Much of his writing focuses on labor, the urban environment, and the organisation of work, from the Western world of business and high-technology to conditions of offshore labour in the Global South.

A scholar and activist associated with the anti-sweatshop movement, he published No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers in 1998 and Low Pay, High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor in 2002.

The latter book, written on the ground in China, is a frank alternative to Thomas Friedman's pro-outsourcing views on corporate globalisation.

Focusing on areas such as water supply, metropolitan growth, renewable energy, downtown revitalisation, immigration policy, and patterns of pollution, the book argues that urban managers have to base policy on combating environmental injustices to avoid replicating the condition of eco-apartheid that prevails in Phoenix and other major urban areas.

The book considers some of the legal and moral principles of the Jubilee South movement–aimed at repudiating external debts of developing countries–and adapts them to the situation of household debtors in the North.

Based on extensive field interviews, the book documents the conditions and challenges of workers in quarries and factories in the West Bank and it follows their movement across the Green Line to work on Israeli construction sites.

From the late 1990s, he has turned his attention to the academic labour movement, both in the national AAUP, and at NYU as a vocal supporter of the graduate student union, and as a founding member of Faculty Democracy.

In 2007, his co-edited volume, The University Against Itself, documented and analysed the long strike at NYU in 2005 by GSOC-UAW (The Graduate Student Organizing Committee).

[14] A founder of the Gulf Labor Coalition, he has helped to organise campaigns to raise migrant labour standards in the United Arab Emirates.