On April 30, the National Employment Law Project (NELP) will honor economist and writer Nancy Folbre, U.S. secretary of labor Tom Perez, and the Ford Foundation for their leadership in the fight for workers’ rights. Folbre will receive the Beth Shulman Award, named for former NELP board president and New Press author Beth Shulman, who passed away in 2010. The past honorees are New Press board member Bob Herbert, distinguished senior fellow at Demos and contributing editor at the American Prospect, and Patricia Smith, solicitor of the U.S. Department of Labor and former New York State commissioner of labor.

Folbre is a MacArthur fellow and professor emerita of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her work focuses on political economy and feminist theory, particularly on caring labor and other forms of nonmarket work. She is a co-author, with Jonathan Teller-Elsberg and James Heintz, of Field Guide to the U.S. Economy: A Compact and Irreverent Guide to Economic Life in America, which they wrote as staff economists at the Center for Popular Economics. Folbre is a regular contributor to the New York Times Economix blog.

In a career that spanned over thirty years, author and labor attorney Beth Shulman was a tireless advocate for workers’ rights as a civil rights lawyer, a union attorney, the vice president of the United Food & Commercial Workers Union, the chair of the NELP board, and a noted author and commentator. Her book The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans influenced conversations about economic life in America and outlined policy to address the injustice faced by the millions of Americans who work full time but do not make a living wage.

For more information on NELP’s annual benefit and awards dinner, click here.