Labor is a powerful force in California state politics. With a Democratic supermajority in both the Assembly and Senate, organized labor has found many allies in elected officials. The state has just under three million unionized workers, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
The University of California-Berkeley Labor Center projected that more than 469,000 health workers would get wage increases, with the biggest benefits going to women and workers of color. The law covers lower-income employees including certified nursing assistants, patient aides, food service workers, janitors, groundskeepers, and security staff.
“There’s a lot of waste in our health care system right now and there are opportunities to reduce administrative spending or increase the use of preventive care.” Laurel Lucia said.
Last month, Newsom vetoed Assembly Bill 1677, which would have required the UC Berkeley Labor Center to launch an impartial study to analyze the existing state scientist salary structure, compare it with that of state employees doing similar work and look into alternative salary structure models.
A UC Berkeley study published in April found that this move could affect at least 469,000 workers in the state, raising their pay by over $5.74, on average. These workers tend to be women of color — 70% of those affected would be people of color, and 75% would be women — and people who are the primary wage earners for their households.
Some cities and counties have a higher minimum wage than what is required by the state. The UC Berkeley Labor Center maintains a list.
The pandemic exposed long-standing funding and staff shortages in public health. Between 2010 and 2019, public health workforce funding in the state fell 14%, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
Nearly 1.3 million undocumented Californians will remain uninsured in 2022, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center. This group makes up the largest chunk of the state’s remaining uninsured.
“Workers of color have disproportionately applied for and are receiving unemployment insurance benefits here in California,” Sarah Thomason of the UC Berkeley Labor Center said. “Service workers who have seen the highest job losses are disproportionately people of color and they’re also low wage.”
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
