William A. Herbert is a Distinguished Lecturer and Executive Director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College and a Faculty Associate at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute.

His research and scholarship focus on higher education faculty and graduate assistant unionization and collective bargaining; labor history, law, and policy; the implications of location technologies on worker rights; and electronic privacy inside and outside of the workplace.  Among my current research projects is an examination of the origins and history of the CIO’s State County Municipal Workers of America.

His recent publications include a chapter on the history of contingent faculty unionization in Eric Fure-Slocum and Claire Goldstene, Contingent Faculty: A Labor  History (2024). Other of his chapters have appeared in Joshua B. Freeman, City of Workers, City of Struggle: How Labor Movement Changed New York (2019); Wenzhong Shu, et al, Urban Informatics (2021); Tobias Schulze-Cleven and Todd E. Vachon, Revaluing Work(ers): Toward a Democratic and Sustainable Future (2021); and Daniel Julius, Collective Bargaining in Higher Education: Best Practices for the Promotion of Collaboration, Equity and Measurable Outcomes (2021). 

He is a co-editor-in-chief of the treatise Lefkowitz on Public Sector Labor and Employment Law and author of articles on electronic privacy, public sector labor law and history, card check certification, and electronic voting.

He a fellow of the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers and the recipient of the John E. Gould Medal from the American Geographical Society.

Prior to joining the Hunter College faculty, he was Deputy Chair and Counsel to the New York State Public Employment Relations Board (PERB).  Before his tenure at PERB, He was a practicing labor, civil rights. and tenant’s attorney for over three decades. 

He is a graduate of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University and the University at Buffalo.