About The Center

Greg DeFreitas has taught economics at Hofstra University since 1986. Before that he taught at Barnard College, Columbia University, the University of Toronto, and Cambridge University. He was educated at Stanford, Cambridge, and Columbia, where he received his Ph.D. in economics. He has collaborated with Argentine and British economists to publish cross-country empirical comparisons of youth employment, immigration, and labor-management relations. His own research on immigration and the wage and employment experiences of Latinos through the 1980s is presented in his book, Inequality At Work: Hispanics in the U.S. Labor Force (Oxford University Press). In 1995-96, during his year's leave as a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, he directed the New York Youth Employment Survey. This was a unique survey of hundreds of New York City employers sponsored by our Center and funded by the U.S. Department of Labor. The following year he initiated a major new project for the CLD: the New York College Student Job Survey. His latest book is an edited volume: Young Workers in the Global Economy: Job Challenges in North America, Europe and Japan (Edward Elgar Publishers).
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Niev Duffy is a health economist formerly on the Politics, Economics and Law faculty at SUNY, Old Westbury. She was formerly the Research Director at the Institute for Worker Education, City University of New York. Before that position, she was on the research faculty of the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan. From 1996 to 2000, she was an assistant professor of economics at Hofstra, where she introduced a new core course in health economics and was a founding editor of the Regional Labor Review. She received her Ph.D. in economics in 1996 from NYU, where she taught for several years. Her earlier work combined economic and demographic analyses of fertility patterns in Southeast Asia. She is currently doing research on the declining accessibility and affordability of health benefits in the United States. Her research seeks to identify those sectors of the economy where workers have lost the most ground in health benefits in order to reveal important insights about the impact of changing patterns of employment on the demographics of health care coverage.

Robert Guttmann teaches economics at Hofstra and at the University of Paris XIII. He was educated at the University of Vienna, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of London, from which he received his Ph.D. Before coming to Hofstra in 1984, he was for many years on the economics faculty of Rutgers University. He is currently researching the global financial impacts of employee pension funds and their use as an agency for greater worker and public participation in employment of financial capital. His past research on international economics was published in the books, How Credit Money Shapes the Economy: The United States in a Global System and Reforming Money and Finance. He now works with leading French economists associated with the EU Commission, the OECD, and the French Central Bank. He has also been working with Austrian, German and Italian scholars associated with leading research institutes. His newest book is Markets and Institutions in Flux (M.E. Sharpe).
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Sharryn Kasmir joined the anthropology faculty at Hofstra in 1996. She received her B.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and her Ph.D. in anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her ethnographic research on the Mondragon cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain culminated in her recent book, The "Myth" of Mondragon: Cooperatives, Politics, and Working-Class Life in a Basque Town (SUNY Press, 1996). She is currently researching labor-management relations in Spring Hill, Tennessee, site of the General Motors Saturn auto plant. She teaches courses on ethnography and on anthropological approaches to the global economy. Recently, she supervised student field research among immigrant day laborers on Long Island.
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Cheryl R. Lehman is a professor of accounting and business law at Hofstra. She received her Ph.D. in accounting, with a specialization in computer applications, from the Graduate School of Business Administration at NYU. She is general editor of Advances in Public Interest Accounting, associate editor of Critical Perspectives on Accounting, and on the editorial boards of Accounting, Auditing, and Accountability and Gender, Work, and Organization. Her publications appear in Accounting, Organizations, and Society, Accounting, Auditing, and Accountability, Advances in Public Interest Accounting, The Political Economy of Information, and Behavioral Accounting Research: A Critical Analysis. She co-edited the book, Multinational Culture: Social Impacts of a Global Economy with Dr. Rusty Moore. Her book, Accounting's Changing Role in Social Conflict has been published in English, Japanese, and Korean. She has lectured as a visiting scholar in Australia and England and, for the past seven years, has made numerous trips to the Former Soviet Union, lecturing to finance ministers, financial analysts, accountants, economists, and women's organizations. Her research and professional work include accounting's role in the global economy, financial accounting disclosure, public policy and regulation, managerial accounting techniques, business ethics and gender issues. She is on the Board of Directors of the Network of East-West Women and the Institute for Women's Policy Research.
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Martin Melkonian has taught economics at Hofstra and other local colleges for over 30 years. He has worked as an economist in government and in the finance industry. His areas of specialization include economic conversion, energy economics, and the Long Island regional economy. His publications include: Cutbacks in Defense Spending: Outlook and Options for the Long Island Economy, The Energy Picture Entering the 21st Century, and Reinvest in Long Island. He is the coordinator of the Harvey Levin Public Policy Workshop at Hofstra, and a board member of the Long Island Alliance for Peaceful Alternatives and the Citizens' Advisory Panel.
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Marc Silver teaches sociology and is former chairman of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Hofstra. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia. He is the author of Under Construction: Work and Alienation in the Building Trades (SUNY Press, 1986) and co-editor of Contested Terrain: Power, Politics, and Participation in Suburbia (Greenwood Press, 1995).
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Martha Weisel is an Associate Professor in Accounting, Taxation and Legal Studies in the Zarb School of Business at Hofstra University. She was educated at Queens College, City University of New York and at St. John's University School of Law, where she earned a JD. Professor Weisel is admitted to practice in New York State courts, the federal courts in the Eastern and Southern Districts, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and the United States Supreme Court.

She has had many articles published in law and accounting journals, including: “Equitable Estoppel in Family Law” (New York State Bar Association Journal ), “Prenuptial Agreements in Estate Planning” and “Equitable Estoppel and Paternity” (Nassau Lawyer, respectively). Earlier articles were published in The Woman CPA, Arbitration Journal, and the Journal of Law and Psychiatry.
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James Wiley is an emeritus professor of Geography at Hofstra and was the founding director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program. He holds a Ph.D. from Rutgers University and is an expert on Latin American labor immigration and economic development. His research focuses on Latin American and especially Caribbean labor and social conditions. Most recently, he has been studying the efforts of small, highly specialized economies in the Caribbean and Central America to diversify their production, export profiles and generate new sources of employment. He is investigating the implications of these efforts for immigration trends from this region to the United States.
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Robert Archer, Senior Partner (ret.), Archer, Byington, Glennon & Levine  
Elaine Bernard, Director, Trade Union Program, Harvard University.  
Susan Borenstein, Executive Director, UI  Appeal Board, NYS Dept. of Labor  
Roger Clayman, Executive Director (ret.), Long Island Federation of Labor (AFL-CIO)  
Benjamin Coriat, Director, CREI, University of Paris.  
John Coverdale, Director, Nassau County, New York State United Teachers  
Elise de Castillo. Executive Director, Central American Refugee Center (CARECEN) 
Robert Dow,  Commissioner of Labor (ret.), Suffolk Co., NY  
John Durso, President, RWDSU/UFCW Local 338 & President, Long Island Federation of Labor (AFL-CIO)  
Nora Higgins, Regional Director, NYS Public Employees Federation  
Alexandra Howell, Employment Attorney, Archer, Byington, Glennon & Levine  
Nicholas LaMorte, Regional President, Civil Service Employees Association  
Adriana Marshall, Senior Fellow, National Research Council of Argentina, Buenos Aires.  
Ray Marshall, Former U.S. Secretary of Labor and University Professor, University of Texas.  
Lawrence Mishel, President, Economic Policy Institute, Washington, D.C.  
Leslie Rose, NYS United Teachers, Nassau County  
Cathy Ruckelshaus, Co-Director, National Employment Law Project  
Onika Shepherd-Bernabe, Political Director, SEIU Local 1199 
Mary Anne Trasciatti, Director of Labor Studies, Hofstra University  
Ryan Stanton, Executive Director, Long Island Federation of Labor (AFL-CIO)
Edward Wolff, Professor of Economics, New York University.  
Michael Zweig, Professor of Economics Emeritus, SUNY Stony Brook