The Biden-era policies contributed to the lowest rate of uninsured U.S. residents in history. If they are allowed to expire next year, experts such as Miranda Dietz said they worry that health insurance costs and the rate of uninsured Americans will increase significantly.
About one third of California workers — 5.6 million in all — are defined as low-wage earners by the UC Berkeley Labor Center. And the leading occupation of low-wage earners isn’t fast food worker, but rather home health care and personal care provider.
“Anything that enhances (workers’) ability to organize and lower the power imbalance that now exists will ultimately result in better working conditions, including wages,” said Enrique Lopezlira, director of the Low-Wage Work program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
“Increases in the state minimum wage have never been paused,” and the delay is “very unusual,” said Ken Jacobs.
The UC Berkeley Labor Center reported in August that 18 campus strikes occurred over the previous year and half, as unions seized a tight job market to press for greater gains.
The University of California, Berkeley’s Labor Center projected a smaller impact from the new health care worker wage law, estimating it will cost the state in the “low hundreds of millions of dollars in fiscal 2025,” according to a report published in February.
“There are about half a million folks who are undocumented but earn too much for Medi-Cal, so they are uninsured,” Dietz said. “They’re also not part of DACA, because that program no longer accepts new applicants.”
Researchers estimate there are 2.2 million undocumented people in California. There may be 520,000 people who earn too much to qualify for Medi-Cal but don’t have employer-provided health care, said Laurel Lucia, the health care program director at the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
“Raising the minimum wage is a simple, direct way that we can improve the incomes of low-wage workers, pull many poor families out of poverty and pull many children out of poverty,” Ken Jacobs, co-chair of the UC Berkeley Labor Center, said in a 2021 release accompanying one of the center’s studies.
“I think we know that health care is unaffordable, but to see how much that problem has gotten worse in 20 years is really something,” said Miranda Dietz, a policy research specialist at the UC Berkeley Labor Center and co-author of the report. “The costs are taking up more and more of a family’s budget.”
According to research by the UC Berkeley Labor Center, more than 450,000 workers will be affected by the raises, and the impact will be most significant for workers of color, who make up more than 70% of health care workers in the state, and women, who account for 75% of that workforce.
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.
