Economists at the University of California at Berkeley Labor Center crunched the numbers and included other costs, like the time when drivers must wait to be matched with a rider. They concluded drivers’ actual wage to be closer to $5.64 per hour.
The new GAO report echoes the conclusions of similar studies by the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center in 2013 and 2015, which found that U.S. taxpayers are subsidizing large corporations to the tune of $153 billion per year in the form of public assistance programs to support their low-wage employees.
The GAO’s conclusions add to an existing body of research showing the extent to which profitable companies paying low wages are effectively subsidized by the federal government to the tune of billions and billions of dollars.
McAlevey argues that unions focus too much on persuading the employer rather than empowering workers for collective action.
A Berkeley Labor Center study found Prop 22 would net ride-hail and delivery drivers a minimum wage of $5.64 an hour—California’s minimum wage is $12 an hour.
As researchers at UC Berkeley’s Labor Center have noted in a recent report, “there is strong evidence that worker voice on the job has a positive impact on compliance. Unionized workers know more about health and safety risks and their rights under the law and are more likely to report violations because they have better protection from unfair dismissals.”
Jane explains the door-knocking Democrats should do, why the left needs more than a Labor Secretary, and how to take lessons from union elections, since they’re models of voter suppression.
A sizable number of the recipients of federal aid programs such as Medicaid and food stamps are employed by some of the biggest and more profitable companies in the United States, chief among them Walmart and McDonald’s.
The benefits stipulated in Prop 22 are not as good as those for someone classified as an employee. One study said those “promises in the proposition were worth the equivalent of only $5.64 per hour” (University of Berkeley Labor Center).
A study by three research groups at the University of California at Berkeley found that Uber and Lyft drivers would be guaranteed only an estimated $5.64 per hour. This no doubt would have surprised 40 percent of those in a survey of early voters who said they had supported Proposition 22 to ensure workers earned livable wages.
Labor advocates say it’s possible to both have flexibility and be an employee. Ken Jacobs, chair of the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, sees Uber’s hybrid model as an “old model wrapped in new technology,” with the companies shifting the costs and risks to workers.
Prop 22 promises substandard healthcare, a death sentence to many in the middle of a pandemic. We’re promised a sub-minimum wage in the middle of a recession that an independent study showed would be as low as $5.64 an hour – not the eventual $15 state minimum.
AB 5 still covers the majority of California’s independent contractors, from maids to truck drivers. To classify those jobs as independent contractors, companies still have to meet what is known as the ABC test, meaning they should not impose control over workers in areas such as their hours. Those workers should also perform duties outside the usual course of the companies’ business.
But winning the election is like gaining recognition for a union. Now the real work starts.
A new podcast “Black Work Talk” with Steven Pitts kicked off its first episode with long-time racial justice and labor activist Bill Fletcher Jr. on Nov 11.
“The biggest thing is control of the Senate and the ability to pass a law for gig workers,” Ken Jacobs, a gig economy expert at the UC Berkeley Labor Center, told Motherboard. “We’ll know more after the Georgia election, but things like an ABC test that takes legislation will be more difficult for Biden in the short run.”
AB 5 still exists, and it still covers millions of California workers, says Ken Jacobs, chair of the UC Berkeley Labor Center. They include janitors and other cleaners, retail workers, ground maintenance workers, and truck drivers
Prop 22 exempts the gig companies from AB5, and instead creates a “third category” of independent contractors with a few perks. Drivers will now receive limited health benefits, but only for those who log enough hours, and an hourly pay “guarantee” that a UC Berkeley Labor Center study found to be worth $5.64.
“The ACA covered millions of people and reduced the racial and ethnic disparities in health coverage in California,” researchers at the UC Berkeley Labor Center and UCLA Center for Health Policy Research wrote in a recent publication. “(T)o take away these coverage options especially during a global pandemic and recession would exacerbate racial and ethnic inequality in California.”
“AB5 was always about so much more than Uber and Lyft and (app-based) delivery drivers,” said Jacobs, who co-wrote a research paper looking at who was covered by AB5. “They make up a small fraction of the millions of Californians covered under the law.”
A report conducted by the UC Berkeley Labor Center in May 2020 found Uber and Lyft would have paid $413m into California’s unemployment benefits system if drivers had been classified as employees rather than independent contractors. California is among many US states struggling to maintain funds for unemployment insurance funds.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are deeply concerned that the passage of Proposition 22, a ballot initiative in California, will undermine the rights of workers for app-based companies in the state and set a dangerous precedent across the United States and globally.
A University of California at Berkeley analysis concluded that after accounting for full expenses and wait times, the proposition’s pay guarantee is worth less than $6 an hour.
Californians’ approval of this ballot measure cements gig workers as permanent independent contractors, keeping them from qualifying to be full-time employees and receive basic benefits. Labor experts at University of California – Berkeley did an analysis which found that Proposition 22’s passage means that Uber and Lyft drivers will only make $5.64 an hour on average.
A University of California, Berkeley labor center study found that when full time spent working (including wait time) was counted, the guarantee amounts to $5.64 an hour, less than half the state minimum wage.
If Uber and Lyft had classified workers as employees, they would have collectively contributed $413 million into the state’s Unemployment Insurance Fund between 2014 and 2019, according to a May report from The Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley.
Jacobs also said the federal government can step in to say gig drivers should be considered as employees in its law, making them eligible at least for some benefits such as the federal minimum wage, which is set at $7.25 an hour. “Either way, this debate is far from over.”
“Drivers will continue to be paid less than the minimum wage if all their work time is counted; and they will be reimbursed for less than half of their business expenses. That’s a big price to pay,” UC Berkeley labor economist Michael Reich said in an email.
As Ken Jacobs and Michael Reich of the UC Berkeley Labor Center have pointed out, the $15.60 minimum shrinks to only $5.64 when conditions and specifics are factored in.
California voters typically support labor rights, but gig companies successfully confused the issue through “deceptive design in the measure itself,” as well as the volume of spending to push out the companies’ messages, said Ken Jacobs.
It should be noted that the UC Berkeley Labor Center estimates this only works out to about $5.64 an hour on average; Uber and Lyft insist it’s closer to $25 to $27, but UC Berkeley still disagrees.
“The question all along has been over time would new workers continue to enroll at the same rate or would some people drop off,” said Jacobs, the UC Berkeley professor. “And so far we’ve seen union membership hold pretty steady.”
“If you’re a barista, you are paid whether or not there’s someone at the counter at the moment,” noted Ken Jacobs, chair of the Labor Center at the University of California at Berkeley. Jacobs analyzed Prop 22 and found its wage guarantee comes out to $5.64 for every hour that drivers are logged into their app. California’s minimum hourly wage is $12.
According to the University of California Berkeley’s Labor Center, rideshare drivers will only earn an average wage of $5.64 per hour after numerous loopholes are factored in — a pay rate considerably below California’s $13 per hour minimum wage starting in 2021.
An August 2020 report by Ken Jacobs and Michael Reich of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UC Berkeley concluded that drivers’ compensation, if Proposition 22 passes, is approximately $5.64. The proposition doesn’t pay drivers for the time spent waiting for customers and underestimates driving expenses.
According to Business Insider’s review of compensation in Uber’s initial public offering, Uber’s CEO took home a $45 million pay package last year; comparatively, under Prop 22, a 2019 study from the UC Berkeley Labor Center last year found that a worker’s “guaranteed pay” would hover around $5.64 per hour.
Pennsylvania is one of 26 states that saw median household income grow at a slower pace during the president’s first three years than during the three years leading up to his administration, according to the analysis conducted by Capital & Main in partnership with the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education
Fifty-five percent of Latino Californians are employed as essential workers — in agriculture, construction, product-stocking and other occupations that require close proximity between workers, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center. Only 35% of white Californians hold these types of jobs.
Another chronic problem in the gig economy is that too many workers chase too little work, a phenomenon that has been particularly acute among ride-hailing services. It arises in part because most platforms allow almost anyone to join. Our ongoing but unpublished interviews with gig shoppers and delivery workers find that this imbalance has intensified during the pandemic.
This stipend bears little resemblance to traditional employer-based insurance, which is what drivers would get if they were considered employees instead of gig workers, said Ken Jacobs, chair of the University of California-Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education.
“Instead of spreading the cost of new cleaner technologies to whole industries, you’re putting that on the backs of workers,” said Carol Zabin.
We talk to Goldman Alumna Rebecca Stack-Martinez and the Chair of the UC Berkeley Labor Center Ken Jacobs about the implications of Prop 22 on labor and the influence of money on the most expensive ballot initiative in California’s History.
“Obama was carrying us out of a very deep and long recession, and Trump inherited that. If anything, it’s notable that real income didn’t rise any faster under Trump than it did under Obama, despite the stimulus that his tax cuts were supposed to provide.”
“This is a really important battle. We’ll see it spread to other industries. It’s not just an issue in California. It has huge implications for labour – more of a race to the bottom by taking away worker protections through outsourcing and subcontracting.”
Much of gig work is spent waiting for a job in the app. UC Berkeley’s Labor Center did a study where they tried to take time between rides into account, along with wear and tear on the vehicle. Adding those factors in the mix, the study found the wage guarantee drops to just $5.64 an hour.
Drivers are only compensated when they’re fulfilling a ride request, not when they’re waiting for one, [so] the actual average pay for total time spent in the car is only $5.64 per hour.
Only paying drivers for engaged time would be the equivalent of a fast food restaurant or retail store saying they will only pay the cashier when a customer is at the counter.
Reich and Jacobs say the studies backed by Uber and Lyft underestimate costs like gas, vehicle damage and car-value depreciation, in part because those studies discount expenses incurred outside of engaged time.
Labor activists say Uber is failing to provide drivers basic protections only offered to employees, such as healthcare and the ability to unionize. They also say the protections outlined in Prop 22 are inadequate, pointing to an analysis from the Labor Center at the University of California Berkeley that found the minimum wage under Prop. 22 would only be $5.64 due to loopholes and hidden costs.
In late 2019, the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley, released a report estimating that drivers working under Prop. 22 could receive a net wage as low as five dollars and sixty-four cents an hour—less than half the minimum wage in California, and hardly a third of the minimum wage in San Francisco
Economists at the University of California at Berkeley Labor Center crunched the numbers and included other costs, like the time when drivers must wait to be matched with a rider. They concluded drivers’ actual wage to be closer to $5.64 per hour.
California receives some $27 billion a year from the federal government to subsidize insurance coverage for low- and moderate-income Californians, an amount roughly equivalent to what the state spends annually on prisons, colleges and universities, according to estimates by the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
Labor activists say Uber is failing to provide drivers basic protections, such as healthcare, wage protections and the ability to unionize, because they aren’t employees.
Los Angeles County worked with UCLA’s Labor Center and the University of California Berkeley’s Labor Center to study and respond to the situation. The first step was to give workers a direct and private way to report worrisome situations. Thousands of tips poured in, allowing the county to crack down on situations.
“The U.C. Berkeley Labor Center estimates that California could annually lose 27 billion [dollars] and potentially 299,000 jobs if the ACA was struck down,” Kelch outlined.
Reich has a more optimistic view than Uber and Lyft of their ability to transition. He predicts that in California, prices would increase 5% to 10%, while labor costs would go up 25% to 30%.
A UC Berkeley Labor Center study said Uber and Lyft would have owed California $413 million for unemployment between 2014 and 2019 if drivers were employees.
A study by my colleagues at UC Berkeley found that under Prop 22, Uber and Lyft drivers would be guaranteed only $5.64 an hour – a far cry from the $13 an hour minimum wage they’d otherwise get. And the vast majority would not qualify for the health benefits outlined in Prop 22.
Proposition 22, which is being put to voters on the same day as the November 3 presidential election, will determine whether California’s government can enforce a law which became effective this year requiring on-demand companies to treat drivers as employees, instead of independent contractors.
The NLRB has been “ripped asunder by the current leadership,” says Jane McAlevey, a longtime labor organizer and fellow at UC Berkeley’s Labor Center. The result is that corporations are more likely to cheat in negotiations, knowing there won’t be any real consequences.
“You know, that’s about $6 an hour, what they’re proposing — it’s actually less than I make right now. That’s how bad this thing is.” (Labor and economics experts at University of California, Berkeley, later confirmed the driver’s calculations.)
Prop 22 also will not likely offer higher wages because of a complex formula that will be used to determine “minimum wage.” A study by the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center found that if Proposition 22 passes, many drivers could earn as little as $5.64 an hour once their considerable driving expenses are subtracted, which is not even half of California’s minimum wage of $12 per hour.
LA officials pushed to set up tip lines for violations on workplace health enforcement and other offenses. UC Berkeley Labor Center believed the idea was “innovative,” noting that the workplace was the driver of COVID-19 in the county, affecting mostly Latinos and Blacks.
Union members see the tech-funded initiative as a direct attack on the working class.
“If the ACA is overturned, policymakers would be facing a lot of hard decisions about how to respond,” Lucia said. “Over $28 billion in federal funding would be very difficult for the state to replace.”
Misclassification of workers is a substantial contributor to growing inequality, as well as a raid on the public treasury. One study estimated that Uber and Lyft would have paid $413 million into California’s unemployment insurance fund between 2014 and 2019 if their drivers had been employees.
As president, Biden would have a number of means at his disposal to enforce better labor standards in the industry, said Carol Zabin, a labor economist who directs the Green Economy Program at the University of California, Berkeley. His administration could make sure individual workers aren’t expected to cover the costs of environmental initiatives.
Los Angeles County officials attribute a dramatic decline in COVID-19 death and case rates among Blacks and Latinos over the past two months to aggressive workplace health enforcement and the opening of tip lines to report violations. Now, officials intend to cement those gains by creating workplace councils among employees trained to look for COVID-19 prevention violations and correct or report them — without fear of being fired or punished.
California measure would bring slight tweaks including a path to health-care reimbursements and some disability insurance, but if companies’ record-breaking $185 million campaign fails, it could mean much bigger changes.
A car caravan of more than 250 rideshare drivers will bring their “No on Prop. 22” message to Los Angeles on Wednesday, alleging the ballot measure would lock workers into sub-minimum wage jobs with little in the way of benefits.
Opponents of Proposition 22 say the initiative does not guarantee that drivers will receive the 120% of California’s $13 minimum wage because of the hidden costs of app-based driving, such as vehicle upkeep and waiting times between rides. They cite research from UC Berkeley, which indicates drivers would only make about $5.64 under Proposition 22.
The UC Berkeley Labor Center also estimates that after factoring in waiting time, expenses, and taxes, this wage floor established by Proposition 22 would, in fact, come out to $5.64 an hour, far less than the current state minimum wage of $12 an hour ($13 an hour at larger firms like Uber and Lyft).
It seems that these companies would sooner destroy their own businesses than grant workers the dignity of comprehensive benefits, guaranteed wages or unemployment insurance. Rejecting Prop 22 is a chance finally to ensure gig workers the protections all workers deserve.
A joint analysis of Prop 22 by the UC Berkeley Labor Center, Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, and Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics found that the estimated pay guarantee for rideshare drivers would be equivalent to a wage of $5.64 per hour; California minimum wage for employees will be $13 in 2021.
Voting against Prop 22 is arguably a pro-business move in addition to being pro-worker. If you believe in market competition, companies should have to compete fairly on grounds of price and quality, not be undercut by a cynical evasion of labor and anti-trust law.
“The assumption that streamlining processes leads in a linear fashion to greater efficiencies, and thus cost reductions, may be fundamentally flawed,” professors Beth Gutelius and Nik Theodore wrote in the paper, commissioned by the U.C. Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education and Working Partnerships USA.
A recent report by the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and the nonprofit Working Partnerships USA predicted that workers would come under new pressure as stores began to resemble Amazon warehouses, and noted that “stock clerks’ jobs seem destined for more radical change than any of the other major retail job categories.”
California’s Prop 22 would make the misclassification of Uber and Lyft drivers permanent.
An analysis by the UC Berkeley Labor Center earlier this year found that had California’s gig economy law been in place between 2014 and 2019, Uber and Lyft would have paid $413 million in unemployment insurance alone
“Do you believe for one second that these companies are spending $180 million on a ballot measure that’s going to benefit drivers more than it benefits Uber-Lyft-DoorDash’s bottom line?”
“If your employer is going to stop you coming in the door because you have a temperature, it would also be really good if (the) employer was offering paid sick leave,” Jessie HF Hammerling said. “So that workers don’t have an incentive to try to sneak into work when they might potentially be infected.”
Prop 22’s text actually calls for “a net earnings floor based on 120% of the minimum wage applied to a driver’s engaged time.” So they’re making a distinction between ‘engaged time’ versus ‘unengaged time’ — ‘engaged time’ is when the driver has a fare, ‘unengaged time’ is when the driver is hanging around hoping for a fare to come in.
“This is an extremely dangerous precedent,” said Ken Jacobs, chair of the Labor Center at UC Berkeley. “They just acted like the law doesn’t apply to them and assumed they could bring in enough money, gain enough political power, to bend the law to their will.”
“These are unacceptable deaths, each of which could have been prevented if we had had adequate supply chains in place in advance of the pandemic,” said UC Berkeley Professor William Dow.
Prop 22 “guarantees” certain benefits, including completely undefined “assistance” with health care premiums and disability coverage for those injured on the job. Drivers are guaranteed an hourly wage at least 120 percent of the local minimum. But that only kicks in during time spent driving, while waiting for or getting to a ride or a delivery, which can be as much as 37 percent of the time spent on the job, remains uncompensated.
If Prop 22 is defeated and A.B. 5 is enforced, driver pay would be tied to hours worked rather than just ‘engaged’ time. Drivers would receive fairer wages, and it would be less financially attractive for the companies to have drivers idling or driving unproductively.
Cherri Murphy, like other gig workers, found she couldn’t get unemployment insurance because Lyft didn’t classify her as an employee. She says the fight over this ballot measure is critical for worker protections.
Dr. Rhee’s data shows that workers of color are behind on saving for retirement — 38% of Black households and 31% of Latino households have some assets in a retirement account, compared to 63% of white households.
Prioritizing good jobs that also solve some of our environmental and climate issues are part of a strong economic recovery. We’re at a crossroads. The recommendations in the Jobs and Climate Action Plan for 2030 will help California emerge from this recovery stronger and more resilient than ever.
“The companies have been slick in their deception. [Prop. 22] doesn’t provide meaningful guarantees for the driver. The central effect of Proposition 22 is to take away rights and benefits for drivers under California law.”
“They have basically operated as though the law does not apply to them,” Ken Jacobs, the chair of the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, told Salon. “And I think that signals to other states around the country, ‘Don’t try to enforce your laws because we have the political power and resources to defeat you if you do.'”
Unless workers in the gas and oil industry see a future for themselves in a low-carbon economy, their first priority is to “save their own livelihoods,” said Carol Zabin, director of Green Energy Program at UC Berkeley Labor Center. For the state to truly achieve its goals fighting climate change, Zabin said, it needs to invest in helping its gas and oil workforce transition.
Prop 22 would legalize the companies’ current practice of classifying drivers as independent contractors, preventing them from access to the benefits and protections that employment status offers. Prop 22 does mandate certain pay, reimbursement, and benefit standards for drivers, but there are loopholes in these standards which erode their value.
Interview with Laurel Lucia on “What Losing the Affordable Care Act Could Mean for Californians.”
Under Proposition 22, drivers will not be paid for the time they are waiting to give a ride, nor the time they spend preparing and cleaning their cars. That time accounts for some 33% of the drivers’ working time, Jacobs said, citing a 2019 study that looked at Lyft and Uber rides in six metropolitan areas across the country, including Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Organizing, the last approach—and the one McAlevey champions—recognizes that ordinary people outnumber the elites, and it seeks to involve them in developing a power analysis and a campaign to win. There may be professional organizers who help start a campaign, but for it to be most successful, ordinary people (not staff) must become the leaders of the movement.
Walmart is estimated to save around $2.2bn annually from the tax cut bill. Before the bill was passed, Walmart announced plans to spend $20bn over the next two years on stock buybacks. Ken Jacobs, the chair of the University of California at Berkeley Labor Center has estimated it would cost Walmart $3.8bn to increase their minimum wage to $15 an hour, the level being lobbied for by the Fight for $15 movement, Senator Bernie Sanders and others.
While every thinking person is rightly worried about the prospect of a third U.S. wave of COVID-19 cases and deaths, one should take a moment to contemplate a pandemic-related disaster in which the first wave is just beginning. That’s the meltdown of state and local government budgets produced by the higher costs of dealing with the crisis combined with the collapse of revenues.
According to Ken Jacobs and Michael Reich of the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center, engaged time is only 67 percent of a driver’s shift, and workers under Proposition 22 could make as little as $5.64 an hour. “Not paying for [wait] time would be the equivalent of a fast food restaurant or retail store saying they will only pay the cashier when a customer is at the counter,” they wrote in 2019.
“We know they’ve been affected by the crisis more than any other group,” Lozano said. Latinos hold over half of front-line worker jobs in California, according to a 2018 report from UC Berkeley Labor Center.
We must invest in a healthy economic recovery – one that prioritizes underserved communities, reduces pollution, and grows good jobs. We can’t slow the growth of the logistics and warehousing industry, but we can make sure that it is cleaner, safer, and better. A new report from the UC Berkeley Labor Center, “Putting California on the High Road,” lays out how we get there.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is courting union members with what California Labor Federation spokesman Steve Smith described as “the strongest platform to support workers since FDR.”
Uber and Lyft say they’ve created a new type of work that deserves new rules. Their opponents say that what these companies have created is an app for an old type of work — employment — and that they only want new rules because it is less expensive than following the existing rules, which guarantee employees protections like minimum wage, overtime, and the right to form a union.
The COVID-19 crisis comes in the middle of a fundamental shift toward more automation and online ordering in grocery retail. In fact, the pandemic is likely to accelerate that change.
Murphy said she believes that Uber’s publicly stated commitments to racial justice are intended as a smokescreen to protect their reputation as a progressive company as they try to circumvent classifying drivers as employees and granting them labor protections such as paid sick leave, unemployment insurance, and reimbursement for business expenses by passing Prop 22.
Building support and political consciousness amongst workers is obviously crucial to the task of weakening support for the nationalist Right. Writers like Day & Uetricht and Jane McAlevey have made profound and persuasive observations as to how this could be achieved in the US context.
Biden traveled last week to Pennsylvania, where the jobless rate is 13.7 percent, and, as Jane McAlevey reported in the Nation (where I am editorial director), he talked about looting and violence rather than about jobs.
Let’s doff our hats to Uber, Lyft and their fellows in the gig economy. Having created a model of exploiting workers and obnoxiously browbeating local officials to get their way, they have now set a record for spending on a self-interested ballot proposition.
“One thing we do know is that it takes a fair amount of time to train these robots,” Tilly said. In some cases, the researchers heard of robots still struggling to learn shelf inventory after being in stores for nearly a year.
“Esa pieza de legislación por primera vez requirió que el estado presentara recomendaciones sobre cómo apoyar a los trabajadores, mientras hacemos esta gran transición económica para reducir las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero”, dijo Zabin, quien es la principal autora del reporte.
Many people just want to get through 2020, but labor organizer Jane McAlevey believes we can set our sights higher than simply surviving.
Many people just want to get through 2020, but labor organizer Jane McAlevey believes we can set our sights higher than simply surviving. A senior policy fellow at the UC Berkeley Labor Center, McAlevey kicked off the year making a strong case for Americans to build and flex their collective muscle through workplace organizing.
For Labor Day, let’s imagine it’s time to actually try winning key swing states, where, like the entire country and world, finding a good-paying job is the most urgent issue—unless you are Black, in which case not being shot by the police trumps employment.
An August report from the University of California-Berkeley found that at least 20,860 California cases of COVID-19 among essential workers could have been avoided, as well as dozens of deaths, if the state had had a sufficient supply of protective gear.
Carol Zabin, Director of the Green Economy Program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center, is the report’s lead author. She says it’s meant to act as a roadmap as the state intervenes in the economy to enact climate goals.
Tilly said in interview he was surprised by the extent that new technologies allow for surveillance of a store’s occupants. “We knew there were things going on but had no clue of how much we, as customers, and retail workers were already being scrutinized by cameras and sensors and so on,” Tilly said.
“California has the most comprehensive portfolio of climate policies and programs, so it’s really important to add labor and equity elements to that, and this report shows the state how,” Zabin said.
Joe Biden said at the Democratic National Convention that America should “lead the world in clean energy and create millions of new good-paying jobs.” Similar thinking underlies the Green New Deal, which declares a goal of “guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States.” So how do we actually create those kinds of family-supporting jobs, and give people the skills to fill them?
A UC Berkeley Labor Center study found that if the state had had a stockpile prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, thousands of workers would not have contracted the virus, and California would have saved $93 million each week on unemployment claims from out-of-work healthcare workers.
The initiative, Proposition 22, relies on false premises to make the case that it would be good for drivers, as UC Berkeley’s Labor Center has helpfully noted. When the California Attorney General created an accurate description of what was in the measure, companies sued to change the language to suit their PR spin.
“Research shows that when workers are empowered to speak up it leads to safer conditions on the job,” said Ken Jacobs, director of the UC Berkeley Labor Center and also a co-author of the report. “Workers have deep knowledge of the workplace and are best positioned to identify threats to themselves and the public, as well as solutions. Frontline workers are less likely to speak up if they fear retaliation or don’t believe they will be listened to.”
Latinos account for 56% of California’s low-wage workers, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center, many of whom work in essential jobs in which they must leave home to work, raising their risk for infection.
If Uber and Lyft can continue delaying an order to convert their California drivers to employees and reorganize into franchise models, it would signal to other companies that corporations have the power to avoid complying with the law, said Ken Jacobs, chair of the Berkeley Labor Center.
“Health care and nurses unions have an impressive history of fighting to improve their working conditions and pushing for patient care policy reforms that benefit all of us,” Lucia said.
With the federal government at a standstill on a stimulus package and the challenge of controlling the pandemic and establishing economic stability, the U.S. economy could spiral from a recession to a depression, according to a study by UC Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.
A UC Berkeley Labor Center study estimates that drivers will earn $5.64 an hour if Proposition 22 is passed. If drivers switch from independent contractors to employee status they will make at least minimum wage, which is $13 an hour.
“If this proposition passes, there was a study by the UC Berkeley Labor Center that found that this pay guarantee would amount to about $5.64 an hour for drivers.”
Lyft and Uber have spent a collective $90 million on their campaign to pass the measure — which, if passed, could reduce drivers’ earnings to $5.64 an hour, by an estimate from UC Berkeley Labor Center. California’s minimum wage is $12 an hour.
An analysis from the Labor Center at the University of California Berkeley found the minimum wage under Prop. 22 would only be $5.64 due to loopholes and hidden costs. The analysis also found that the vast majority of drivers wouldn’t be eligible for the healthcare subsidies.
A new study out of the University of California Berkeley finds that creation of a state stockpile of personal protective equipment, or PPE, for future pandemics or emergencies could have economic and health benefits. Co-author of the study, William Dow, joined Wake Up With Cheddar to discuss.
A report conducted by the UC Berkeley Labor Center in May 2020 found Uber and Lyft would have paid $413m into California’s unemployment benefits system if drivers had been classified as employees rather than independent contractors. California is among many US states struggling to maintain funds for unemployment insurance funds.
One study by UC Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education found that Uber and Lyft would have had to pay more than $400 million over the last five years into California’s unemployment insurance fund if their drivers were classified as employees.
At a press conference organized by the No on Proposition 22 campaign, app-based drivers in L.A. and the Bay Area expressed their frustration at Uber’s latest tactic to gain an exemption from regulations.
Sylvia Allegretto is a labor economist and co-chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the co-author with Bryce Liedtke of the new report Workers and the COVID-19 Recession: Trends in UI Claims & Benefits, Jobs, and Unemployment.
When you look inside the numbers of the new UC Berkeley report urging California to aggressively stockpile protective gear for the next pandemic, it doesn’t take long to understand how the state could spend itself into a financial ditch just trying to keep health care workers safe.
In California, for example, a lack of sufficient PPE may have infected 20,860 essential workers and members of their households, who would have otherwise not gotten the virus, according to a recent study from the University of California Berkeley Labor Center.
If Uber won’t follow the rules, it should move over and make space for companies that will.
The report states that many health care workers were furloughed because of the lack of PPE, partially resulting in more than 250,000 California health care workers receiving unemployment benefits. According to the report, for every week earlier that these workers could return to work in the next pandemic, the state would save approximately $93 million in unemployment insurance payments.
Nearly 21,000 essential workers wouldn’t have contracted COVID-19 and dozens likely wouldn’t have died if California had an adequate stockpile of personal protective equipment at the outset of the pandemic, according to a Wednesday report from UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health and Labor Center.
UC Berkeley researchers believe 35 percent of these infections could’ve been avoided. It was estimated that the cost of PPE would’ve only been 17% of what it has taken to battle coronavirus infections now due to inflated rates.
Even before AB5, states have been using ABC tests, and court rulings have declared that Uber drivers aren’t independent contractors. These rulings are costly for Uber, who was found to owe $649 million in unpaid unemployment taxes in New Jersey last year. A UC Berkeley study estimated that in California, Lyft and Uber should have paid $413 million into the state unemployment fund.
But the meager stockpile carried a high human toll as well, as according to a new study the state could have prevented thousands of new infections and even deaths among frontline workers.
Proposition 22 is meant to give drivers more protections while allowing Uber to still minimize labor costs, but researchers at the UC Berkeley Labor Center found that the measure would only guarantee $5.64 an hour, not the $15.60 an hour that Proposition 22 advocates promise.
A new case study of California’s preparedness aligns with experts’ worst fears about the dangers of a dearth of PPE: More than 17,000 essential workers in the state were estimated to be infected because they didn’t have the proper equipment.
“It was one shocking number after another as I looked at this,” said report co-author William Dow, a professor of Health Policy and Management in the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. “Based on these numbers, we should be building a stockpile for the future.”
Researchers at UC Berkeley are urging California legislators to pass a bill that would create a stockpile of face masks and other personal protective equipment in case of future pandemics, saying such a cache would have averted much of the human and economic toll of the coronavirus pandemic.
Uber and Lyft drivers have lost significant income as ridership has dropped during the pandemic, pushing many to seek relief from unemployment insurance that Uber and Lyft have yet to contribute to.
California’s Assembly Bill 5 went into effect in January. The law stops companies from misclassifying their employees as independent contractors. As California grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic, the new law has illustrated how critical workplace protections are — particularly for those who are misclassified and treated like independent businesses when they are, in fact, employees.
About 34.5% of workers in the county earned less than $14.35 per hour, or less than $574 a week, according to a survey of 2017 employment data by UC Berkeley’s Labor Center.
“Disasters, including pandemics, are often times when there’s an opening for privatization. Sometimes, the public sector can’t really adapt because it’s required to serve everybody,” says Dr. Hinkley.
As businesses start to reopen, some are turning to technology to figure out how to make workplaces safer. Michelle Quinn reports on the tradeoffs.
An analysis by the UC Berkeley Labor Center released in May indicated that had AB 5 been in place between 2014 and 2019, Uber and Lyft would have paid $413 million just in unemployment insurance.
The pandemic has dramatically raised the stakes in the years-long fight over what protections Lyft, Uber and other gig-economy companies should be required to provide workers.
So an active struggle has to be waged within class organizations to build unity and equality, as Jane McAlevey describes in her account of a hospital strike in Nevada.
For California’s ports – A robust offshore wind industry will revitalize ports in the state with investments to manufacture, assemble, and install wind turbines and towers. The Port of Humboldt Bay has already issued an RFP for an offshore wind terminal and manufacturing facility. Other ports such as Richmond, Stockton and Vallejo could be renovated to support parts of the offshore wind supply chain.
Enrollment could also be lagging because the service industry has been hit hard, and many low-income workers in restaurants, bars or salons were already enrolled in Medi-Cal. “About a quarter who were at risk of losing jobs were already enrolled when the crisis started,” said Laurel Lucia.
This week’s Strike for Black Lives, a massive walk-out action spanning 160 cities and many thousands of workers, according to its organizers, was a shot across the bow. While many of the participants were not actually on strike, we should see it as what union organizer Jane McAlevey calls a structure test—a demonstration of the potential chaos to be caused if this many workers did, in fact, go out on strike.
Additionally, Lyft is not only shortchanging drivers, they’re also stealing from California tax payers to the tune of $413m, according to a recent report from the Berkeley Labor Center. Lyft is continuing to practice a predatory business model that is subsidized by taxpayers and fueled by the exploitation of workers. If Prop 22 is not defeated, this exploitation will be codified into law.
With 2020 half gone, its time for my annual mid-year look at the most significant events in California workers’ comp to date. In a year unlike any other because of changes wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the top developments must be seen through that lens. But there were others as well.
These huge challenges call for a style of organizing that Jane McAlevey refers to as “whole worker organizing.” It’s about engaging people beyond their roles as employees, tapping into their roles as community members — members of community groups, sporting associations, political parties, congregations, whatever the case may be.
“Right at the same moment that workers are facing greater risk, they are being asked to take cuts. It’s not surprising that you would see a pretty big reaction,” said Ken Jacobs, chair of the Labor Center at UC Berkeley.
A 2019 report from the U.C. Berkeley Labor Center states that algorithmic management introduces new forms of workplace control, where the technological regulation of workers’ performance is granular, scalable, and relentless. There is no slacking off while you are being watched.
UC Berkeley Labor Researcher Ken Jacobs says communities of color have born the brunt of pandemic-related job losses. “The jobs that have gone away during this downturn, are jobs that are also disproportionately workers of color, so that includes jobs like non-food retail, the restaurant industry, entertainment industry, [and] hotels,” he says.
Warehouse workers are more likely to toil in dangerous conditions that put them at greater risk of infection. A recent report from the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley, found that, nationwide, Latino and Black workers were far overrepresented in warehouse jobs.
Compliance with the existing law could also pose an economic threat to the companies themselves: University of California, Berkeley researchers estimated that treating independent contractors as employees would have cost Uber and Lyft $400 million in unemployment insurance between 2014 and 2019.
If the app companies get their way, they would never pay a dime into California’s unemployment insurance program, which is already stretched thin as millions who have lost their jobs to COVID-19 fight for coverage. A study by the University of California, Berkeley’s Labor Center found that Uber and Lyft combined have already left a $400 million crater in our state unemployment fund, after stealing five years worth of payments from taxpayers and hardworking families.
Instead, policymakers should focus on traditional approaches that will boost the economy as a whole. Pandemic responses should aim to support businesses and workers—both salaried and non-salaried—alike, addressing inequality through a focus on its root causes and industry-level trends. This last point was captured by Annette Bernhardt, a labor economist at U.C. Berkeley, who found little evidence of “a strong, unambiguous shift toward nonstandard or contingent forms of work—especially in contrast to the dramatic increase in wage inequality.”
First, it showed how few workers make a living wage during normal times. About one in three workers in California—that’s about 5 million people—make less than $600 a week, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center. The current state minimum wage—$13 an hour at larger employers—comes to only $520 a week for full-time workers, and that’s before taxes are taken out from their paychecks.
One estimate from the Berkeley Labor Center estimates Uber and Lyft would have contributed $413 million into California’s unemployment insurance fund between 2014 and 2019 if their workers had been classified as employees. They’d be on the hook for even more money if contractors became employees because they’d be liable for accidents or traffic collisions, for example.
The compensation and benefits the companies would pay under Proposition 22 would fall far short of the costs their drivers must shoulder. The UC Berkeley Labor Center estimated in October that 120% of the California hourly minimum wage of $13 in 2021, or $15.60, would effectively shrink to $5.64 an hour because of provisions in the initiative.
Many workers who will benefit from the wage hikes have continued working through the perils of the pandemic, including retail and grocery workers, as well as those in elder care, according to Ken Jacobs of the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education.
“BLS statistics are just not picking up workers who do independent contracting on the side, for supplemental income in addition to a W-2 job,” says University of California economist Annette Bernhardt PhD., author of “The Gloves-off Economy.” “This is a real significant challenge to understanding what’s going on in the labor market.”
Many gig-based business models help customers take advantage of workers. Let’s stop giving tech companies a free ride.
This country is teetering on the brink of becoming a failed state, and climate change remains a profound, nearly existential threat to human civilization. We need to win — and fast. I don’t know how we can do that. However, I think the scholar and organizer Jane McAlevey holds part of the answer.
Misclassification often results in workers being significantly more likely to draw on government-funded income supports to make ends meet, leaving taxpayers to foot the bill in lieu of big business.
New unemployment numbers are out – and they show over 2 million people have filed or applied for some type of assistance. Interview with Steven Pitts.
Jane McAlevey said Musk’s treatment of his workforce was typical of tech companies in Silicon Valley. “He is causing untold problems for his workers. He has stressed them out. They’re saddled by the kind of promises and rushed production that get people hurt, and now he’s doing it again during a pandemic.”
Beyond alleging wage theft, drivers also demanded that Uber and Lyft pay unemployment insurance taxes. According to a report from the UC Berkeley Labor Center, Uber and Lyft have evaded paying $410 million in unemployment insurance taxes between 2014 and 2019 by classifying their drivers as independent contractors, who are exempt from traditional unemployment insurance benefits.
Capital & Main caught up with Steven Pitts less than a month before his retirement to talk about the work that has defined his career: understanding the crisis affecting Black workers and how to address it. Pitts has focused on the lack of good jobs, which he says is an underappreciated dimension of that crisis.
I spoke to dozens of health care experts about how technological change would impact the health care industry. The results were, for workers and patients, a warning: without a purposeful push from worker groups and others, technologies like telehealth, autonomous robots, and artificial intelligence will likely erode job quality and, by extension, patient care.
Forty percent of fast food workers live in poverty, and a 2015 study by the Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education shows that nearly 52 percent of all fast food workers are dependent upon public assistance programs such as food stamps, Medicaid, and child care subsidies.
Ken Jacobs said issues like affordable housing and substantial increases in wages for the lowest-paid workers must be addressed to avoid further displacement. “If we don’t address these problems, the result is more homelessness, greater commutes, and a pushing of low-income people and people of color out of the Bay Area.”
Steven Pitts, a professor at the UC Berkeley Labor Center who has led racial justice discussions for many unions, argued that the behavior of cops is a bigger issue than the presence of their unions within the AFL-CIO.
A study conducted by UC Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education found that Uber and Lyft would have had to pay more than $400 million in the last five years into California’s unemployment insurance fund if their drivers were employees rather than independent contractors.
According to a recent UC Berkeley Labor Center analysis, 48% of black workers in California are now employed in a front-line job deemed “essential.” This category includes food prep workers, personal care aides and material movers.
The story of how Los Angeles teachers’ unions rebuilt their union is the crown-jewel chapter of McAlevey’s newest book, “A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing and the Fight for Democracy.” McAlevey, who is the strike correspondent for The Nation and a senior policy fellow at the U.C. Berkeley Labor Center, is both a coach of today’s labor movement and a chronicler of its key plays.
“Even local governments have played a significant role. For example, in manufacturing and port areas, streets are designed to facilitate the passage of turbine blades and other large parts with street poles that fold flat and with traffic circles that have wide, straight shortcuts through the middle.” That’s a description of wind-freight logistics and infrastructure in Denmark, captured in a report by Robert Collier for the University of California at Berkeley Labor Center.
“If we’re going to make these technologies work for workers rather than harm them, we’re going to have to figure out the question of governance,” said Dr. Annette Bernhardt, director of the Low-Wage Work Program at the University of California, Berkeley. “Workers need to have a direct say over which technologies are used, to which ends, whether it’s through collective bargaining or legislation or new mechanisms we haven’t dreamed of yet.”
A report by the UC Berkeley Labor Center, which has been vocal in its belief that drivers should be employees, said that Uber and Lyft would have had to pay $413 million into the state unemployment insurance fund from 2014 to 2019 if their drivers had been employees.
In the wake of nationwide demonstrations protesting police brutality, many large food companies — including at least one which has a history of fighting policies that would benefit employees of color — are now making public statements about racial injustices.
A UC Berkeley Labor Center study last month analyzed the racial makeup of jobs that California officials designated as essential, including those in hospitals, home care, nursing homes, grocery stores, warehouses, meat processing plants, trucking and public transit agencies.
If the ride-sharing companies had been forced to classify drivers as employees instead of independent contractors, they would have owed the state of California $413 million between 2014 and 2019. That’s according to an analysis from the UC Berkeley Labor Center. That money would have been due to California’s Unemployment Insurance Fund.
Additional scrutiny from law enforcement during protests on top of pandemic restrictions serve as a “double whammy” for people of color, said Brenda Muñoz, deputy chair of UC Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education.
In “A Collective Bargain,” labor organizer and author Jane McAlevey notes that the majority of HCA Healthcare facilities are located in right-to-work states like Tennessee and Florida. “This isn’t an accident,” writes McAlevey. “It’s part of HCA’s strategic plan to operate in states with weaker union laws in order to profit off cheap labor.”
This group of capable organizers, rooted in structure-based organizations in the workplace and in the community, composed of many groups whose leaders and members are overwhelmingly women and people of color, is now attempting the unthinkable: challenging Proposition 13, passed by California voters more than four decades ago.
Ride-hailing companies oppose efforts by drivers to access traditional unemployment benefits from states, which are financed through payroll taxes. Uber and Lyft are contesting a California law intended to classify workers like their drivers as employees, and the state recently sued them in response.
In A Collective Bargain, organizer and author Jane McAlevey notes that the majority of HCA Healthcare facilities are in right-to-work states like Tennessee and Florida. “This isn’t an accident,” writes McAlevey. “It’s part of HCA’s strategic plan to operate in states with weaker union laws in order to profit off cheap labor.”
A recent study found that if the ride-sharing companies had been forced to classify drivers as employees instead of independent contractors, they would have owed the state of California $413 million between 2014 and 2019. That’s according to an analysis by the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
If the drivers had been classified as employees, Uber and Lyft would have paid $413 million into California’s unemployment fund between 2014 and 2019, a recent report from UC Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment found. That’s about the same amount of money as California borrowed from the federal government in April to pay a staggering number of unemployment claims.
If the ride-sharing companies had been forced to classify drivers as employees instead of independent contractors, they would have owed the state of California $413 million between 2014 and 2019. That’s according to a new analysis from the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
“There will be deep concern in labor on anything that lets employers off the hook on health and safety,” Ken Jacobs said. “We have already seen in a number of cases — both in the nursing home industry and in the meatpacking industry — what appears to be real negligence on the part of employers. If they are free from any liability from their actions at the same time that workers are forced back to work … that is a very dangerous formula.”
Laurel Lucia, director of the health care program at the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, says some people will still face a fine. “I think it’s worth exploring whether a temporary exemption is needed for Californians who have lost coverage due to COVID-related hardship, but are not eligible for one of the existing exemptions,” she said.
A study by the UC Berkeley Labor Center said that Uber and Lyft should owe the state $413 million in unpaid unemployment insurance taxes.
Jane McAlevey, a longtime labor organizer who has written several books about the labor movement, said coaching workers on what to expect from union avoidance firms like Crossroads has become an essential step for organizers. “If you haven’t been inoculating workers about the employer campaign to come, you’re probably going to be in very, very big trouble once the union buster starts.”
The very business model behind social gathering magnets, like restaurants, nightclubs, bars and hotels do not gel with California’s new health standards as they were before the novel coronavirus said Policy Research Specialist Sara Hinkley with the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
Mantener sindicatos fuertes no solo es un asunto para los miembros sindicales – sino que nos afecta a todos
Misclassification is a key part of Uber’s elusive path to profitability as the strategy minimizes labor costs and liabilities by increasingly shifting its burden onto workers and taxpayers. This strategy allows Uber and Lyft to dodge paying $413 million in unemployment taxes to California and another $630 million in California wage claims.
If Lyft and Uber had classified their drivers as employees rather than independent contractors as the companies currently do (and would very much like to continue doing), what would they have hypothetically owed to California in unemployment insurance tax? According to an estimate from the UC Berkeley Labor Center, the two companies would have had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the state’s Unemployment Insurance Fund over a five-year period had their workers been employees.
A group of early childhood educators with the Halton District School Board, near Toronto, were in the middle of a union drive when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. With schools closed and physical distancing rules in effect, workers had to quickly shift gears and experiment with new approaches.
KCBS news anchor Susan Leigh Taylor spoke with Ken Jacobs, Chair of the UC Berkeley Labor Center and co-author of the brief.
Uber and Lyft would have contributed more than $400 million to California’s unemployment insurance fund since 2014 had they classified hundreds of thousands of drivers as employees instead of independent contractors.
A new report from the UC Berkeley Labor Center finds that Uber and Lyft avoided paying California $413 million in state unemployment insurance (SUI) taxes by misclassifying drivers as independent contractors from 2014 to 2019.
Jane McAlevey’s survey of labor unions shows that organizing and strikes still work.
Government jobs played an important role in the building of the black middle class in the U.S. It started after World War I, when blacks began migrating from the rural south to urban areas across the country, said Steven Pitts, associate chair of the Center for Labor Research and Education at UC Berkeley.
Now, another blow comes to the industry in a report from UC Berkley’s Center for Labor Research and Education which found that the workers filling boxes with pre-portioned ingredients and recipe cards are struggling with low wages, unaffordable benefits, unpredictable schedules, inconsistent wage increase policies, risk of injuries, and recurrent problems with timely payment.
Monica’s story holds true for thousands of other families across California for whom a union job has been the main path to the middle class. These stories demonstrate just how important unions have been for increasing economic mobility.
Mantener sindicatos fuertes no solo es un asunto para los miembros sindicales – sino que nos afecta a todos
A new report by the UC Berkeley Labor Center and the San Francisco International Airport finds that improving wages at U.S. airports is not only an issue for workers’ livelihoods, it is vital for the safety and security of the flying public.
According to data obtained and analyzed by researchers at UC Berkeley’s Labor Center, the answer is that in recent years, a significant share of good, career-track jobs in the construction of renewable energy power plants in Kern County and statewide have in fact gone to low-income residents and people of color.
As they move to dismantle secure pensions for teachers, GOP politicians are starting to argue that eliminating guaranteed pensions is what’s best for teachers. They base this claim on dubious research, sponsored by anti-pension groups, that uses high attrition rates among entering teachers to claim that “most teachers” don’t stay in their jobs long enough to get a decent pension.
California legislators are on the verge of voting whether or not to extend the state’s cap-and-trade program — one of the policies critical to meeting the state’s long-term climate change goals. As they debate the measures, they should be aware of the economic and job impacts of cap and trade in the state’s most environmentally and economically challenged regions.
Much of the automation-driven jobs losses that basic income seeks to remedy may still be decades, if not generations away. In the meantime, it’s important to remember that work will remain the primary source of income for workers and families now and for the foreseeable future. Good jobs still matter.
This study looked at our state’s carbon cap-and-trade program, renewable energy policy and energy efficiency programs. The data revealed plenty of economic costs, but even greater economic benefits.
It’s true that factory jobs once helped build America’s middle class. But new evidence shows that, today, many manufacturing jobs in the U.S. pay wages that are more in line with what you find at McDonald’s or Walmart.
Darden Restaurants, owner of multiple restaurant chains including Olive Garden and Longhorn Steakhouse, is a leading corporate lobbying powerhouse in its industry. Darden has played a prominent role in opposition to minimum wage increases and earned sick leave policies, and in supporting politics that impact food sustainability and customer health.
California has a serious low-wage jobs problem, and it’s only gotten worse over the past 15 years.
The low wages paid by businesses, including some of the largest and most profitable companies in the U.S. – like McDonald’s and Wal-Mart – are costing taxpayers nearly $153 billion a year.
