute, Harvard Business School, and others.  Alison was most recently Advisor for Private Sector Engagement to U.S. Secretary of Labor Tom Perez. In this capacity, she managed the inclusive capitalism strategy for the Secretary and with the White House. She was also responsible for engagement on the Department’s future-of-work efforts and its Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing guidance. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of JobsFirstNYC as well as the Advisory Council of the NextGen Chamber.   Alison received her Master of Public Administration from Harvard Kennedy School.

Paul Oyer is The Mary and Rankine Van Anda Entrepreneurial Professor and Professor of Economics at Stanford University and Senior Fellow at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.  In addition, he is a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Labor Economics.  Oyer studies the economics of organizations and human resource practices, focusing on firms’ incentive systems, as well as hiring and firing.  

His work has looked at the use of broad-based stock option plans; how firms use non-cash benefits; how firms respond to limits on their ability to displace workers; and how labor market conditions affect the  careers of MBAs and PhD economists after they leave school.  More recently, Paul’s work has focused on the gig economy and how people's backgrounds determine the decision to become an entrepreneur as well as the success of their ventures.  See Older Workers and the Gig Economy and The Gender Earnings Gap in the Gig Economy.

Geoffrey Parker is a professor of engineering at the Thayer School of Dartmouth College where he also serves as director of the Master of Engineering Management Program. His research explores the economics of and strategy of platform markets and two-sided markets.

Parker and his colleague, Marshall Van Alstyne co-authored the book Platform Revolution. They were recently awarded the 2019 Thinkers50 “Digital Thinking Award” for work on two-sided markets and the “inverted firm” whereby firms leverage network effects through external ecosystems, shifting value creation from inside to outside.

Parker is a visiting scholar and fellow at the MIT Initiative for the Digital Economy, where he also co-chairs the annual MIT Platform Summit and the annual BU Platform Research Symposium.  

In 2019 Parker was awarded a grant from the Sloan Foundation to investigate the role of platforms in changing outsourcing relationships, labor markets, and worker outcomes. In 2020, he was elected as a Fellow of the Production and Operations Management Society and joined the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Advanced Manufacturing and Production.

James A. Parrott is Director of Economic and Fiscal Policies at the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School. Parrott’s recent research projects include analyses of the economic impact of the Covid-19 crisis in New York City, and of the magnitude of gig and other low-paid independent contract work in New York State. He has studied the effect of New York’s $15 minimum wage and pay inequities in the nonprofit New York City contract workforce. Parrott co-authored, along with Michael Reich of the University of California, Berkeley, the analysis that led to New York City’s first-in-the-nation minimum pay standard for app-dispatched drivers.  In July 2020, Parrott and Reich released a similar study commissioned by the City of Seattle. Together with Dmitri Koustas of the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, they are analyzing the effects of the New York City minimum pay standard.

Michael Reich is Professor and Co-Chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) of the University of California at Berkeley.  He served as Director of IRLE from 2004 to 2015. His research publications cover numerous areas of labor economics and political economy, including the economics of racial inequality; labor market segmentation; historical stages in U.S. labor markets; and the social structures of accumulation, high performance workplaces, union-management cooperation, Japanese labor-management systems, living wages, and minimum wages.

Reich's publications include 17 books and monographs, including When Mandates Work: Raising Labor Standards at the Local Level, with Ken Jacobs and Miranda Dietz.

Reich has also written over 130 papers, including these two landmark studies with James Parrott, A Minimum Compensation Standard for Seattle TNC Drivers and An Earnings Standard for New York City’s App-based Drivers: Economic Analysis and Policy Assessment.  Pay, Passengers and Profits: Effects of Employee Status for California TNC Drivers was published in October 2020.

Hye Jin Rho is an Assistant Professor at the School of Human Resources and Labor Relations at Michigan State University. Formerly, she was an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). Her research focuses on the changing nature of work and organizations, such as outsourcing and the use of alternative work arrangements, and its implications for employment processes and outcomes dictating the future of work. In her recent work, she looks at how the use of platform technologies and intermediating vendors may lead to differential wage effects for nonstandard workers hired through these multi-faceted employment arrangements.

She is also co-author of CEPR reports on nonstandard work, Nonstandard Work Arrangements and Older Americans, 2005–2017, and Young Workers in Nonstandard Work Arrangements, 2005-2017.

She holds a Ph.D. in Management from MIT Sloan School of Management with the Institute for Work and Employment Research, and a B.A. in Political Science and International Studies from Northwestern University.

Christine Riordan is an Assistant Professor at the School of Labor and Employment Relations (LER), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Christine has conducted research focusing on the implications of restructuring and outsourcing for work design and voice. Research in progress explores these topics in the nursing occupation; past work has focused on legal work in corporate law firms. She has co-authored multiple papers considering how outsourcing reshapes conflict, work relationships, and inequality.

She has also recently begun several collaborations on worker and employer responses to COVID-19. At LER, Christine teaches courses in collective bargaining and industrial relations theory. Christine holds a PhD in Management from the Institute for Work and Employment Research at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Raffaele Saggio is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of British Columbia and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). His research focuses on how alternative work arrangements impact outcomes of both firms and workers. Saggio’s research utilizes econometric methods that facilitate the study of matched employer-employee datasets.

Saggio was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University’s Industrial Relations Section. He was the recipient of an Early Career Research Award from the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in 2019.  In 2018, he received an honorable mention in the Upjohn Institute’s Dissertation Award competition. He also recently received a grant from the Sloan Foundation to provide evidence on the effects of outsourcing on worker and firm outcomes using unique Italian data. His recently updated paper, The Effects of Partial Employment Protection Reforms: Evidence from Italy studies a 2001 Italian reform that “lifted constraints on the employment of temporary contract workers while maintaining rigid employment protection regulations for employees hired under permanent employment contracts.”

Johannes Schmieder is Associate Professor of Economics at Boston University. His fields of study are Labor Economics, Health Economics, Industrial Organization, and Environmental Policy and Regulation. He holds a PhD and M.A. in Economics from Columbia University. His undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Economics is from University of Bayreuth, Germany.

His current research projects include the following: “Domestic Outsourcing in the United States,” with David Dorn, Jim Spletzer, and Lee Tucker; and “The Effects of Franchising on Workers: Evidence from the United States,” with Rosemary Batt and Andrew Green. His prior research on outsourcing includes “The Rise of Domestic Outsourcing and the Evolution of the German Wage Structure” with Deborah Goldschmidt.

Chris Tilly is professor of Urban Planning and Sociology at UCLA. Tilly holds a joint Ph.D. in Economics and Urban Studies and Planning from MIT. For over thirty years, he has conducted research on low-wage and precarious work and policies to improve conditions and reduce inequalities in the workplace. His books include Half a Job: Bad and Good Part-Time Jobs in a Changing Labor Market;  The Gloves-Off Economy: Labor Standards at the Bottom of America’s Labor Market; and most recently, Where Bad Jobs are Better: Retail Jobs across Countries and Companies. His work on outsourcing includes Under construction: The continuing evolution of job structures in call centers, and the book chapters “When firms restructure: Understanding work-life outcomes” in Work and Life Integration: Organizational, Cultural, and Individual Perspectives (Ellen Ernst Kossek, Susan J. Lambert, eds.) and “Too many cooks? Tracking internal labor market dynamics in food service with case studies and quantitative data” in Low-Wage America: How Employers Are Reshaping Opportunity in the Workplace (Eileen Appelbaum, Annette Bernhardt, and Richard Murnane, eds.).  

Janet Vertesi is Associate Professor of Sociology at Princeton University.  Her area of specialization is the sociology of science, knowledge, and technology.  She has conducted major ethnographic studies of NASA's robotic spacecraft teams. Her books, Seeing like a Rover: Images and Interaction on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission (Chicago, 2015) and Shaping Science: Organizations, Decisions, and Culture on NASA's Teams (Chicago, 2020) draw on her ethnographic studies of missions to Mars, Saturn, and the outer planets and examine how organizations matter to scientific discovery.

Vertesi is also a leader in digital sociology, whether studying computational systems in social life, shifting research methods online, or applying social insights to the building of technologies.  She has been awarded top prizes for her work from the American Sociological Association and the Society for Social Studies of Science.  In 2019, The Sloan Foundation awarded her a grant to “investigate an as-yet undertheorized link between outsourcing and automation.”

Steve Viscelli is an economic sociologist who studies work, labor markets, automation, and public policy. He is currently a Faculty Fellow at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy and Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Steve’s first book The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream explains how deregulation of trucking and the rise of independent contracting turned trucking from one of the best blue-collar jobs in the US into one of the toughest. His current research looks at the impact of self-driving trucks on truckers and ecommerce on last-mile delivery workers. In addition to his academic research, Steve works with a range of public and private stakeholders to make the trucking industry more efficient, safer and a better place to work.

You can learn more about his work here.