Valadao faces a more difficult battle: More than half a million residents in his Central Valley district, or roughly two-thirds of the population, are covered by the program — the most of any district in California, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
“Insurance premiums have been going up faster than wages over the last 20 years,” said Miranda Dietz. Rising hospital prices are largely to blame.
In Valadao’s 22nd congressional district in particular, 67% of the population is on Medi-Cal, as Medicaid is known in California — the highest percentage in the state, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
“There’s been an increase in the number of people working over the age of 65 and even into their 70s,” said Nari Rhee. Half of working Americans have no retirement benefits other than Social Security.
A report released on Monday by researchers with the UC Berkeley Labor Center that analyzed data on driver earnings in January 2022 in major metro areas, including Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, found drivers earned less than the local minimum wage.
The administration estimates that 3.4 million workers will benefit from the change. Ken Jacobs, chairman of the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, said he expected the fast-food and retail industries where supervisory wages are low to be affected the most.
Retirement in the U.S. is a patchwork system with “a really big gaping hole” for self-employed people such as Kropp, who never worked for a large employer that offered 401(k) matching contributions, said Nari Rhee.
“The union’s message — that strikes work — I think was spot on,” Jacobs said. “Well-organized strikes with high participation have an impact.” While the union did not attain all its demands, “it appears they made significant progress.”
California will extend Medi-Cal benefits to the last remaining group of undocumented people — those ages 26 to 49 — in what is expected to be its biggest expansion of coverage since key provisions in the Affordable Care Act were implemented in 2014.
For workers in several cities, the pay bump may be more significant. Twenty-seven cities across the state adopted new minimum-wage laws this year, according to a study by the UC Berkeley Labor Center, and the pay increases are set to take place Jan. 1.
Laurel Lucia, director of the healthcare program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center, said a yet-to-be-published estimate by the university suggests the cost is closer to $300 million from the general fund in the first year — lower than the state’s prediction. The labor center developed the estimate based on the final law to help inform policymakers, she said.
Ken Jacobs, a labor specialist and chair of the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, said “people are very concerned about the precedent this is setting with an employer suing a union over labor activity. The severity of the penalty that was levied was also disconcerting.”
Nearly half of the workers expected to see a wage increase under the bill are Latino, and 75% are women, according to a report by the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
As Labor Day rolls by during a momentous surge in worker organizing, here are some lessons on building a strong contract campaign, according to McAlevey.
As Ken Jacobs and Michael Reich of the UC Berkeley Labor Center determined, however, the loopholes written into the measure — exemptions for driver waiting time, underpayments for gas, vehicle wear and tear and insurance, and the cost of Social Security and Medicare taxes — reduced the actual hourly compensation for Uber and Lyft drivers to an average of $5.64 an hour.
The administration estimates that 3.4 million workers will benefit from the change. Ken Jacobs, chairman of the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, said he expected the fast-food and retail industries where supervisory wages are low to be affected the most.
The goal of the UC Labor Summer is to usher in a new generation of college-educated workers, equipped with a knowledge of labor rights that can reshape their workplaces and support California’s labor movement for years to come.
“Sometimes there’s this assumption that, ‘Oh, college kids are being supported by their parents,’” Mahones said. “But that’s not always the case.”
The labor organizer Jane McAlevey has this great argument in one of her books about how sometimes the best union leaders are the ones who start out in strongest opposition, only to later realize their loyalties have been in the wrong place. It’s amazing that one of the most exciting battles in “Andor” doesn’t involve any X-Wings. It’s a work stoppage.
“This is one of the drawbacks of having a healthcare system that is tied to employment,” said Laurel Lucia, healthcare program director at the UC Berkeley Labor Center. “We saw during the pandemic, when there were furloughs or layoffs, people lost job-based coverage when they needed it most.”
According to estimates by UCLA and UC Berkeley, Altman said, almost half a million Californians have employer-sponsored coverage that is less affordable than what they will be able to obtain now on Covered California. An additional 87,000 Californians who could be helped by the new rule are uninsured today, and about 35,000 have policies that aren’t currently subsidized.
“Social Security is a bedrock,” Nari Rhee, director of UC Berkeley Labor Center’s Retirement Security Program, testified at a federal hearing last year. But “the current average benefit of $1,500 a month is insufficient to cover basic needs for most retirees, given the cost of living.”
“I think that creating a more sustainable economy creates good-paying jobs for workers who already have those skills,” said Enrique Lopezlira, a labor economist at the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education.
A study by the UCLA and UC Berkeley labor centers found almost two-thirds of fast-food workers have experienced wage theft, and more than half have faced health and safety hazards on the job. Of the workers who raised concerns with their employers, about a third reported that their employer did nothing to resolve the issue, while 25% experienced retaliation, the study found.
Just 21% of California workers operating home-based day cares reported having some form of retirement savings, according to the center. Comparatively, 46% of Californians working in the private sector have a retirement plan, according to a report by the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
