“What determines unemployment in low-wage markets is the supply side—it’s hard to recruit and retain workers when you have very low-quality jobs that pay low wages,” says Enrique Lopezlira.

“Workers, especially younger workers or people who weren’t knowledgeable about unions, are seeing the unions being the first ones to fight against the administration,” said Brenda Muñoz, executive director of the UC Berkeley Labor Center.

In Los Angeles County, over 40 percent of the population is enrolled in Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program, according to analysis from the Berkeley Labor Center.

The UC Berkeley Labor Center found in a January 2022 report that 39 percent of families of construction workers are enrolled in at least one safety net program, and “three times as many construction workers as all workers lack health insurance.”

Those who’ve sought to focus on building the capacity at JFK8 to successfully grapple with the company over the bargaining table brought in Jane McAlevey, one of the most accomplished union strategists and organizers, to help them build that support.

According to a 2019 study by the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley, the median annual pre-tax income of Alvarez and his fellow port truckers, once their expenses are factored in, is a munificent $28,000.

Today, of the roughly 12,000 truck drivers who transport goods to warehouses from the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the site of around 40 percent of all seaborne imports in the U.S., nearly all are independent contractors, who sit unpaid in hours-long lines until they get their containers, who must pay for all their own expenses, and whose average yearly income, when those expenses are taken into account, is roughly $28,000, according to a study from the UC Berkeley Labor Center.

“We have a set of relationships with the state’s unions and other groups on the ground,” says Jacobs, “and with an extraordinary group of academics. It’s one of the privileges of being at Berkeley.”

The combination of these measures make the minimum wage hike not at all incidental to the budget. The Berkeley Labor Center estimates that workers who would receive a wage increase in this bill receive $107 billion per year in safety net support.

Not only are gig companies gouging workers and consumers, but traditional firms are benefiting from the substandard labor regime as well.

Prop 22 “guarantees” certain benefits, including completely undefined “assistance” with health care premiums and disability coverage for those injured on the job. Drivers are guaranteed an hourly wage at least 120 percent of the local minimum. But that only kicks in during time spent driving, while waiting for or getting to a ride or a delivery, which can be as much as 37 percent of the time spent on the job, remains uncompensated.

One study by UC Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education found that Uber and Lyft would have had to pay more than $400 million over the last five years into California’s unemployment insurance fund if their drivers were classified as employees.

Jacobs added that it is difficult to determine how many Californians would be affected by AB 5 if it passes, because it’s already a challenge to determine how many are now misclassified by the current standard. Ironically, the very act of incorrectly classifying workers skews the statistics.

To try to find out, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center published a report last month called “What Do We Know About Gig Work in California?” They sifted through government statistics and recent industry studies, and came away with many more questions than answers.