William Foley is a Ph.D. student in the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers–New Brunswick. His research focuses on improving job quality and revitalizing worker power, with a particular interest in the relationship between organized labor and employee ownership as strategies to address these challenges.

Organized Labor and Worker-Owned Firms: Building solutions to the challenges of Neoliberalism

This project explores how labor unions are developing worker cooperatives. A worker cooperative is a type of business where employees own the company and make decisions through a "one-worker-one-vote" system. By partnering with a West Coast union, I investigate whether unions can successfully incubate these cooperatives to create stable, high-quality jobs, and assess the challenges and opportunities for doing so. This project addresses democratic innovation by examining how democratic principles can be expanded to the workplace.