Worker Militancy

Arthur Wheaton is Director of Labor Studies and works in the Cornell ILR Buffalo Co-Lab. He also works for the Scheinman Institute on Conflict Resolution. Professor Wheaton’s expertise includes workplace training, negotiations, costing out a contract, and conflict resolution, as well as auto and aerospace industrial relations.

Prior to joining the ILR faculty in 1999, Professor Wheaton was with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was project manager for the Labor Aerospace Research Agenda.

Author of numerous publications, Professor Wheaton earned a B.A. in Multidisciplinary Social Science with a concentration in Political Science, History, and Economics at Michigan State University. He has an MLIR from the Michigan State School of Labor and Industrial Relations.

Cathy Creighton is Director of the ILR School’s Buffalo Co-Lab. Prior to assuming this role, Ms. Creighton taught classes to workers interested in becoming union representatives through the ILR Extension’s Labor Studies Program. A graduate of the ILR School, she has been involved with ILR’s High Road Fellowships program since its inception in 2009, serving on the program’s advisory board. Ms. Creighton, who helped draft Buffalo’s living wage ordinance, is former chair of the city’s Living Wage Commission; a co-founding partner of the law firm Creighton, Pearce, Johnsen & Giroux; and director of the Erie County Fiscal Stability Authority. She also serves on the Coalition for Economic Justice Workers’ Rights Board and is a former board member of the Lawyers Coordinating Committee of the AFL-CIO and the Labor and Employment Relations Association of Western New York.

Harry C. Katz is the Jack Sheinkman Professor of Collective Bargaining at Cornell University’s ILR School and the director of ILR’s Scheinman Institute on Conflict Resolution. He received his doctorate in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. After teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Professor Katz came to ILR in 1985. His areas of expertise include labor-management cooperation, labor relations, and contract negotiations.

Jamie LaReau joined the Detroit Free Press in June 2018 covering General Motors and the auto industry. Previously, she spent 13 years writing for Automotive News.

The Society for Professional Journalists awarded Ms. LaReau a first place in 2019 for her coverage of the GM strike. She was nominated for a Pulitzer and for the 2020 Richard Milliman Journalist of the Year by the Michigan Press Association.

A journalist for 30 years, Ms. LaReau worked at Reuters in New York covering transportation companies and at Bridge Wire Service in Chicago covering the financial markets. She did general assignment reporting at various television and radio news outlets across the Midwest and was bureau chief for WHOI-TV in Peoria, Illinois.

A native Detroiter, Ms. LaReau graduated from Michigan State University in 1991 with a Bachelor’s degree in Communications.