When considering your options, you’ll want to ask yourself whether the job exists in the area where you need to be, want to be or can be, says Pamela Egan, director of the Labor Management-Partnerships Program for the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center.
Ken Jacobs helps explain what two-tier contracts are and why they are bad for worker solidarity.
Enrique Lopezlira, a labor economist at the University of California at Berkeley and an expert on the low-wage workforce, said the stories were a sign, albeit anecdotal, that the market was functioning as it should in the face of excessive demand for workers.
This is not an argument against government assistance; it is an acknowledgment that taxpayers are making up the difference when employers do not pay their workers a living wage.
Prop. 22 gave companies confidence that they could contract out work that was previously reserved for employees with secure pay and benefits, without facing the risk of being sued for misclassification, said Chris Benner, a University of California at Santa Cruz professor who has studied app-based delivery work.
A sizable number of the recipients of federal aid programs such as Medicaid and food stamps are employed by some of the biggest and more profitable companies in the United States, chief among them Walmart and McDonald’s.
California voters typically support labor rights, but gig companies successfully confused the issue through “deceptive design in the measure itself,” as well as the volume of spending to push out the companies’ messages, said Ken Jacobs.
Biden traveled last week to Pennsylvania, where the jobless rate is 13.7 percent, and, as Jane McAlevey reported in the Nation (where I am editorial director), he talked about looting and violence rather than about jobs.
“One thing we do know is that it takes a fair amount of time to train these robots,” Tilly said. In some cases, the researchers heard of robots still struggling to learn shelf inventory after being in stores for nearly a year.
A new case study of California’s preparedness aligns with experts’ worst fears about the dangers of a dearth of PPE: More than 17,000 essential workers in the state were estimated to be infected because they didn’t have the proper equipment.
Jane McAlevey said Musk’s treatment of his workforce was typical of tech companies in Silicon Valley. “He is causing untold problems for his workers. He has stressed them out. They’re saddled by the kind of promises and rushed production that get people hurt, and now he’s doing it again during a pandemic.”
Ride-hailing companies oppose efforts by drivers to access traditional unemployment benefits from states, which are financed through payroll taxes. Uber and Lyft are contesting a California law intended to classify workers like their drivers as employees, and the state recently sued them in response.
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