Bernhardt Labor Journalism Forum and Awards Ceremony

Please join the New York Labor History Association and NYU Special Collections’ Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at NYU Libraries, in collaboration with LaborArts and the NYC Central Labor Council, to mark the 11th Annual Bernhardt Award with a Forum focused on immigration.

The event is free and open to the public. It will also be livestreamed. Please RSVP to receive access to the livestream link.

AWARD - The 2024-2025 Bernhardt Labor Journalism prize winners will be announced at the end of September.

FORUM - Telling Immigrant Stories in the Face of Global Authoritarianism - in conversation with Gwynne Hogan (The City Reporter) and Arya Sundaram (Gothamist and WNYC), moderated by Ruth Milkman (Graduate Center, CUNY)

The award and the forum honor the late Debra E. Bernhardt, who worked across many realms to share the hidden histories of working people. As head of the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, she built relationships with  an astonishing number of people and organizations to document overlooked stories and unrecognized contributions, and to make links between past and present. The LaborArts project is dedicated to Bernhardt, and the online exhibit, Making History Personal, explores her work. Debra Bernhardt and Rachel Bernstein's Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives – A Pictorial History of Working People in New York City, features many of the materials Bernhardt brought to the Wagner Labor Archives.

About the Participants

Gwynne Hogan is a senior reporter at The City Reporter who's covered immigration, homelessness, and many other subjects in more than a decade reporting on New York City. Her coverage of ICE arrests at 26 Federal Plaza during a summer arrest surge in 2025, and the deplorable conditions in the holding cells inside that building, earned her awards from the Silurians Press Club, The Deadline Club and the Park Center for Independent Media. Before covering immigration enforcement under the second Trump administration, she spent two years reporting on the arrival of migrants from the southern border which tested the limits of New York City's right-to-shelter protections, and won her the Newswomen’s Club of New York’s Journalist of the Year award. Before working at The City Reporter, she was a general assignment reporter at WNYC and Gothamist, where her dogged coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic forced New York City officials to admit they were undercounting the dead.

Arya Sundaram is a journalist reporting on the race and immigration beat at Gothamist and WNYC, the local NPR station in New York City. An Indian-American writer from Raleigh, North Carolina, she recently spent a year as a fellow on the New York Times investigations desk, where she dug into police traffic stops for a Pulitzer Prize-winning project, unearthed scoops about anti-harassment charity Time’s Up, and investigated the rise workplace productivity monitoring for a forthcoming story. She has reported on immigration for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Texas legislature for Texas Tribune, and criminal justice for The Texas Observer. For the Observer, she wrote about how TX jails skirt inmate death investigations, and during 2021 Winter Storm Uri, obtained video footage of snow falling into a Texas Pr*son cell. Both of these projects were featured in The Marshall Project’s newsletter. Her immigration reporting has taken her across the U.S.-Mexico border, from a colonia in the Rio Grande Valley to a Hindu temple in Southern California. For The Atlantic, she wrote about the Border Patrol-to-Emergency Room pipeline. For The Guardian, her article on the rise in undocumented Indian immigrants crossing the border won Yale’s MacMillan Foltz Journalism prize.

Ruth 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. Her most recent books are: Immigration Matters (co-edited with Deepak Bhargava and Penny Lewis, New Press, 2021), Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat (Polity, 2020) and On Gender, Labor and Inequality (Illinois, 2016). Her early research focused on the impact on U.S. women workers of economic crisis and war in the 1930s and 1940s. She went on to study the restructuring of the U.S. automobile industry and its impact on workers and their union in the 1980s and 1990s; in that period she also analyzed the labor practices of Japanese-owned factories in California. More recently she has written extensively about low-wage immigrant workers, analyzing their employment conditions as well as the dynamics of immigrant labor organizing. She co-authored a 2013 study of California’s paid family leave program, focusing on its impact on employers and workers. She served as the 2016 President of the American Sociological Association; her presidential address focused on Millennial-generation social movements. She has also conducted extensive policy-oriented research on such topics as wage theft, unionization trends, paid sick leave, the aging workforce, and U.S. home care workers. After 21 years as a sociology professor at UCLA, where she directed the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment from 2001 to 2008, she returned to New York City in 2010. She is currently Distinguished Professor of Sociology and History at the CUNY Graduate Center and at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.

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