“They’re put through a gantlet by employers who make all sorts of threats,” said Ken Jacobs, chair of UC Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education. Growers will sometimes fire organizers, even though that’s illegal; penalties are modest and rarely enforced.
Race is part of the debate over AB 701. Latino and Black employees constitute 66% of warehouse staff, although workers of color account for just 37% of the total U.S. labor force, according to a UC Berkeley study.
“It’s great that the state saw a sixth consecutive month of 100,000-plus job growth. But many workers are still on the sidelines. Employers need to improve the quality of jobs, not just wages.”
“When the labor market does its thing, we produce tremendous wage inequality and tremendous growth in low wage jobs,” said Carol Zabin, who directs the Green Economy Program at UC Berkeley’s Labor Center.
California should be encouraging the creation of blue-collar jobs with good pay and benefits. Residential construction used to be a solid middle-class career, but now the work can pay near-poverty wages.
Converting to a single-payer system would cause enormous upheaval, however, and the Legislature has balked at bills to mandate it. Instead, in 2019 it created the Healthy California for All Commission to study its feasibility. That work is starting to bear fruit.
Latino workers have the highest rate of employment in essential frontline jobs, where there’s a higher risk of exposure to the coronavirus, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
The country’s three largest grocery providers, Walmart, Kroger and Albertsons, together earned an additional $6.8 billion in profit in the first three quarters of 2020 compared to 2019 — an average increase of 98%. “The industry is doing extraordinarily well in the pandemic,” said Ken Jacobs, chair of the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
Latino workers have the highest rate of employment in essential front-line jobs, where there’s a higher risk of exposure to the coronavirus, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
Latino workers have the highest rate of employment in essential front-line jobs where there’s a higher risk of exposure to the coronavirus, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
The difficulties of midwives in getting vaccinated raise questions about how independent workers in other professions deemed essential will gain early access to the vaccine once more supply is shipped.
For state lawmakers, 2020 “was a year that started out with lots of aspirational plans,” said Ken Jacobs, chair of the UC Berkeley Labor Center. “But it became a year about saving lives.”
Latino workers have the highest rate of employment in essential frontline jobs where there’s a higher risk of exposure to the coronavirus, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center; 55% of Latinos work in such jobs and 48% of Black residents do as well, compared with 35% for white residents.
Keep in mind, 55% of California’s Latino residents work in essential front-line jobs where there’s a higher risk of coronavirus exposure, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center. That’s the highest such employment rate in the state; Black residents come in second, at 48%, compared with just 35% of white residents.
Latino workers have the highest rate of employment in essential frontline jobs where there’s a higher risk of exposure to the coronavirus, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center; 55% of Latinos work in such jobs and 48% of Black residents do as well, compared to 35% for white residents.
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 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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We are the authors of an often-cited study about the economic impact of California’s landmark global warming law, AB 32. The law was passed in 2006 to control the state’s greenhouse gas emissions; now some in Sacramento want to see it shelved. And to bolster their case they are misrepresenting our research — despite the facts and over our objections.
“I think we will see more people classified as employees over time,” said Ken Jacobs, chairman of the Center for Labor Research and Education at UC Berkeley. “And that is very likely to expand the number who are offered and take coverage. But the situation is definitely fluid.”
By 2016, full-time independent contractors constituted 8.5% of California’s workforce, according to estimates in UC Berkeley Labor Center’s in-depth survey of available data. A somewhat higher percentage uses independent contracting for supplemental income, the study suggested.
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.
“They’re put through a gantlet by employers who make all sorts of threats,” said Ken Jacobs, chair of UC Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education. Growers will sometimes fire organizers, even though that’s illegal; penalties are modest and rarely enforced.
Race is part of the debate over AB 701. Latino and Black employees constitute 66% of warehouse staff, although workers of color account for just 37% of the total U.S. labor force, according to a UC Berkeley study.
“It’s great that the state saw a sixth consecutive month of 100,000-plus job growth. But many workers are still on the sidelines. Employers need to improve the quality of jobs, not just wages.”
“When the labor market does its thing, we produce tremendous wage inequality and tremendous growth in low wage jobs,” said Carol Zabin, who directs the Green Economy Program at UC Berkeley’s Labor Center.
California should be encouraging the creation of blue-collar jobs with good pay and benefits. Residential construction used to be a solid middle-class career, but now the work can pay near-poverty wages.
Converting to a single-payer system would cause enormous upheaval, however, and the Legislature has balked at bills to mandate it. Instead, in 2019 it created the Healthy California for All Commission to study its feasibility. That work is starting to bear fruit.
Latino workers have the highest rate of employment in essential frontline jobs, where there’s a higher risk of exposure to the coronavirus, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
The country’s three largest grocery providers, Walmart, Kroger and Albertsons, together earned an additional $6.8 billion in profit in the first three quarters of 2020 compared to 2019 — an average increase of 98%. “The industry is doing extraordinarily well in the pandemic,” said Ken Jacobs, chair of the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
Latino workers have the highest rate of employment in essential front-line jobs, where there’s a higher risk of exposure to the coronavirus, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
Latino workers have the highest rate of employment in essential front-line jobs where there’s a higher risk of exposure to the coronavirus, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
The difficulties of midwives in getting vaccinated raise questions about how independent workers in other professions deemed essential will gain early access to the vaccine once more supply is shipped.
For state lawmakers, 2020 “was a year that started out with lots of aspirational plans,” said Ken Jacobs, chair of the UC Berkeley Labor Center. “But it became a year about saving lives.”
Latino workers have the highest rate of employment in essential frontline jobs where there’s a higher risk of exposure to the coronavirus, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center; 55% of Latinos work in such jobs and 48% of Black residents do as well, compared with 35% for white residents.
Keep in mind, 55% of California’s Latino residents work in essential front-line jobs where there’s a higher risk of coronavirus exposure, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center. That’s the highest such employment rate in the state; Black residents come in second, at 48%, compared with just 35% of white residents.
Latino workers have the highest rate of employment in essential frontline jobs where there’s a higher risk of exposure to the coronavirus, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center; 55% of Latinos work in such jobs and 48% of Black residents do as well, compared to 35% for white residents.
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 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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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