Health Care
Low-Wage Work
Unions & Worker Organizations
Labor standards policies
Health care
Public policy and unions
Ken Jacobs is a senior policy advisory at the Labor Center, after serving 17 years as chair and one year as co-chair. He joined the Labor Center as a labor specialist in 2002. His areas of focus include low-wage work, labor standards policies, sectoral wage setting, and health care coverage. Recent research includes analyses of California Proposition 22 and drivers’ earnings, worker misclassification, and the effect of unions on wages and benefits; prospective studies of proposed city and state minimum wage laws; the relationship between wages, turnover, security, and safety at U.S. airports; the economic benefits of care work; and the public cost of low-wage work.
Jacobs is the co-editor with Michael Reich and Miranda Dietz of When Mandates Work: Raising Labor Standards at the Local Level from University of California Press. Jacobs led a multi-campus program providing research and technical assistance to unions, consumer stakeholders, and policymakers on the effects of the Affordable Care Act and measures to cover the remaining uninsured. His work has been covered in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and National Public Radio.
This study of gig passenger and delivery driver earnings in the Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay, and Seattle metros finds the typical drivers earned less than the applicable minimum wage in all five metros.
This brief analyzes the impact SB 525 is projected to have on workers, patients, and the state budget in the first year of the policy. It is an update of our June 2023 and April 2023 briefs, both of which analyzed preliminary versions of the bill.
Data and methods appendix to the brief “California health care minimum wage: New estimates for impacts on workers, patients, and the state budget.”
Chartbook comparing California union membership and coverage from 2001-2002 and 2021-2022. Findings show that at least half of all of California’s 2.5 million union members are women and that the majority of all union workers are people of color. By contrast, 20 years ago the typical union member in California was a white man.
In this brief I review the evidence of how airport minimum labor standards promote safety and security.
“Corporations learned long ago that because of the lack of penalties under our labor law system that their strategy should be to delay and delay and delay,” Jacobs said. “We can expect those kinds of rulings that allow employers to get away with violations of the law [under a Trump NLRB].”
Wages have been growing slower than inflation, said Ken Jacobs, co-chair of the UC Berkeley Center for Labor, meaning hotel workers’ pay has less buying power than it did previously.
Ken Jacobs said that “key issues in those negotiations include pay while on the ground and unpaid overtime … This is likely to be a major bargaining issue across the remaining airlines in the coming years.”
A discussion with an author of a new report laying out how Uber and Lyft’s preferred worker classification — codified in California’s Prop 22 — depresses pay and deprives drivers of benefits.
“Yes, strikes are effective,” said Ken Jacobs.
“Increases in the state minimum wage have never been paused,” and the delay is “very unusual,” said Ken Jacobs.
With Trump-era corporate tax cuts set to end in 2025, the nation’s next leaders will likely issue high-stakes decisions such as how much to invest in working people and students versus benefits for corporations and wealthy Americans, Jacobs said.
“It’s low pay, and the more drivers there are, the longer the waiting time and the less they make,” said Ken Jacobs.
While companies would argue their workers are independent contractors under the state’s three-prong test, Jacobs believes the assertion falls flat because of the amount of control ride-hailing and delivery platforms have over drivers’ wages and employment conditions.
Many California voters thought they were improving the lot of drivers by passing Prop. 22. They were mistaken and possibly misled.
