Low-Wage Work
Technology & Work
Labor market research
New technologies and low-wage work
Living wage and labor standards policies
Enforcement of employment and labor laws
The gig economy
Immigrants and work
Low-wage service industries
Annette Bernhardt (she/her) is director of the Technology and Work Program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center, and a senior researcher at the UC Berkeley Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. She recently was visiting professor in the UC Berkeley Sociology Department, as well as a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. Previously she was policy co-director of the National Employment Law Project, where she coordinated policy analysis and research on living wage standards, enforcement of workers’ rights, and accountable development. A leading scholar of low-wage work, Dr. Bernhardt has helped develop and analyze innovative policy responses to economic restructuring in the United States.
She was one of the principal investigators of the landmark study Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers, which documented high rates of minimum wage, overtime, and other workplace violations in the low-wage labor market. She has also been a leader in collaborating with immigrant worker centers and unions to develop innovative models of community-based research. Her current research focuses on domestic outsourcing, the gig economy, and the impact of new technologies on low-wage work. Dr. Bernhardt’s books include the co-edited The Gloves-Off Economy: Workplace Standards at the Bottom of America’s Labor Market. She has published widely in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, and the Journal of Labor Economics, among others. Dr. Bernhardt received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1993.
Prepared Testimony by Dr. Annette Bernhardt, Director, Technology and Work Program, UC Berkeley Labor Center for the Joint Informational Hearing, California State Assembly, Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection and Committee on Labor and Employment. August 7, 2024, Sacramento, CA.
Prepared testimony by Annette Bernhardt, presented at “California at the Forefront: Steering AI Towards Ethical Horizons,” Joint Informational Hearing by the CA Senate Governmental Organization Committee and the Senate Budget Subcommittee on State Administration and General Government. February 21, 2024, Sacramento, CA.
We outline core principles for how government action on AI can benefit public and private sector workers, and comment on how two recent executive orders reflect those principles. Our goal is to help inform the significant work that lies ahead for federal, state, and local governments in their efforts to model responsible use of AI.
An overview of current U.S. public policy that regulates employers’ use of digital workplace technologies.
Our goal in this comment is to highlight evidence indicating the prevalence of automated workplace surveillance and management technologies, impact on workers resulting from employers’ use of these systems, and principles and policy models for worker technology rights and protections.
California is the first and only place where employees are getting critical info about their data, UC Berkeley Labor Center Director Annette Bernhardt told the board during public comment ahead of the vote, and recent amendments threaten to deprive workers of agency over algorithmic tools.
“Intense monitoring can push warehouse workers to the point of injury, biased hiring algorithms can shut women and workers of color out of opportunity, and gig platform workers can end up making below the minimum wage,” said Annette Bernhardt.
“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
“It is necessary to ensure that impactful decisions are still made by a human,” said Annette Bernhardt, Director of the Technology and Work programme at the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
The role of AI as a tool for school and business was a key theme of the symposium. Annette Bernhardt, director of the technology and work program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center, emphasized the balance between worker privacy and the benefit of highly productive AI tools.
A workplace tech accountability bill would force employers to tell workers they’re being spied on and would ban surveillance outside of work.
Annette Bernhardt, Lisa Kresge, and Reem Suleiman of the UC Berkeley Labor Center argue that companies should be required to reveal “which activities will be monitored, the method of monitoring, the data that will be gathered, the times and places where the monitoring will occur, and the purpose for monitoring and why it is necessary.”
Annette Bernhardt, along with Lisa Kresge and Reem Suleiman of the labor center, released a report on Wednesday outlining how employees in a variety of industries are tracked and surveilled in the course of doing their jobs, and what rights workers should have over how information about them is collected, stored and used.
Instead, policymakers should focus on traditional approaches that will boost the economy as a whole. Pandemic responses should aim to support businesses and workers—both salaried and non-salaried—alike, addressing inequality through a focus on its root causes and industry-level trends. This last point was captured by Annette Bernhardt, a labor economist at U.C. Berkeley, who found little evidence of “a strong, unambiguous shift toward nonstandard or contingent forms of work—especially in contrast to the dramatic increase in wage inequality.”
“BLS statistics are just not picking up workers who do independent contracting on the side, for supplemental income in addition to a W-2 job,” says University of California economist Annette Bernhardt PhD., author of “The Gloves-off Economy.” “This is a real significant challenge to understanding what’s going on in the labor market.”
