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Abe Walker
Abe Walker
Assistant Professor of Sociology, Fayetteville State University
ChainGE Lab Research Fellow
Abe Walker is a sociologist working at the intersection of industrial relations, cultural studies, and social theory, with a methodological focus on organizational ethnography and qualitative research. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. His forthcoming book, Reassembling the UAW: Insurgency, Contention and the Struggle for Unionism in the American South (due Spring 2026 from Temple University Press), draws on a decade of fieldwork to explain how the United Auto Workers union achieved a landmark victory at a US Volkswagen plant. His work has been recognized with awards from the Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA) and the Illinois Climate Jobs Institute (ICJI), and published in such venues as Leadership, Journal of Political Power, and Labor History. He is a member of the American Association of University Professors and served previously as a campus organizer for the Professional Staff Congress (American Federation of Teachers, Local 2334). He is currently Assistant Professor of Sociology at Fayetteville State University, a constituent institution of the University of North Carolina system.
Broadly, his research centers on questions of labor power and organization amid economic restructuring, climate crisis, and geopolitical turmoil. Active research streams investigate how transnational labor alliances enforce social governance standards within global value chains, with an empirical focus on the automotive sector and warehousing/logistics. He is especially interested in the mismatch between "host-country" labor relations systems and the realities of supply chain capitalism. At ChainGE Lab, he will explore how workers can assert their collective power across scales and strategically exploit structural vulnerabilities within global value chains.