Description:

Cedric de Leon is an Associate Professor at University of Massachussetts Amherst and the Director of their Labor Center. He completed his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan. He also has a Master’s degree in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge and a B.A. in Sociology from Yale University.

Cedric got his start in the labor movement as a researcher for the Connecticut School Bus Drivers Alliance Local 76 SEIU in 1994. From 1995 to 1996 he worked on the Chateau Ste. Michelle, Bruce Church, and strawberry campaigns for the United Farm Workers in Connecticut and Salinas and Watsonville, California. He then became an organizer for District 1199 SEIU in Providence. After a brief hiatus in England, Cedric returned to the labor movement as a rank-and-file member of Local 3550 American Federation of Teachers at the University of Michigan. He was local union president from 2000 to 2002 and, after finishing his dissertation, became lead organizer for the University of Michigan lecturers’ union, AFT Local 6244.

Cedric’s research focuses on labor, race, and party politics in the United States, India, and Turkey. His first book, Party and Society: Reconstructing a Sociology of Democratic Party Politics (Polity, 2014), uses comparative historical analysis to examines the ways in which social scientists and other observers have imagined the relationship between parties and society. His second book, The Origin of Right to Work: Antilabor Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Chicago (Cornell/ILR Press, 2015), reveals the racialized roots of "right-to-work" laws by arguing that contemporary "right-to-work" laws can be traced back to end of the Civil War, when political elites revised the English common-law doctrine of conspiracy to cast collective bargaining as a form of white male enslavement. He is also the co-editor of Building Blocs: How Parties Organize Society (Stanford University Press, 2015) with Manali Desai and Cihan Tugal, which examines political parties in Indonesia, Canada, Egypt, the United States, India, and Turkey and shows that political parties, rather than divisions among constituents, shape social divides. His work has appeared in a variety of journals including Labor Studies Journal, Global Labour, Sociological Theory, Political Power and Social Theory, and Studies in American Political Development.