Dr. Carla Lipsig-Mummé
Director, Australian Research Centre on Work and Society
Deakin University
Australia

Carla Lipsig-Mummé is Founding Director of the Australian Research Centre on Work and Society (ARCWS), established by Deakin University in 2002.

Prior to moving to Melbourne in 2001 to become Professor and Chair of Sociology at Deakin, Lipsig-Mummé taught at York University in Canada, and directed a research centre, CRWS, in partnership with the Canadian labour movement.

She is a labour educator and researcher, a frequent guest on radio and TV, and a sometime contributor to Australian, Canadian and US newspapers.

Lipsig-Mummé began her working life as a union organiser with Cesar Chavez' United Farmworkers in California and was involved with the first strike of sessional academics at the University of Wisconsin.

Obtaining her doctorate in sociology at the Université de Montréal, for over twenty years she also worked as a labour activist and policy advisor to Quebec and English Canadian unions.

In the mid-1980s she was seconded to the Quebec Confederation of Education Unions to work on sector-wide negotiations.

In the early 1990s she worked with Russian trade unions as they struggled to transform themselves from agents of the state to social movements in civil society.

Throughout the 1990s, she has been a frequent visitor to Australia, speaking to Trades Hall and member unions on numerous occasions. In 1990 she was elected to Canadian Who's Who.

From 1990 to 2001, Lipsig-Mummé focused on developing activist and intellectual partnerships between unions, community organisations and the university, through CRWS at York.

Those partnerships obtained considerable long-term Canadian funding, and researched precarious employment, the political economy of training, young workers and unions, organising, and the globalisation of union strategy. In 2000, she directed a pilot project to educate mid-career union staffers in internet-based labour research.