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Immanuel Ness teaches political science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He is a labor activist, and author and editor of numerous articles and academic and popular books on labor, worker insurgencies, migration, and social transformtion. Since 2000, Ness has edited WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society a quarterly peer-review social science publication founded in 1997 listed on leading indexing services that examines workers and labor organizations from a critical, socialist, perspective. WUSA's editorial board includes: Dario Azzellini, Stanley Aronowitz, Debdas Banerjee, Steve Early, Robin D.G. Kelley, Gigi Roggero, Saskia Sassen, Ben Trott, and Lucien van der Walt. Ness is general editor of the eight-volume 4280 page Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 to the Present a scholarly reference published in 2009 by Wiley-Blackwell, recipient of numerous awards from leading libraries, and academic institutions--as well as positive endorsements and reviews. He writes on the working class, the poor, and low-wage labor, and precarious labor. His research is on worker resistance, including rank-and-file action, unemployed movements, and autonomist labor organizations. His works include Immigrants, Unions and the New U.S. Labor Market (Temple University Press 1995) and Guest Workers and Corporate Despotism. (University of Illinois Press 2011). His numerous editing projects include the Encyclopedia of American Social Movements. The four volume work was recipient of the American Library Association, Best Reference Source. He has recently co-edited with Dario Azzellini Ours to Master and Own: Workers Councils from the Commune to the Present. (Haymarket Books 2011/Herramienta 2011/Nuerer ISP Verlag 2011/TURC-Indonesia Bahasa Version 2011)

He was a trade union organizer in the 1980s and 1990s and a labor activist from 1995 to 2010. He has organized unorganized and unemployed workers. In 1990, he co-founded with Keith Brooks the New York Unemployed Committee (1990—1992), which successfully organized the jobless to encourage federal unemployment benefit extensionsbenefits through organization and participation in local, state, and national protests. He was active in local political activism from 1998-2002 as co-founder and coordinator of the Lower East Side Community Labor Coalition.

His current work focuses on new forms of union organizing, syndicalism, workers councils, labor migration, and protest movements. His current work on migration includes a comprehensive scholarly project tracing global human population from deep history to the present. The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, which he is editing with leading scholars throughout the world, including Peter Bellwood, Stephen Castles, Donna Gabaccia, Alex Julca, Hye-Kyung Lee, Adebusuyi I. Adeniran, Dirk Hoerder, among other leading scholars of migration. Ness has been invited to speak widely on union organizing in the U.S., labor militancy, and migrant worker struggles at research institutes, universities, and labor centers in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and South America.

Biography written by Rank-And-File Publishers/International Solidarity Movement.

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