Across the country, cities and counties have become laboratories of policy innovation on labor standards. Before 2012, only five localities had minimum wage laws; currently, 56 counties and cities do. To help inform policymakers and other stakeholders, the UC Berkeley Labor Center is maintaining an up-to-date inventory of these laws, with details on wage levels, scheduled increases, and other law details, as well as links to the ordinances.

Labor Center research was used in a years-long campaign by health and immigrant advocates to bring health coverage to undocumented Californians.

We provide an overview of existing research that attempts to measure the prevalence of employers’ use of workplace management technologies – i.e., technologies that are used to monitor, evaluate, or make predictions about workers, or assist or augment their tasks.

The UC Berkeley Labor Center has released a report on how and why employers in key industries are deploying new technologies, and what effects these changes could have on workers. The report, “Technological change in five industries: Threats to jobs, wages, and working conditions,” synthesizes the findings from studies released by the Labor Center and Working Partnerships USA from 2018 to 2022. The report concludes that technology’s effects on job quality – like wages and working conditions – should be just as big of a concern as its effects on the total number of jobs available.

Understanding how technological changes may unfold in different industries is essential for developing effective solutions to the challenges that workers face. In this report, we synthesize the findings of five industry studies: trucking, warehouses, health care, retail, and food delivery.

Proposed federal regulations would fix the family glitch by extending subsidies to spouses and children offered unaffordable family coverage through an employer. The employee would still be excluded from subsidies if their cost for single coverage through their employer was affordable. We use the California Simulations of Insurance Markets (CalSIM) model to project for 2023 how many people would fall into the family glitch in California, how many would be newly eligible for a positive dollar subsidy, and how many would enroll in Covered California with subsidies under the family glitch fix.

The California Legislature has passed AB257 and it now heads to the Governor’s desk. The FAST Recovery Act provides a way for the state’s fast-food workers to have a voice in the development and implementation of labor standards in their industry.

After decades of inaction and failed attempts, the U.S. has finally passed federal legislation addressing climate change. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is groundbreaking not only in its efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but also in how it demonstrates that we don’t have to choose between good jobs and action on the climate. By including strong labor standards in incentives for clean energy and energy efficiency work, the IRA will help build a high-road green economy, creating good jobs and clear pathways into them.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) currently being considered by Congress would improve health care affordability for many Californians by addressing high and rising drug prices and by extending the improved premium affordability assistance to Covered California enrollees that began in 2021. The extension of federal premium assistance would also unlock additional state-financed affordability help to reduce how much Covered California enrollees pay out-of-pocket when they access care.

Our minimum wage and living wage tools and resources includes our Inventory of US City and County Minimum Wage Ordinances and a table of current local minimum wages 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.

New research finds that an $18 minimum wage would give five million California workers a pay raise; the ballot initiative would help lift 3.5 million Californians out of poverty.

Comment submitted to the Internal Revenue Service on proposed regulation that would address the ACA “Family Glitch.”

This brief is intended to help policymakers and the public better understand the financial standing of Marin County’s public pension systems, the role of legacy liabilities vs. ongoing benefit accrual in employer pension costs, and the current trajectory of these costs.

Designed as a resource for policymakers and journalists, this brief explains how public pension costs are calculated and funded, and explains how reforms adopted by CalPERS, CalSTRS, and MCERA have put the systems on stronger footing in recent years. This is the second of three briefs in the Marin Public Pension Series.

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.

Today, the UC Berkeley Labor Center released an update to its data tool, “California’s Labor Market Two Years into the Pandemic: 2022 Chartbook.” The chartbook provides researchers, policymakers, journalists, and the public with an in-depth look at the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on workers and the labor market in California based on the most recently available data.

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.

The Labor Center is working to provide research on how California is experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic; analysis of new policies, what they offer the state’s workers and businesses, and what is still needed; and curated lists of resources, information, and tools for workers and their advocates.

Amazon recently announced a new policy on freedom of association under international standards, saying it would comply with International Labor Organization and United Nations principles on union organizing and collective bargaining. This assessment shows that Amazon’s freedom of association policy, on its face, is non-compliant with international labor standards, and Amazon management’s conduct before and after issuing the policy continues to violate international standards.