Ruth Milkman is a distinguished professor of sociology at the City University of New York and also at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, where she serves as chair of the Labor Studies program. Milkman is a sociologist of labor and labor movements who has written on a variety of topics involving work and organized labor in the United States, past and present. She was elected the 2016 president of the American Sociological Association. She spent 21 years as a sociology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she directed the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment from 2001 to 2008. She is the author of Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat (Polity, 2020), among other books. She earned her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.