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Professor Fran Quigley, ’87, spoke about the people he met and the research he did for his latest book, If We Can Win Here: The New Front Lines of the Labor Movement, during the first Faculty Book Talk event of the Fall 2015 semester. The event was held September 1 in the Wynne Courtroom. The book was published in Spring 2015 by Cornell University Press.

Professor Quigley marked the book’s beginning as February 1, 2012, when hundreds of workers and supporters overspread the lawn of the Indiana Statehouse to protest the Right to Work legislation that was at the time advancing toward becoming state law. The measure passed in the Indiana Senate that day.

Yet on the same day in 2012, food service workers on the IUPUI campus approved their first collective bargaining agreement with Chartwells Dining Services, the contractor at the university that supplies food services. James Meyers, a lead food-service worker at IUPUI, talked with Quigley for the book, and his photograph is on its cover. Meyers appeared at the event to share his story. He was joined on the panel by LaVenita Burnett, who works as a cashier in the café at Inlow Hall, and Matt Warner, who works in security and was part of the effort to unionize workers in that sector. (In the photo from left are Matt Warner, James Meyers, LaVenita Burnett, and Professor Fran Quigley.)

“It’s a bad time for workers, but workers have been in this place before,” Professor Quigley said, pointing to the rise of the union movement in the early 20^th century. “The movement toward organizing service-sector workers bodes well for their future, even more so when one considers that these are jobs that have to be done here and cannot be outsources,” he said.