The author summarizes the contents of the 2003 issue of The State of California Labor, an annual publication of the University of California Institute for Labor and Employment.

Ruth Milkman summarizes the contents of the 2004 issue of The State of California Labor, an annual publication of the University of California Institute for Labor and Employment.

California made history on September 23, 2002, when the nation’s first comprehensive paid family leave program was signed into law by former governor Gray Davis. Benefits provided by this pioneering legislation became available to most working Californians starting on July 1, 2004. The new law provides up to six weeks of partial pay – 55% of weekly earnings up to a maximum of $728 per week – for eligible employees who need time off from work to bond with a new child or to care for a seriously ill family member. The program, funded entirely by a payroll tax on employees, builds on California’s existing State Disability Insurance (SDI) system, which for many years has provided income support for employees’ medical and pregnancy-related leaves. Like SDI, the new paid family leave program is extensive (although not universal) in coverage: apart from some selfemployed persons, virtually all private sector employees are included.1 California’s new law is especially valuable for the growing numbers of low-wage workers, many of them female, who currently have limited access to employer-sponsored fringe benefits providing paid time off (such as paid sick leave and paid vacation). Until July 1, 2004, such benefits were the main sources of income support for employees who took leaves from work to bond with a new child or to provide care for a seriously ill family member.

After briefly reviewing the various developments contributing to the recent growth in demand for time off from work as well as the political processes that led to the passage of California’s pioneering paid family leave legislation, this chapter analyzes new data on paid family leave from two recent state-level surveys—the fall 2003 Golden Bear Omnibus (GBO) survey of California adults and the 2003 Survey of California Establishments (SCE) of employers.2 Although California adults responding to the GBO survey expressed overwhelming support for the idea of paid family leave, their awareness of the new law was surprisingly limited, with only about one in five respondents indicating that they were familiar with it. Awareness of the new law was especially low among the groups that are least likely to have access to employer-sponsored paid time off: women, low-wage workers,immigrants, and disadvantaged racial-ethnic groups. Ironically, these same groups expressed disproportionately favorable attitudes toward the idea of paid leave.

The survey data also provide insight into the ways in which, prior to the implementation of the new law, employers and employees in the state handled the kinds of events that the paid family leave program now covers. Many employed Californians have taken family leaves in the past, the GBO data show. And the data from the SCE survey reveal that many employers in the state—especially those that are unionized, those with large numbers of employees, and those with a relatively large proportion of professional, managerial, and technical employees—already provided family and medical leave benefits beyond those required by law before the establishment of the new paid family leave program. The recent extension of such benefits to the much larger population covered by the legislation passed in 2002 could be its most far-reaching effect; realizing that potential, however, will require increasing public awareness of the law substantially.

Ruth Milkman and Eileen Appelbaum examine one of California’s most important recent legislative initiatives: the paid family leave law that was passed in 2002 and took effect in mid-2004. California is the first state in the nation to provide paid family leave to its workers. The authors review the developments leading to the establishment of this new program, which builds on California’s longstanding State Disability Insurance system. The paid leave program covers virtually all private sector workers (unlike the federal Family and Medical Leave Act which is restricted to relatively large employers), and thus should in principle provide universal coverage. The authors use data from two surveys: the Golden Bear Omnibus survey, which investigated public attitudes about paid leave, public awareness of the state’s new paid family leave law, employees’ previous experience with family and medical leave, and employees’ expectations about future needs for leave; and the Survey of California Establishments, which examined the extent to which California employers provided family and medical leave benefits beyond what was legally required prior to the implementation of the new law, as well as employers’ recent experience with such leaves. The authors’ analysis reveals that relatively few Californians—only about one in five—are aware that the new paid family leave program exists. Moreover, workers with the most family-friendly employers are more likely to learn about the paid family leave law than are those who are employed by “low-road” companies and who are most in need of paid leave. The danger is that the benefits from the new program will go disproportionately to the state’s more privileged workers, many of whom already enjoy the functional equivalent of paid family leave via other employer-sponsored fringe benefits. If nothing is done to increase the visibility of the state’s much-celebrated paid family leave program among low-wage workers, immigrants, and others who need it most, the already entrenched inequality that is so deeply embedded in the state’s labor market and wider social organization may become characteristic of this arena as well, despite the fact that the clear intent of the law is to provide universal coverage.

This analysis of California union membership draws on data from the 2001–02 California Union Census (CUC), a new survey of local unions conducted by the Institute for Labor and Employment, as well as selected data from the Current Population Survey. The focus is the recent divergence of California from the United States as a whole: while union density has continued its long decline nationwide, in California it has increased over the past few years. This divergence reflects not only the ways in which labor’s political strength in the state has facilitated recruiting new union members but also California’s distinctive labor history. The relatively large share of union membership held by the Service Employees (SEIU) in California yielded disproportionate growth for the state’s labor movement in the 1990s, as this union became the nation’s single most rapidly growing labor organization. The authors also examine variation in union membership by industry, region, and across key demographic groups. In both California and the nation, for example, union density is much higher in the public sector than in the private sector. Women and African Americans have higher unionization rates in California than nationally; the rates are similar in the state and nation for immigrant workers, who are less unionized than their native-born counterparts in both cases. Finally, the authors look at data on union staffing levels. The key finding here is that organizing staff are employed by relatively few local unions, but that those that do employ them are the fastest growing.

This chapter explores the characteristics of job growth in California during the long economic expansion of the 1990s. The main focus is on the quality of jobs (measured by median hourly earnings) generated during the boom years. Drawing on U.S. Current Population Survey data, the analysis shows that net employment growth in California was polarized between "good jobs" and "bad jobs," with relatively little growth in the middle. The state's pattern of job growth was more polarized than that in the U.S. as a whole, although in both the state and the nation, the 1990s pattern contrasts sharply with that of the 1960s, when economic expansion generated a more evenly distributed array of new jobs. In the 1990s, race, ethnicity and nativity were tightly linked to the new polarization, although in the case of gender, the analysis reveals extensive within-group polarization. One of the most striking findings in this chapter involves regional differences: whereas the Los Angeles metropolitan area showed an even more extreme pattern of job polarization than the state as a whole, in the San Francisco Bay Area (which includes Silicon Valley) "good jobs" dominated growth, with little expansion of jobs at the low end or in the middle. This suggests that the much-touted "new economy" of the 1990s is a geographically bounded phenomenon, and one that may depend on a more polarized and less salutary set of economic arrangements in nearby regions.