California may have an active labor movement and labor-friendly political leaders in control of its Legislature and many city councils. But almost one in three California workers — 4.3 million people — are employed in a job that pays less than $18.02 per hour, according to a UC Berkeley Labor Center data explorer.
California’s revived Industrial Welfare Commission will prioritize those industries that have 10% or more of their workers living in poverty. About 15% of fast-food workers live in poverty, twice the rate of the overall workforce, according to a 2021 study from the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
What the conversation around SB 525 really underscores is just how many of California’s health care workers aren’t making enough to get by.
Under Biden’s proposed rule, “There is a very strong case that gig workers are misclassified,” Jacobs wrote in an email to Capital & Main. “The proposed rule would make it easier to prove misclassification in industries with a long history of misclassification, like janitorial, trucking and construction.”
“There’s up to five times the level of incentives for paying prevailing wages and using apprenticeships on clean-energy construction projects,” according to Jessie Hammerling, co-director of the Green Economy program at the University of California, Berkeley, Labor Center. “Businesses willing to invest are well positioned to take over the new work.”
That fragmented nature of the modern fast-food industry renders it impossible to follow a traditional labor organizing model.
Enrique Lopezlira, director of the center’s Low Wage Work Program, said researchers there have determined that anyone who makes less than two-thirds of the median income in a given area of California should be defined as a low-wage worker. In 2021, that figure was $18.02 per hour.
These are people who ordinarily wouldn’t be considered for, or themselves consider, a job at LADWP. A 2016 report from the University of California, Berkeley, found that more than two-thirds of people accepted into UPCT are from zip codes with very high unemployment rates, and where more than half of the population lives below the poverty level.
“Certification can really support good wages, and it does identify skills that help employers know what they’re hiring,” says Zabin.
In a time of pandemic and with its healthcare system in pieces, a bold Assembly bill shows California moving forward.
“The basic concept is there. This would be the first modern labor standards board on a state level covering an industry of this size — this would be the first of its kind,” says Ken Jacobs.
Some critical coalition-building opportunities in California have already been lost, according to UC Berkeley’s Carol Zabin, director of UC Berkeley’s Labor Center Green Economy Program and a governor’s appointee to the executive council for the California Workforce Development Board.
“Over time,” says Zabin, “the skilled and trained workforce standard allowed the Building Trades to have enough leverage with these contractors and these oil companies to get project labor agreements on this work.”
A report on the trucking workforce by the UC Berkeley Labor Center estimated that nearly a quarter of California truck drivers are misclassified as independent contractors, a practice that deprives the state of tax revenue and threatens California’s ambitious climate goals.
There’s a big argument for shrinking the state’s uninsured population, since undocumented immigrants are still the least likely to have insurance. With coverage, people aren’t having to rush to emergency rooms to get health care, which is more expensive than preventative medicine.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
