“We need to assure that workers have a seat at the table on these technologies from the outset, not just when they’re being implemented,” said Annette Bernhardt
“The big challenge for labor in 2024 will be to take that momentum and turn it into new organizing and getting first contracts where workers have organized,” said Ken Jacobs. “That’s going to be a real challenge because labor law in the US is broken.”
“These are traditionally male-dominated jobs, and so they’re subject to the same forces as the rest of the economy that make it hard for women to enter” and the best way to solve the problem is through apprenticeships, said Carol Zabin, a labor economist at the UC Berkeley Labor Center who has studied the solar industry.
“The win rate has to be turned into gaining collective bargaining agreements” said Jacobs. “There won’t be a change in labor law unless large numbers of workers are in motion demanding unions, and that won’t happen without a large investment in organizing.”
With the climate and labor movements becoming more integrated, Jane McAlevey said, “It drives the stakes higher for California employers.”
Productivity scores give the impression that they are objective and impartial and can be trusted because they are technologically derived – but are they? How the proprietary systems arrive at their scores is often as unclear to managers as it is to workers, says Kresge.
She owes much to Jane McAlevey, a US labour strategist who has indicated that she supports Unite’s new boss. Ms McAlevey says unions won’t expand their ranks with labour law reform. She told the New Yorker last year that “power for ordinary people can be built only by ordinary people standing up for themselves, with their own resources, in campaigns where they turn the prevailing dogma of individualism on their head”.
“Creating minimum health and safety standards and a fast-food council provides a way to address these industry-specific issues and improve conditions for the fast-food workforce in an industry that, because of the way it is structured is unlikely to do so outside of government regulation,” Jacobs said.
Drivers say working conditions remain poor after voters approved measure exempting Uber and other apps from labor laws.
Steven Pitts, a longtime labor economist at the University of California, Berkeley, said Biden should pursue two sets of labor policies. “One is try to raise and protect labor standards like a higher minimum wage and tougher safety rules,” he said. “Second is to build worker power into policy. Too often we focus on the former and not the latter.”
Prop 22 promises substandard healthcare, a death sentence to many in the middle of a pandemic. We’re promised a sub-minimum wage in the middle of a recession that an independent study showed would be as low as $5.64 an hour – not the eventual $15 state minimum.
Walmart is estimated to save around $2.2bn annually from the tax cut bill. Before the bill was passed, Walmart announced plans to spend $20bn over the next two years on stock buybacks. Ken Jacobs, the chair of the University of California at Berkeley Labor Center has estimated it would cost Walmart $3.8bn to increase their minimum wage to $15 an hour, the level being lobbied for by the Fight for $15 movement, Senator Bernie Sanders and others.
