News & Events

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.

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.

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.