Orsetta Causa
Orsetta Causa is senior economist at the OECD Economics Department, Deputy head of the Public Policy Analysis Division and head of the Labour market & Inequalities team. Her research interests and publications cover a number of areas, including labour market dynamics and transitions, jobs and incomes, inequality of opportunities and inequalities of outcomes, social mobility — with a strong emphasis on policy traction in terms of growth and distributional outcomes. Orsetta holds a PhD from the Paris School of Economics.
Sukti Dasgupta
Sukti Dasgupta is currently the Director of the ILO Work and Equality Department (WORKQUALITY), previously Chief, Employment and Labour Markets Branch in the ILO Office in Geneva. She has worked at the ILO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific in Bangkok and in the field offices in South Asia and East Asia. She holds a PhD degree in Economics from the University of Cambridge, UK. She has published widely in the areas of employment, poverty and gender. She has extensive experience in working with policymakers on employment and labour market policies.
Anja Eleveld
Anja Eleveld is an associate professor social-legal studies in precarious work and poverty at the VU University. She had conducted empirical-legal research on the activation of social assistance recipients in the Netherlands and comparative legal research on activation regimes in Europe. In one of her latest articles she investigates whether mandatory work for social recipients can be meaningful work.
Stefan Olsson
Stefan Olsson is a Swedish lawyer with degrees in Swedish and international law. Having joined the European Commission in 1996, he has worked in various departments including employment, fisheries, justice, environment and human resources. As from 2015, he took up the position of Director responsible for the management of the European Social Fund, employment policy as well as legislative and policy issues relating to working conditions including health and safety at work. From September 2022, he serves as Deputy Director-General responsible for policy issues in DG Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion.
Aída Ponce Del Castillo
Aida Ponce Del Castillo is a lawyer by training. She obtained her European Doctorate in Law, focusing on the regulatory issues of human genetics, from the Universities of Valencia and Bonn. She also holds a Master’s degree in Bioethics. Within ETUI’s Foresight Unit, her research focuses on strategic foresight and on the legal, ethical, social and regulatory issues of emerging technologies. She is a member of the Competent Authorities Sub-Group to regulate nanomaterials at the European Commission. At the OECD she is member of the Working Party ‘Bio, -Nano and Convergent Technologies’ , and AI Governance. Previously, she was the Head of the ETUI Health and Safety Unit, working on occupational health and safety policies in the EU. She also was the Coordinator of the Workers’ Interest Group at the Advisory Committee of Safety and Health to the European Commission.
Luz Rodríguez
Luz Rodríguez is Professor of Labour Law at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). She has been a Senior Specialist in Labour Market Institutions at the International Labour Organisation, where she prepared the report ‘Decent work in the platform economy’. She has authored over 200 publications, with her most recent publication being her book Labour Law and Decent Work in the Platform Economy, published by Routledge in 2025. She is currently leading a research project on digital rights in the workplace and is involved in GDPoweR, a European research project being carried out in five European Union countries.
Manfred Weiss
Born 1940 in Southern Germany. 1960 – 1964 legal education at the universities of Freiburg and Berlin. 1965 – 66 Research Fellow at the Center of Law and Society at the University of California in Berkeley. 1974 – 1977 Full Professor of Civil Law and Labor Law at the University of Hamburg and 1977 – 2008 at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. Since 2008 Professor emeritus. His main research topics have been German, European and international labor law. Visiting professor at many universities all over the world, in the USA particularly at the University of Florida, at the University of Pennsylvania, at the NYU (member of the Global Law Program) and at the University of Illinois. For many years consultant to the International Labor Organization (ILO) and to the European Union (EU).1990 – 1995 President of the German Association of Industrial Relations and 2000 – 2003 President of the International Industrial Relations Association (now renamed International Labor and Employment Research Association). He also served as German correspondent to the NAA. He holds several honorary doctorates and in 2015 the international Labor Law Research Network(LLRN) endowed him the prestigious Award for outstanding contribution to labor law. He is a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science (WAAS).
Yiran Zhang
Yiran Zhang is Proskauer Assistant Professor of Employment and Labor Law at Cornell University Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) School and an Associate Faculty Member of the Cornell Law School. She studies how legal systems govern care work at the intersection of the often-informal labor market, the welfare state, and the economic household. Her current projects employs a socio-legal approach to examine public care programs and the employee classification of non-traditional laborers in the US. She also writes about care migration and social reproduction in China.
Yiran’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in UCLA Law Review, Boston University Law Review, Indiana Law Journal, Stanford Law & Policy Review, Cornell International Law Journal, Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, and Critical Sociology. She has received an S.J.D. and an LL.M. from Harvard Law School and an LL.B. from Tsinghua University.
Further keynote and plenary speakers will be confirmed and announced in the coming weeks.