“Fossil fuel workers are unionized,” Carol Zabin, director of the UC Berkeley Labor Center’s Green Economy program, told Recode. “Most clean energy workers are not.”
Demand and the high quit rate have made the field slightly better for job seekers and workers over the past few months. But it’s important to put wage gains in context, says Enrique Lopezlira.
Automation hasn’t replaced all the workers in warehouses, but it has made work more intense, even dangerous, and changed how tightly workers are managed.
Last November, California passed a ballot initiative called Proposition 22, cementing Mighetto and her colleagues in semi-employee status. They still don’t get state unemployment, discrimination protections, sick leave, or collective bargaining rights, though they do have some bare-minimum guarantees of pay while actually carrying a passenger.
