About 3.2 million Californians are uninsured this year, representing 9.5 percent of the population, according to a study by scholars at the University of California-Berkeley Labor Center. Nearly two-thirds of the state’s undocumented residents, or about 1.3 million people under the age of 65, are uninsured, the report found.
“This means that Uber drivers will be still short-changed to the tune of 40-50%,” they added. That figure lines up roughly with a study from the UC Berkeley Labor Center that found Uber and Lyft drivers were between trips approximately 33 percent of the time in six major American cities.
Misclassification of workers is a substantial contributor to growing inequality, as well as a raid on the public treasury. One study estimated that Uber and Lyft would have paid $413 million into California’s unemployment insurance fund between 2014 and 2019 if their drivers had been employees.
I spoke to dozens of health care experts about how technological change would impact the health care industry. The results were, for workers and patients, a warning: without a purposeful push from worker groups and others, technologies like telehealth, autonomous robots, and artificial intelligence will likely erode job quality and, by extension, patient care.
“There will be deep concern in labor on anything that lets employers off the hook on health and safety,” Ken Jacobs said. “We have already seen in a number of cases — both in the nursing home industry and in the meatpacking industry — what appears to be real negligence on the part of employers. If they are free from any liability from their actions at the same time that workers are forced back to work … that is a very dangerous formula.”
As part of the Republicans’ alternative to a minimum wage increase, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) wants to move the threshold of who is covered by the employer responsibility provisions in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) from 30 to 40 hours a week.
