Local 1000 workers recently staged a rally at the Capitol to energize support as they enter contract bargaining. A recent study commissioned by the union and conducted by the UC Berkeley Labor Center showed many members were struggling financially, particularly women, Black and Latino employees.
Rally organizers point to a recent study from the UC Berkeley Labor Center showing that state workers are struggling to make ends meet, particularly women, Black and Latino employees.
The University of California, Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education has studied the law extensively, but has no evidence yet about its impact. “From our previous research, I believe the benefits of the law will far outweigh any negative effects,” said Ken Jacobs, the center’s chairman.
Several California cities have an even higher minimum wage as of Jan. 1.
Nearly 391,000 of those caught in the glitch would qualify for subsidies on Covered California, the state-based insurance exchange, noted health policy researcher Miranda Dietz of the UC Berkeley Labor Center. She worked with colleagues at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research to examine the impact of the changes in IRS regulations prior to their approval.
“Clearly, in California, union’s political power has grown in the state,” Jacobs said. Where big business and wealthy individuals can dominate, though, is in ballot measure campaigns. They can invest hundreds of millions of dollars in ads, giving them an advantage unions can’t match.
In California, Latino workers make up nearly 38% of the state’s overall workforce and the majority of the state’s low wage earners, according to data from the U.C. Berkeley Labor Center.
“These dialysis initiatives have really been about regulating an industry that has a duopoly, high profit rates and well-documented patient safety concerns,” said Laurel Lucia, director of the Health Care program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
In the U.S., though, “employers are suddenly willing to shell out outrageous premium pay to striker replacement workers instead of investing these funds … where the workers on strike are demanding it, in this case, to help patients get better care,” McAlevey said.
“What it does mean is that they’ve exhausted themselves attempting to solve this problem,” said Jane McAlevey. “When you make the decision to do open-ended, it means the members are ready. It means they’re frustrated. It means their level of preparedness is significant.”
The state of California is ready with $304 million to help lower- and middle-income consumers pay for health insurance if federal subsidies end. But the fund will cover only a fraction of what would be lost. “We’re fortunate the state has the program, but it’s not enough,” said Laurel Lucia.
Undocumented residents remain the largest group of uninsured in California, according to a recent analysis from the the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California, Berkeley.
About 80% of workers in California’s fast-food industry are people of color, and two out of three are women, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center. While fast-food workers on average are younger than workers overall, 77% are over 18 years old, contrary to the myth that fast-food jobs primarily employ high school students.
Almost half of construction workers in California rely on food stamps or Medi-Cal, costing taxpayers over $3 billion annually, according to a 2021 study by the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
Lopezlira, director of the low-wage program at the university’s labor center, said that the four-day week would most likely put hourly workers at a financial disadvantage. Most of them are looking to work more hours during the week.
Ken Jacobs, chair of the UC Berkeley Labor Center, said that while $15 was a significant increase in the state’s minimum wage, it still falls below what a typical Californian needs to earn in order to meet basic needs in the state.
“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,” said Ken Jacobs.
As California moves toward a future in which many employees will be able to work remotely all or some of the time, unions will have to find new ways to recruit.
Several cities in California have an even higher minimum wage than the statewide amount. The UC Berkeley Labor Center tracks local minimum wages in the state and across the country.
Ken Jacobs said the sympathy strike might well be a commentary on the overall state of labor relations at Kaiser right now.
Ken Jacobs noted that Kaiser serves 912,000 workers insured through 454 union trusts, and all those members care deeply about how Kaiser treats its unionized workforce.
Many workers in the industry are in the residential construction sector, where they are often misclassified as independent contractors and are not being paid as highly as those who are putting up commercial buildings and roads, said Kuochih Huang, one of the authors of the study.
The plummeting unionization rate has also come with deteriorating pay and working conditions, said Beth Gutelius, the research director at the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago who authored the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center’s study on the logistics industry.
When workers see others go on strike, that can have a snowball effect, said Ken Jacobs, chairman of the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
“What’s happened with port drivers and the inability to have people taking containers out of the ports is a direct reaction to how we’ve been doing that business for the last 50, 60 years,” said Rome Aloise, international Teamsters vice president. “It used people and threw them away. What it created was jobs that weren’t worth coming back to.”
