Peter Ranis is Professor Emeritus in the Ph. D Program in Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research interests include labor studies and the political economy in Latin America and the United States. Currently, Professor Ranis is examining alternative labor movements in civil society. He is studying the recuperated enterprise and factory movements as well as producer cooperatives in Argentina and Cuba and is exploring the potential uses of eminent domain and cooperatives as a labor strategy in defense against working-class unemployment and poverty in the U.S. pranis@york.cuny.edu