ITHACA, N.Y. -- Ron Blackwell, director of corporate affairs at the AFL-CIO, is this year's pre-Labor Day speaker at Cornell University Thursday, Aug. 29. The labor leader is also a former economist and academic dean at the New School for Social Research in New York City.

Blackwell's public lecture is titled "No More Business as Usual: A Union Perspective on Corporate Accountability." It will take place from noon to 1 p.m. in 105 Ives Hall on Cornell's campus. The talk, which is sponsored by the School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR), is free and open to the public.

"Ron Blackwell has been concerned about corporate accountability for many years," said Richard Hurd, professor of labor studies at the ILR School. "He is a leading advocate for increased oversight of corporate financial practices. As a high-ranking official of the AFL-CIO, Mr. Blackwell has insight on this subject that should be extremely interesting for students and faculty."

At a labor conference at the University of California-Los Angeles in 2001, Blackwell noted that white-collar engineers at Boeing had won a decisive victory the year before, not for pay raises but for a greater say in how the aerospace giant was being run following a buyout -- a development he saw as representative of the new face of labor. "Companies are going out of business because they are being mismanaged," he said. "Unions have to use their bargaining strength to keep companies on the high-road competitive path, to make sure that the company is there in the future. Using bargaining power to force companies to do what we need them to do for society is part of our task."

He also counseled workers to exert more power as shareholders in pension funds. Such funds represent 26 percent of all publicly traded companies in the United States, he said. "We have to use this role representing citizens, shareholders and workers to bend [mismanaged] companies to a core purpose -- and they are way off that purpose."

The AFL-CIO is a federation of U.S. labor unions representing more than 13 million workers. Blackwell's responsibilities there range from capital stewardship and corporate governance; to collective bargaining and strategic campaigns; to work organization, technological change and community development.

Prior to his current post, Blackwell was executive assistant to the president of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union and chief economist of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, where he advised union leadership on public policy and union strategy. Before joining the labor movement, he taught economics at the New School for Social Research and was an academic dean of its Seminar College.

Blackwell is the author of "Globalization and the American Labor Movement" in Audacious Democracy: Labor, Intellectuals and the Social Reconstruction of America (Mariner Books, 1997). He serves on the editorial boards of Perspectives on Work and the New Labor Forum and on the Industrial Relations Research Association's board of directors.

Blackwell represents the Trade Union Advisory Committee of the international Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Task Force on Corporate Governance. He helped formulate the "OECD Principles of Corporate Governance" and reviewed OECD's "Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises." In addition, he represents the AFL-CIO in a variety of forums on issues of workers and a changing global economy including, most recently: "Workers' Role in Corporate Governance in Developing and Transition Economies" (Latin American Roundtable on Corporate Governance, Mexico City).

His talk, which will be introduced by ILR Dean Edward Lawler, is part of an annual ILR School pre-Labor Day celebration. Classes are suspended for a few hours so students can attend the talk and picnic that follows. For information, contact Hurd at (607) 255-2765 or Robin Burke at (607) 255-5840.

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