Center for Labor Research and Education

Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit and the other public benefits programs discussed in this report provide a vital support system for millions of Americans working in the United States’ service industries, including fast food. We analyze public program utilization by working families and estimate total average annual public benefit expenditures on the families of front-line fast-food workers for the years 2007–2011.

Young workers on college campuses around the country are supporting unionization at levels not seen in decades. Labor organizers speculate several factors are leading to this historic cascade of strikes and drives for union recognition.

In this brief I review the evidence of how airport minimum labor standards promote safety and security.

In this brief we estimate the new costs to the state resulting from SB 525 as well as the savings it would generate through reductions in safety net program enrollment of affected workers and their family members.

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.

The model  is designed to estimate the impacts of various elements of the ACA on employer decisions to offer insurance coverage and individual decisions to obtain coverage in California. 

In April, the Biden Administration announced a proposed rule that would allow an estimated 40,000 uninsured DACA recipients in California access to subsidized health coverage through Covered California. This fills an important gap in health coverage options, but it renders access to Covered California contingent on DACA status—which itself is at risk of being overturned by the courts.

Passage of AB 2257 has caused only minor changes in coverage of the ABC test under AB 5.

This report examines the state of work in the East Bay prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that even before the pandemic, when the economy was strong by conventional economic metrics and had recovered from the Great Recession, many East Bay workers were earning low wages, housing cost-burdened, and struggling to make ends meet, with workers of color in particular making wages too low to support themselves and their families.

Undergraduates spend spring break learning firsthand about Bay Area labor history during the 2023 Solidarity Spring at UC Berkeley.