Michael Yates

Michael Yates is a writer, editor, and labor educator. Among his books are Why Unions Matter (Monthly Review Press, 1998, second revised edition 2009), Longer Hours, Fewer Jobs (Monthly Review Press, 1994), Power on the Job (South End Press, 1994), Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global Economy (Monthly Review Press, 2002),More Unequal: Aspects of Class in the United States (Monthly Review Press, 2007), Cheap Motels and a Hotplate: an Economist's Travelogue (Monthly Review Press, 2007), In and Out of the Working Class (Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2009), Wisconsin Uprising (Monthly Review Press, 2012), A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in the Struggle for Economic Justice (Monthly Review Press, 2013), The Great Inequality (Routledge, 2015), Can the Working Class Change the World? (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle (Monthly Review Press, 2022) .He has also published hundreds of articles and reviews in a wide variety of journals, magazines, blogs, websites, and newspapers.

He is currently Editorial Director of Monthly Review Press in New York City. He taught economics and labor relations at the University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown from 1969 until his retirement in 2001. He won the Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Award in 1984. Between 1980 and 2015, he was a labor educator, teaching working people in a wide variety of formats, from one-day seminars to six-week courses to semester-long classes. He taught workers through Penn State's Union Leadership program, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst's Labor Center, Indiana University, Cornell's Labor Center in Manhattan and Albany, and through individual arrangements with unions, including SEIU (1199), UNITE, USWA, UFCW, and OCAW. Yates also worked in the research Office of the United Farm Workers Union and has served as a labor arbitrator with the Pennsylvania Bureau of Mediation. He and his wife Karen Korenoski have been traveling the United States for the past twenty-one years. The early years of these travels are recounted in his book Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate: an Economist's Travelogue. Yates's blog posts, which ended a few years ago, can be read at cheapmotelsandahotplate.org.