UC Berkeley

This dissertation describes the importance of wages to child welfare workforce measures using two empirical strategies and datasets. The first approach uses public pay data and private living wage estimates to generate descriptive analyses of 58 public child welfare agencies in California. These analyses reveal that 42% of the sample’s 9,996 workers earned a living base wage in 2024. Across the sample, 61% of workers earned a living total wage, and 81% of workers earned overtime pay. Trends over the 2011–2024 period show heterogeneity across counties regarding living wage status, overtime earnings levels, and the ratio of children with investigations to the number of workers as a proxy for caseload. Statewide trends over the past decade show increases in total staff and overtime utilization concurrent with decreases in average caseload, suggesting that workers may be facing conditions that require more time per case. County fixed-effects multiple linear regressions controlling for year suggest that base wage increases may be related to staffing changes and greater overtime utilization measures. The second approach turns to the collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) underlying wage and workforce policies for public child protective services (CPS) workers in California to understand whether these contracts vary significantly in their approach to regulating wages. This approach applies both manual data extraction methods and syntactic dependency parsing to a convenience sample of 124 CBAs across 18 unions and 57 counties. Most contracts are similar in their balance of topics, with a higher focus on workload regulation, indicating sector-wide uniformity. Workers’ rights have remained consistent in their relative share of extracted clauses over the past decade (approximately 3–7%). County random-effects multiple linear regressions with year fixed effects suggest that cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) are negatively correlated with overtime measures and positively correlated with living wage levels. The use of COLAs in CBAs may increase living wage levels and decrease overtime usage through higher overtime costs.