October 15, 2007
Contact: Caroline Jenkins
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417
AMHERST, Mass.—Elizabeth Vladeck, American lawyer and labor organizer, will deliver a lecture titled “Workers’ Rights and Union Organizing in Putin’s Russia: A First-Hand Account” at Amherst College on Tuesday, Oct. 23. The talk, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 7:30 p.m. in the Amherst Center for Russian Culture in Webster Hall.
Vladeck is one of a very small number of Americans to have done sustained, in-country work with Russian trade unions and worker organizations over the tumultuous period since the fall of the Soviet Union, having worked both for local trade union groups in the town of Kaliningrad and for a national labor rights nongovernmental organization that works with unions all over the country. Because of her work in Kaliningrad organizing port workers, she was even recently refused a renewal of her Russian visa—an incident which was the subject of an article by reporter Peter Finn in The Washington Post. Using this, her other experiences in the nation and the lens of the U.S. labor movement as a way into the conversation about union organizing in modern-day Russia, she will offer a few stories about today’s workers and her own thoughts about the past, present and future of Russian labor.
The talk is sponsored by the Georges Lurcy Lecture Series Fund and The Virginia and David S. Pennock ’60 Russian Culture Fund.