Low-Wage Work
Enrique Lopezlira is the director of the Low-Wage Work program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center. He is a labor economist, directing and conducting research on how policies affect working families, with a particular focus on how these policies impact racial and gender equity.
Dr. Lopezlira previously served as senior policy advisor for economic and employment policy at UnidosUS (formerly the National Council of La Raza), one of the largest Latinx civil rights organizations in the nation. He also served as deputy director for policy and research at Western Progress, a think tank advancing progressive policies and change in the eight states of the Rocky Mountain West.
He also brings experiences in advising various government agencies and testifying at the state and federal levels. He is often asked for his economic insights and analysis by English and Spanish media; he has appeared on CNN, CNN en Español, and Univision, and has been covered in Al Jazeera, Politico, and the Washington Post.
Dr. Lopezlira holds a doctorate in economics from Howard University. He also holds a master’s degree in international management from the Thunderbird School of Global Management, and bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics from Arizona State University.
The California state government has close to a quarter of a million employees, almost half of whom are women and almost two-thirds of whom are workers of color. But across occupations and throughout the state, many state workers earn well below what is needed to attain a decent standard of living in California.
The Living Wage Act is a proposed ballot measure to increase the California minimum wage to $18 an hour by 2025. This report examines which workers stand to benefit from the proposed increase.
This blog post highlights some of the findings from our just-released update to our chartbook “California’s labor market in the times of COVID-19,” which explores labor market trends in California over the past two historic years.
This data tool tracks the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on workers in California, and how the state is recovering from these effects. The pandemic left millions of Californians out of work, and while the economy has begun to recover in recent months, some workers continue to struggle. This resource will be updated periodically, as new data becomes available, to allow users to monitor the progress of labor markets in the state. Last updated May 18, 2022.
In this blog we will use the Low-Wage Data Explorer to dispel some myths about the one-in-three workers in California who are paid low wages.
Enrique Lopezlira, the director of the Low-Wage Program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center, said that women and workers of color were affected more severely by the pandemic because they are overrepresented in industries that pay low wages, where they had to work on-site and risk their health during the pandemic.
What might be harder than finding a job, Lopezlira says, is finding a job with all the high salaries and extra benefits and perks that came with many Silicon Valley and Bay Area tech jobs.
Enrique Lopezlira, an economist at the UC Berkeley Labor Center, said wage gaps are in part caused by discrimination. He pointed to studies that show that resumes with traditionally white-sounding names were more likely to be contacted by employers than similar resumes that used Black-sounding names.
The national bus driver shortage started before the pandemic, according to Enrique Lopezlira, director of the Low-Wage Work Program at UC Berkeley’s Labor Center. He said two trends — a drop in immigration during Donald Trump’s presidency and an aging workforce — have driven a labor shortage.
Labor Center researcher Lopezlira said his organization is beginning research on why the public sector has seen slow recovery in employment staffing since the pandemic. He said the city’s lack of affordable housing could be one of the causes of the high number of vacancies in government positions.
“I think that creating a more sustainable economy creates good-paying jobs for workers who already have those skills,” said Enrique Lopezlira, a labor economist at the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education.
Lopezlira, who’s studied the impact of wages and turnover on airport safety and security, says lower turnover reduces the constant need to train or retrain new workers. This can also reduce any existing gaps in security or safety measures that could pose a risk to worker and public safety.
“Consumer spending is also going to drop severely, so I’m not sure how many real opportunities for gig type of work there will be, or whether people will be able to live on those kinds of jobs,” Enrique Lopezlira said.
“The good news is we have seen some wage growth …,” Enrique Lopezlira said. “There have been more job openings than workers. The problem is some of that wage growth has slowed down and with inflation creeping up, the real purchasing power of the wage has declined.”
A Labor Center study on the San Francisco International Airport, cited by the Florida union in its report, found higher employee wages led to lower turnover and better performance. Workers who stayed at their jobs longer also had the experience to better avoid mistakes and identify safety and security issues, Lopezlira said.
