Across the country, cities and counties have become laboratories of policy innovation on labor standards. Before 2012, only five localities had minimum wage laws; currently, 65 counties and cities do. To help inform policymakers and other stakeholders, the UC Berkeley Labor Center is maintaining an up-to-date inventory of these laws, with details on wage levels, scheduled increases, and other law details, as well as links to the ordinances.

This factsheet describes the characteristics of the private sector security guard workforce in Seattle and the state of Washington, highlighting the need to improve labor conditions in the industry.

Security guards are essential workers who ensure public safety in buildings, hospitals, and transportation hubs—but their compensation and working conditions do not reflect their important role. Our series of briefs examines wages, job quality, and workforce characteristics in the private security industry across multiple geographies.

Enrique Lopezlira testified at the March 11, 2026, hearing of the California Senate Labor, Public Employment and Retirement Committee on “A Year in Review: 2025 Federal Policy Impacts on California’s Labor Market.” View video and slideshow.

This factsheet describes the characteristics of the private sector security guard workforce in Baltimore, highlighting the need to improve labor conditions in the industry.

This paper uses data from January 2022 to determine the earnings of delivery network company drivers in Seattle prior to implementation of the city’s App-Based Worker Minimum Payment Ordinance, and to calculate what their earnings would have been had the policy been in place at that time, finding that earnings would have been below the city’s minimum wage.

Our minimum wage and living wage tools and resources includes our Inventory of US City and County Minimum Wage Ordinances and a table of current local minimum wages in California.

In this blog post, we look at veterans’ prominent role in California’s labor unions, using the data and methodology from our recent report, “State of the Unions: California Labor in 2024.”

This report is the second in a series of reports looking at wages, living conditions, and economic challenges for workers and their families in Alameda and Contra Costa Counties. It finds that while East Bay workers experienced real wage growth during the recovery from the COVID-19 recession, many still lived at or “near” poverty, struggling to make ends meet during the years 2021-2023.

The report State of the Unions: California Labor in 2024 provides a snapshot of the California labor movement at a time of dramatic political and economic shifts nationwide. Led by researchers at the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) and the UC Berkeley Labor Center, the report analyzes the most recent publicly available data on union density, member demographics, and labor organizing activity in California and the nation.