Annette Bernhardt, along with Lisa Kresge and Reem Suleiman of the labor center, released a report on Wednesday outlining how employees in a variety of industries are tracked and surveilled in the course of doing their jobs, and what rights workers should have over how information about them is collected, stored and used.
A data tool from the UC Berkeley Labor Center is tracking the state’s uneven economic recovery, looking at how rolling, pandemic-driven rounds of hiring and firing have affected people from different backgrounds and in different jobs.
According to the UC Berkeley Labor Center, one in 10 low-income workers experiences wage theft in California. Violations range from getting paid below minimum wage to working off the clock or without overtime pay, resulting in thousands of dollars in lost compensation per worker.
One factor that has been shown to drive up wages in a given area is penetration of unions. “In unionized settings you are more likely to see both higher wages and better benefits,” said Ken Jacobs, who chairs the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
“It’s a uniquely American problem that so many people have to rely on crowdsourcing to pay for their health care,” said Laurel Lucia, director of the health care program at UC Berkeley’s Labor Center. “It shows how many people are left out of our system and how unaffordable care has become.”
“The employer is still requiring the employees to come to work — they’re not laying them off,” Muñoz said. “Clearly, they have a need for them. They’re thinking about how to make their bottom line and continue to get their business to be productive. But what about on the other end?”
“AB5 was always about so much more than Uber and Lyft and (app-based) delivery drivers,” said Jacobs, who co-wrote a research paper looking at who was covered by AB5. “They make up a small fraction of the millions of Californians covered under the law.”
A UC Berkeley Labor Center study said Uber and Lyft would have owed California $413 million for unemployment between 2014 and 2019 if drivers were employees.
Many people just want to get through 2020, but labor organizer Jane McAlevey believes we can set our sights higher than simply surviving.
California’s Assembly Bill 5 went into effect in January. The law stops companies from misclassifying their employees as independent contractors. As California grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic, the new law has illustrated how critical workplace protections are — particularly for those who are misclassified and treated like independent businesses when they are, in fact, employees.
“Right at the same moment that workers are facing greater risk, they are being asked to take cuts. It’s not surprising that you would see a pretty big reaction,” said Ken Jacobs, chair of the Labor Center at UC Berkeley.
Many workers who will benefit from the wage hikes have continued working through the perils of the pandemic, including retail and grocery workers, as well as those in elder care, according to Ken Jacobs of the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education.
A report by the UC Berkeley Labor Center, which has been vocal in its belief that drivers should be employees, said that Uber and Lyft would have had to pay $413 million into the state unemployment insurance fund from 2014 to 2019 if their drivers had been employees.
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