Margaret Levi is the Jere L. Bacharach Professor of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. She has written extensively on the bases for and effects of trustworthy governance. Her publications include Bureaucratic Insurgency: The Case of Police Unions (Lexington:1977); Of Rule and Revenue (University of California Press, 1988); Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism (Cambridge University Press, 1997); The Limits of Rationality (University of Chicago, 1990), co-edited with Karen S. Cook; Governance and Trust (Russell Sage, 1998), co-edited with Valerie Braithwaite. In progress is a co-authored volume with Karen Cook and Russell Hardin, building on a multi-year Russell Sage Foundation project on trust. Concurrently, she is working on a range of issues having to do with labor unions and with global justice campaigns. Professor Levi is currently the president-elect of the American Political Science Association.

BILL FLETCHER, JR., is the Director of Field Services & Education for the American Federation of Government Employees.  He also serves as the executive editor of BlackCommentator.com (www.blackcommentator.com).  Prior to joining AFGE, Fletcher was the Belle Zeller Visiting Professor at Brooklyn College-City University of New York.  From January 2002 through April 2006 he served as the President and chief executive officer of TransAfrica Forum, a national non-profit organization organizing, educating and advocating for policies in favor of the peoples of Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America.  Previously, Fletcher served as Education Director and later Assistant to the President of the AFL-CIO. His union staff experience also included the Service Employees International Union, the National Postal Mail Handlers Union, District 65-United Auto Workers in Boston, Massachusetts, and the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America.  Fletcher has authored numerous articles published in a variety of books, newspapers and magazines. He is the co-author, with Fernando Gapasin, of the book Solidarity Divided (University of California Press, 2008) which examines the crisis of organized labor in the United States. He is also the co-author of the pictorial booklet, The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941. 

JEFFERSON COWIE (PhD History, UNC Chapel Hill 1997) is Associate Professor of History at Cornell University. His work focuses on workers and the problem of class in the postwar United States, as well as issues in international and comparative history. He is the author of Capital Moves: RCA's Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor, which received the Philip Taft Prize for the Best Book in Labor History for 2000, and co-editor of Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization. His newest book, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class will be published in the fall of 2009. He is currently working with Nick Salvatore on The Long Exception: Rethinking the New Deal in American History. Cowie's commitment to undergraduate education is evident in his numerous teaching awards and his appointment as House Professor and Dean of Keeton House at Cornell University. He has been named a fellow by the American Council of Learned Societies; the Society for the Humanities at Cornell; and the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego.

GUY STANDING is Professor of Economic Security at the University of Bath in the UK. He was previously Director of the Socio-Economic Security Programme of the International Labour Organisation, where he worked for 30 years. He has been involved in numerous research and advisory projects, in developed and developing countries and, in the early 1990s, in the “transition” countries of Eastern Europe. He has written and edited books on labor economics, labor market policy, unemployment, labor market flexibility, structural adjustment policies and social protection policy. Recent books include: The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (Bloomsbury Academic, 2011); Social Income and Insecurity: A Study in Gujarat, with Jeemol Unni, Renana Jhabvala and Uma Rani (Routledge, 2010); Work after Globalization: Building Occupational Citizenship (Edward Elgar, 2009) and Promoting Income Security as a Right: Europe and North America (Anthem Press, 2005).

STEPHEN LERNER is a labor and community organizer who has spent more than three decades organizing hundreds of thousands of janitors, farm workers, garment workers, and other low-wage workers into unions. He is the architect of the justice for janitors campaign, which has organized and helped win a union for hundreds of thousands of immigrant janitors. He has helped lead the work challenging the power of wall street and big banks, and is part of a growing movement in the us that is using non-violent civil disobedience and direct action protests to challenge corporate power. Stephen is a member of SEIU’s international executive board.

GREG MUTTITT is the author of Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied iraq. He was previously co-director of campaigning charity Platform, which exposes and fights the environmental and human impacts of the oil industry. Since the Iraq war started in 2003, Muttitt has investigated the hidden plans for the future of the country’s oil. Now, in a gripping account of the war that dominated US and UK foreign policy over the last decade, he takes us behind the scenes to reveal the previously untold story of the oil politics that played out through the occupation of Iraq.