Mathew to give Zankel Lecture Nov. 2

“Uber and the Future of Work: Neoliberalism in the Taxi Industry” is the topic of Rider University professor Biju Mathew will address on Monday, Nov. 2, at Skidmore. An academic and a taxi-drivers’ advocate, Mathew is active in immigrant labor organizing, left-wing politics, and transnational solidarity work. As this year’s Zankel Lecturer at Skidmore, he will lecture at 6 p.m. in Gannett Auditorium of Palamountain Hall.

Admission is free and open to the public.

Known as an activist-intellectual, Mathew is a cofounder and leader of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance and the founding secretary of the National Taxi Workers Alliance, as well as an associate professor of information systems and American studies at Rider University in New Jersey.

His New York Taxi Workers Alliance fought to keep drivers’ costs down and created a health and wellness fund for them. It also helped build the national alliance, which became the first new AFL-CIO-chartered union in some 50 years. Mathew’s 2008 book Taxi! Cabs and Capitalism in NYC documents his organizing of immigrant taxi workers.

Cohost and producer of “Global Movements/Urban Struggles” on New York City’s WBAI-FM community radio station, Mathew campaigns for a range of minority rights in South Asia. His work in the Coalition Against Genocide and the Campaign to Stop Funding Hate has tracked millions of dollars that support anti-Muslim, Hindu-supremacist groups inside and outside India. He has also advocated against the displacement of local people by mining operations in India. A founding leader of Lamakaan, a left-liberal educational nonprofit in India, he also serves on the board of the Brecht Forum, and he cofounded Youth Solidarity Summer.

The Zankel Lecture is co-sponsored by Skidmore's Department of Management and Business and the International Affairs Program.