Ruth Milkman

Milkman's grandparents emigrated to the United States around 1910, and the family's last name was allegedly bestowed on them by an immigration official at Ellis Island. (In reality, the family itself must have initiated the name change, since Ellis Island officials never changed names.) While both of Milkman's parents were born and raised in Brooklyn, and eventually attended Brooklyn College, Milkman was raised in Annapolis, Maryland where her father was an instructor at the United States Naval Academy. Milkman attributes her interest in labor to an incident in her childhood, where, when shopping with her mother in New York City, the two encountered an International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union picket line, which her mother refused to cross. Milkman obtained a bachelor's degree in 1975 from Brown University, where created her own major with an emphasis in women's studies. She was awarded a Master of Arts in sociology in 1977 and a Ph.D. in sociology in 1981, both from the University of California, Berkeley. Milkman was drawn to Berkeley because of the left-wing political activity of the 1960s that had taken place there. While at Berkeley, Milkman was an editor of Socialist Review, which later became Radical Society.

In 1981, Milkman was appointed an assistant professor, then associate professor, of sociology at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. In 1986, she was a visiting lecturer in American labor history at the University of Warwick in Coventry, United Kingdom, a visiting professor at the University of São Paulo in São Paulo, Brazil in 1990, a visiting research scholar at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia in 1991, and a visiting research associate at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris in 1993. She won an appointment as an associate professor at University of California, Los Angeles in 1988, where she became a full professor of sociology.

She was appointed director of the UCLA Institute of Industrial Relations in 2001. From 2001 to 2004, Milkman also was director of the University of California Institute for Labor and Employment prior to its restructuring as a research fund. In 2009, Milkman returned to the CUNY Graduate Center, and took up her present position of Research Director at the Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies.