The 2020 Derber Lecture at the School of Labor and Employment Relations will feature journalist Steven Greenhouse, and will be held on April 1.
The Annual Milton Derber Lecture was instituted in 1990 to honor Professor Emeritus Milton Derber.
Besides honoring Derber, the lecture was established to serve as a focal point for the intellectual enrichment for the school, its faculty and its students, as well as for the university community. Nationally known experts in a variety of employment relations subject areas are featured in this event, which is open to the public.
Steven Greenhouse was a reporter for the New York Times for 31 years, spending his last 19 years there as its labor and workplace reporter, before retiring from the paper in December 2014. He is often called the dean of the nation's labor journalists. He has written a new book, Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor, that Alfred A. Knopf published in August 2019.
As labor and workplace reporter from 1995 to 2014, Greenhouse covered myriad topics, including conditions for the nation’s farm workers, the Fight for $15, Walmart’s locking in workers at night, the New York City transit strike, factory disasters in Bangladesh, and Scott Walker’s push to hobble public employee labor unions.
Greenhouse joined The Times in September 1983 as a business reporter, covering steel and other basic industries. He then spent two-and-a-half years as the newspaper’s Midwestern business correspondent based in Chicago and then five years in Paris as European economics correspondent, covering everything from Western Europe’s economy to the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, including the Velvet Revolution in Prague. He next served as an NYT correspondent in Washington for four years, covering economics and then the State Department.
A native of Massapequa, N.Y., Greenhouse is a graduate of Wesleyan University (1973), the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (1975) and NYU Law School (1982).
His first book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, was published in April 2008 by Knopf. It won the 2009 Sidney Hillman Book Prize for a book on social justice. Greenhouse has also been honored with the Society of Professional Journalists Deadline Club award, a New York Press Club award, and a Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Reporting.
He continues to freelance for, among others, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, the Atlantic, the American Prospect, and the Columbia Journalism Review.