Center Team

Miriam Greenberg is the Interim Faculty Director of the Center for Labor and Community (2023-2024).  She is also Professor of Sociology with research and teaching interests in critical urban and environmental studies, housing, labor, geography, and social movements. Her current research explores the role of the California housing crisis and urban displacement on the growth of the Wildlands Urban Interface and related socio-environmental impacts.

She has authored numerous articles and books, including Branding New York:  How a City in Crisis was Sold to the World (Routledge, 2008), Crisis Cities: Disaster and Redevelopment in New York and New Orleans (Oxford, 2014, with Kevin Fox Gotham), and The City is the Factory: New Solidarities and Spatial Tactics in an Urban Age (Cornell, 2017, with Penny Lewis).

Since 2015 Miriam has also led or co-led two community and student engaged research projects— Critical Sustainabilities and No Place Like Home—and served as Planning Commissioner for the City of Santa Cruz (2020-2023).

Steve McKay is Professor of Sociology and has served as the Director of the UCSC Center for Labor and Community since 2010.

His research has focused on labor, migration, racial formation, masculinity, and community-engaged research, authoring and co-editing numerous books, chapters and articles including: Satanic Mills or Silicon Islands?: The Politics of High-Tech Production in the Philippines (Cornell/ILR Press, 2006) ; New Routes for Diaspora Studies (Indiana, 2012) and Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship (Rutgers, 2021).

Steve has also worked locally in the Santa Cruz area on a series of community-initiated student-engaged research (CISER) projects: Watsonville is in the Heart – a community archive and research project; We Belong – Collaboration for Community-Engaged Research and Immigrant Justice; Working for Dignity – the Santa Cruz Low-Wage Worker Study; and No Place Like Home – The Affordable Housing Crisis Study.

Chris Benner is the Dorothy E. Everett Chair in Global Information and Social Entrepreneurship, and a Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  He currently directs the Everett Program for Technology and Social Change and the Institute for Social Transformation. 

His research examines the relationships between technological change, regional development, and the structure of economic opportunity, focusing on regional labor markets and the transformation of work and employment.

His applied policy work centers on social and economic dimensions of technological change, workforce development policy, the structure, dynamics and evaluation of workforce intermediaries, and strategies for promoting regional equity.

He has authored or co-authored over 100 academic papers and reports and seven books, including most recently Solidarity Economics (2021), with Manuel Pastor, which invites us to imagine and create a new sort of solidarity economics – an approach grounded in our instincts for connection and community – and in so doing, actually build a more robust, sustainable, and equitable economy. 

He received his Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from UC Berkeley.

Sarah Mason is the graduate student researcher at the Center for Labor and Community and PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Her dissertation examines the relationship between the labor process and the progression and outcome of strike action in higher education.

Sarah also researches and writes on app-based work and contemporary left-wing political movements in the United States.

Her writing has appeared in the New Left Review, Logic Magazine, the Guardian, New Politics, Notes from Below, and more.

Sarah is a union steward in UAW 2865 and volunteer organizer with the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee.

Vicente Vega is the Administrative Research Coordinator at the Center for Labor and Community and the Institute for Social Transformation. He graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 2015 majoring in Business Management Economics.

During his time as a labor organizer at SEIU Local 2015, he represented long term caregivers in California. 

He was also a union rep with Pacific Northwest Staff Union and an executive board member with the Monterey Bay Central Labor Council.

Veronica Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate in social psychology and a graduate student researcher for the Center for Labor and Community, working on the young workers survey.

Veronica’s research explores objectification of low-wage workers in the service industry and the psychological consequences of dehumanizing treatment at work. Her dissertation assesses working conditions at Starbucks and unionization as a possible humanization process.

Veronica is a delegate to the Monterey Bay Central Labor Council for UAW 2865 and has previously served as the Santa Cruz unit chair for UAW 2865.