ILR Worker Institute Research Fellowship Program

At its heart, the Worker Institute views its work as a contribution to reversing the growing inequality, now at historic levels, which undermines the economic and social sustainability of a vibrant democratic society.  The Institute provides the nation’s most comprehensive education, training, research, and organizational support for union leaders and worker advocates.  Worker Institute research fellows, sometimes in small teams, will have the opportunity to work directly with Ithaca-based faculty and ILR labor extension faculty based in NYC.

The fellowship program’s goal is to provide ILR students with a unique opportunity to contribute to important projects concerning workers and unions, expand their research skills, learn about potential career paths and interact with faculty, labor leaders and other fellows.

The main selection criteria include a strong academic record and a demonstrated interest in one of the Worker Institute’s research areas. 

The Use of LLMs in Labor Union Contracts
This project will continue to evaluate the efficacy of LLM software (developed over my
sabbatical) in accurately coding union contracts for specific themes/provisions. This is an
interactive process where I feed the software a list of topics, and then the software evaluates a
list of N (e.g., 1000) union contract PDFs to see if those themes appear and how. It writes the
output to a database. It's proven accurate so far. With the help of student RAs, I can better
identify places where human coders and AI disagree about whether a topic is present in a union
contract. If the humans are correct (and the AI is incorrect), I can learn how to improve the
model by adding training data. - with John McCarthy