Thursday, August 24, 2023

Rapinoe knocks ‘fake’ Trump criticism after World Cup exit

Sarah Fortinsky
Tue, August 22, 2023 




Retiring U.S. soccer star Megan Rapinoe is knocking former President Trump’s criticism of her after the U.S. Women’s National Team lost in the round of 16 of the Women’s World Cup this month, calling his attacks “fake” in an interview published Tuesday in The Atlantic.

“It always is [hard to parse],” Rapinoe said of Trump’s criticism, “because what he’s saying is fake. It’s a compilation of hit words and hot-button words that don’t actually make any sort of sense or square with reality at all.”

Rapinoe fought back against the criticism her team has faced both in moments of success and in ones of failure, saying, “there’s no way for us to win.”

“I think, just in general, the way that our team was spoken about over the course of the tournament, it was fake. And it didn’t make sense to me: In 2019, we were ultra-confident, ultra-swaggy — and won everything. And even though we won, we did it in bad taste, according to our critics,” Rapinoe said.

“This time, we weren’t confident enough, and we don’t have the right ‘mentality.’ And so we lost. It’s just so disingenuous. There’s no way for us to win, and there’s no way for us to lose,” she added.

Rapinoe was responding to Trump’s immediate response on social media to the news that the her team had lost to Sweden earlier this month.

“The ‘shocking and totally unexpected’ loss by the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team to Sweden is fully emblematic of what is happening to the our once great Nation under Crooked Joe Biden,” Trump wrote at the time on his social media platform, Truth Social.

Rapinoe, a progressive activist, said during the 2019 Women’s World Cup that if the team won, which it eventually did, “I’m not going to the f‑‑‑ing White House,” adding, “We’re not going to be invited… I doubt it.”

Trump, who was in office at the time, responded to her comments by going after Rapinoe in a post on Twitter, writing, “Megan should never disrespect our country, the White House or our flag, especially since so much has been done for her and the team. Be proud of the flag you carry.”

“I’m a big fan of the U.S. team and women’s soccer, but Megan should first win before she speaks! Finish the job!” he added.

President Biden awarded Rapinoe in 2022 with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the nation.




In a Hot Job Market, the Minimum Wage Becomes an Afterthought

Ben Casselman and Lydia DePillis
The New York Times
Wed, August 23, 2023


Under New Hampshire law, Janette Desmond can pay the employees who scoop ice cream and cut fudge at her Portsmouth sweet shop as little as $7.25 an hour.

But with the state unemployment rate under 2%, the dynamics of supply and demand trump the minimum wage. At Desmond’s store, teenagers working their first summer jobs earn at least $14 an hour.

“I could take a billboard out on I-95 saying we’re hiring, $7.25 an hour,” Desmond said. “You know who would apply? Nobody. You couldn’t hire anybody at $7.25 an hour.”

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The red-hot labor market of the last two years has led to rapid pay increases, particularly in retail, hospitality and other low-wage industries. It has also rendered the minimum wage increasingly meaningless.

Nationally, only about 68,000 people on average earned the federal minimum wage in the first seven months of 2023, according to a New York Times analysis of government data. That is fewer than 1 of every 1,000 hourly workers. Walmart, once noted for its rock-bottom wages, pays workers at least $14 an hour, even where it can legally pay roughly half that.

There are still places where the minimum wage has teeth. Thirty states, along with dozens of cities and other local jurisdictions, have set minimums above the federal mark, in some cases linking them to inflation to help ensure that pay keeps up with the cost of living.

But even there, most workers earn more than the legal minimum.

“The minimum wage is almost irrelevant,” said Robert Branca, who owns nearly three dozen Dunkin’ Donuts stores in Massachusetts, where the minimum is $15. “I have to pay what I have to pay.”

As a result, the minimum wage has faded from the economic policy debate. President Joe Biden, who tried and failed to pass a $15 minimum wage during his first year in office, now rarely mentions it, although he has made the economy the centerpiece of his reelection effort. The Service Employees International Union, which helped found the Fight for $15 movement more than a decade ago, has shifted its focus to other policy levers, though it continues to support higher minimum wages.

Opponents, too, seem to have moved on: When Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives voted this year to raise the state’s $7.25 minimum wage to $15 by 2026, businesses, at least aside from seasonal industries in rural areas, shrugged. (The measure has stalled in the state’s Republican-controlled Senate.)

“Our members are not concerned,” said Ben Fileccia, a senior vice president at the Pennsylvania Restaurant and Lodging Association. “I have not heard about anybody being paid minimum wage in a very long time.”

The question is what will happen when the labor market cools. In inflation-adjusted terms, the federal minimum is worth less than at any time since 1949. That means that workers in states like Pennsylvania and New Hampshire could struggle to hold on to their recent gains if employers regain leverage.

Congress hasn’t voted to raise the minimum wage since George W. Bush was president; in 2007, he signed a law to bring the floor to $7.25 by 2009. It remains there 14 years later, the longest period without an increase since the nationwide minimum was established in 1938.

As the federal minimum flatlined, however, the Fight for $15 campaign was succeeding at the state and local levels. Cities such as Seattle and San Francisco adopted a $15 minimum wage, followed by states such as New York and Massachusetts. And while Republican legislatures opposed raising minimums, voters often overruled them; Missouri, Florida, Arkansas and other Republican-dominated states have passed increases through ballot measures in the last decade.

Nationwide, the number of people earning the minimum wage fell steadily, from nearly 2 million when the $7.25 floor took effect to about 400,000 in 2019. (Those figures omit people earning less than the minimum wage, which can in some cases include teenagers, people with certain disabilities or tipped workers.)

Then COVID-19 upended the low-wage labor market. Millions of cooks, servers, hotel housekeepers and retail workers lost their jobs; those who stayed on as “essential workers” often received hazard pay or bonuses. As businesses began to reopen in 2020 and 2021, demand for goods and services rebounded much faster than the supply of workers to deliver them. That left companies scrambling for employees — and gave workers rare leverage.

The result was a labor market increasingly untethered to the official minimum wage. In New Hampshire, the 10th percentile wage — the level at which 90% of workers earn more — was just above $10 in May 2019. By May 2022, that figure had jumped to $13.64, and local business owners say it has continued to rise.

“Today, you’re looking at $15 an hour and saying, ‘I wish that’s all we had to pay,’” said David Bellman, who owns a jewelry store in Manchester, New Hampshire.

The unemployment rate in New Hampshire was low before the pandemic; at 1.7% in July, it is now among the lowest rates ever recorded anywhere in the country. Competition for workers is fierce: The Wendy’s on Bellman’s drive home from work advertises wages of $18 an hour. At his own store, he is paying $17 to $20 an hour and recently hired someone away from the local bagel shop; his son had noticed that she seemed like a hard worker.

“Basically, the only way to hire anybody is to take them away from somebody else,” Bellman said.

New Hampshire is surrounded by states where the minimum wage is above $13, so if Granite State employers tried to offer substantially less, many workers could cross the border for a bigger paycheck. But even in states like Alabama and Mississippi, where the cost of living is lower and where few neighboring states have minimum wages above the federal standard, most employers are finding they have to pay well above $7.25.

Paige Roberts, president and CEO of the Jackson County Chamber of Commerce in Mississippi, said she was “nearly laughed out of a job” when she started asking members about paying the minimum wage. Entry-level jobs there pay about $12 an hour, according to the local unemployment office.


Kitchen workers at Liberty House, a restaurant and event venue in Jersey City, N.J. on Aug. 16, 2023. (Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times)

In states with higher minimums, the picture is more nuanced. Faster increases in the wage floor in the late 2010s forced up long-stagnant wages in fields like restaurants and retail. And some businesses, such as summer camps, say they are still paying the minimum wage for entry-level workers or those in training. But for the most part, the minimums no longer exert the strong upward pressure on pay that they did when they were adopted.

When New Jersey passed a minimum-wage law in 2019, many businesses complained that the increases were too aggressive: The floor would rise by at least $1 an hour every year until it hit $15 in 2024. But recently, the hot job market has levitated the wage scale even more.

“COVID kind of shifted things around a bit, as did inflation,” said Jeanne Cretella, whose business, Landmark Hospitality, operates 14 venues in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Before the pandemic, dishwashers and other entry-level employees at Landmark typically made the minimum wage. These days, Cretella starts workers in New Jersey at $15 an hour, though the state’s minimum won’t hit that mark until next year.

When the Fight for $15 movement began, many economists warned that raising the minimum wage too high or too quickly could lead to job losses. Some studies did find modest negative effects on employment, particularly for teenagers and others on the margins of the labor market. But for the most part, researchers found that pay went up without widespread layoffs or business failures.

Some economists still wondered what would happen as $15 minimum wages spread beyond high-cost coastal cities. But that was before the pandemic reshaped the low-wage labor market.

“We’re kind of in different territory now,” said Jacob Vigdor, an economist at the University of Washington who has studied the issue.

Washington has the highest statewide minimum wage, at $15.74. Yet when Vigdor recently visited Aberdeen, a small town near the Pacific coast, all business owners wanted to talk about was how to retain workers.

“I did not really hear a lot of concern about those minimum wages,” he said. “There the concern is that they’re losing people.”

Still, economists say the minimum wage could become relevant again when the labor market eventually cools and workers lose bargaining power.

David Neumark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, said states with high minimum wages could be at a disadvantage in a recession, because employers would have to keep pay high as demand softened, potentially leading to layoffs.

Other economists have the opposite concern: that workers in states where the minimum wage remains $7.25 could see their recent gains evaporate when they no longer have the leverage to demand more.

“It’s as tenuous as it gets,” said Kathryn Anne Edwards, a labor economist and policy consultant. “The labor market has gained ground, but policy has not cemented that territory.”

Despite the strong labor market, many workers say they barely get by.

KaSondra Wood has spent much of her adult life working for the minimum wage, from the army depot where she held her first job, earning $5.15 an hour, to the Little Caesars where she made $7.25 as recently as last year.

But not anymore: This summer, she started a job cleaning rooms at a local hotel, earning $12 an hour. Even in Oneonta, Alabama, a rural area with few job opportunities, employers know better than to try hiring at the minimum wage.

“They wouldn’t advertise for it, knowing they wouldn’t get anyone in there,” she said.

But Wood, 38, hardly feels that she is getting ahead. The hotel is a 45-minute drive from her home, so gas eats up much of her paycheck, even though she carpools with her mother. Groceries keep getting more expensive.

“A couple years ago, $12 an hour would’ve been killer money,” she said. But now it isn’t enough to pay her bills.

“I don’t ever get caught up,” she said. “I’m broke by the time I get paid.”

c.2023 The New York Times Company

With contracts set to expire Sept. 14, auto union chief says talks with Detroit 3 aren't going well

TOM KRISHER
Wed, August 23, 2023 




United Auto Workers members march while holding signs at a union rally held near a Stellantis factory Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2023, in Detroit. UAW President Shawn Fain told reporters that bargaining on a new contract is not going well between the UAW and Detroit's three automakers. 
(AP Photo/Mike Householder)


DETROIT (AP) — With about three weeks until contracts expire with Detroit's three automakers, the head of the United Auto Workers union says bargaining isn't going well.

President Shawn Fain told workers outside a Detroit factory that their walk Wednesday to practice picketing would become reality if General Motors, Ford and Stellantis don't start negotiating seriously.

"These companies better come to the table. The clock is ticking,” Fain told about 100 workers gathered in a parking lot near Stellantis’ Mack Avenue assembly complex. “Today I want you guys to have some fun practicing for what we’re going to have to do if these companies don’t give us our fair share.”

Contracts between the union representing about 146,000 workers at the companies expire at 11:59 p.m. on Sept. 14. Members are voting this week on whether to give union leaders authorization to call a strike.

The union is seeking a 40% pay increase, restoration of pensions for new hires, elimination of wage tiers and other items. Fain has often told workers they have to be ready to strike in order to achieve gains from the profitable automakers.

In a short interview with The Associated Press Fain characterized bargaining as slow. “We're not getting real far so far,” he said, but added that a strike is not inevitable.

Stellantis wouldn't comment Wednesday and referred to previous statements saying the company wants to fairly compensate workers and find solutions to protect Stellantis from nonunion companies with lower costs, and additional costs from moving to electric vehicles.

GM and Ford each have said they're bargaining in good faith.

Workers are voting this week on whether to authorize union leaders to call a strike against one or more of the automakers when the contracts end.

Four workers interviewed Wednesday said they voted in favor, and Fain said early results coming in from factories show the strike authority is overwhelmingly passing. Such votes almost always get more than 90% approval from workers.

Although Fain says the union has not picked a company to target for a strike and it could strike against all three at the same time, several members who practiced picketing Wednesday all said they think the union will strike against Stellantis.

“If they make more profits, we should be able to get a little piece of that change,” said Jamar Williams, a chassis assembly worker at the Stellantis plant.
As Hollywood strikes drag on, California lawmakers consider unemployment pay for striking workers

Queenie Wong
Wed, August 23, 2023 

SAG-AFTRA and WGA members join forces with the AFL-CIO and its affiliates from across the nation and across industries for a national day of solidarity rally outside of Walt Disney Studios in Burbank on Tuesday. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)


California lawmakers are resurrecting legislation that would allow workers on strike to collect unemployment benefits, reigniting a familiar political battle between labor unions and businesses.

Under Senate Bill 799, striking workers would be eligible to collect unemployment benefits after they're on strike for two weeks, an early version of the bill released on Tuesday shows.

“Even coming out of the strike, when folks eventually get a contract that they agree on, their families have suffered during this time,” said Sen. Anthony Portantino (D-Burbank), who wrote the bill.

The last-minute effort, backed by labor unions, shows how lawmakers are responding to a wave of worker strikes sweeping California. Hollywood writers, later joined by actors, have been on the picket lines for more than 100 days demanding better pay and benefits. Public school workers, hotel staffers, nurses and even Los Angeles city workers also went on strike this year in Southern California.

Striking union members in most states don’t qualify for unemployment benefits. In California, workers must meet requirements to qualify for unemployment benefits, such as showing they are unemployed through no fault of their own and actively searching for a job. To pay their bills, workers on strike usually rely on personal savings, strike funds, side gigs and other financial aid.

New York and New Jersey, though, do allow certain workers on strike to collect unemployment benefits. Lawmakers in states such as Massachusetts, Connecticut and now California are considering similar policies.

Along with expanding eligibility for unemployment benefits, California lawmakers are considering several other bills to aid workers grappling with the rising cost of living. Democrats have introduced legislation that would raise the minimum wage for healthcare workers to $25 per hour and more than double the amount of paid sick leave. The California Chamber of Commerce labeled the bills “job killers."

The chamber opposes allowing striking workers to collect unemployment pay in California, which is as much as $450 per week for a maximum of 26 weeks, stating it would harm businesses.

“This is going to hit employers, even those who have no involvement at all in any labor dispute and never have, but they're still going to pay increased taxes,” said Robert Moutrie, a policy advocate at the California Chamber of Commerce.

Read more: How to tap the WGA strike funds and other financial aid during the writers strike

Businesses pay state and federal payroll taxes on each employee’s first $7,000 in annual wages to fund the unemployment insurance program.

Portantino said his legislation could help fuel more conversations about how to better finance the state’s unemployment fund.

“The level of taxable income is low,” Portantino said. “This is the time to maybe look at that level of income to raise it to make sure that the fund is solvent.”

California is paying out more unemployment benefits than it has collected in state payroll taxes, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

In 2020, amid higher-than-average job losses during the coronavirus pandemic, California borrowed $20 billion from the federal government to fund unemployment claims. The amount of federal unemployment insurance taxes California employers pay increases every year by an extra $21 per employee until the loan is repaid. The state also has to pay interest on these federal loans.

The proposed legislation was first reported by Politico. Although the official deadline for introducing new legislation has passed, the proposal is being introduced by gutting an existing bill and replacing the language with the measure to expand unemployment benefits.

Lawmakers will have to weigh business and labor interests. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has stayed behind the scenes as the Hollywood strikes drag on and has been cautious about any appearance that he’s taking sides. Newsom has been hesitant to support new spending proposals, however, given that he and lawmakers recently agreed on a budget plan that closes a nearly $32-billion deficit. The governor's office didn't respond to questions about whether it would support the bill.

Labor unions, including SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America, support the bill.

"Years of eroding compensation and working conditions have left writers with fewer resources than ever to weather periods without work," Meredith Stiehm, president of Writers Guild of America-West, said in a statement. "Unemployment insurance for striking workers is a commonsense solution to keeping workers afloat and local economies healthy.”

California lawmakers proposed a similar bill to give striking workers unemployment benefits in 2019, but AB 1066 failed to pass the Senate. Various business groups opposed the legislation, saying it could force the state to take out more federal loans and penalize employers for strikes.

At the time, the Employment Development Department estimated that the amount of additional unemployment benefits paid could range from $800,000 to $6 million annually, according to the bill's analysis. The impact depends on the number of employees who collect unemployment benefits and how long the strikes last.

Former state Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez, who leads the California Labor Federation, said owing the federal government money shouldn’t be an excuse for not providing unemployment pay to workers.

“If you're in Los Angeles, obviously you're seeing workers go without a paycheck for an extended amount of time, and slowly finding out what that means,” she said. Gonzalez said she’s seen the effect long strikes have had on workers, pointing to the nearly five-month grocery worker strike in the 2000s. Anonymous studio executives told Deadline that their strategy is to drag out the strikes until workers go broke, but the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers disputed the report.

“They want them to be evicted. I mean, that's crazy. That is exactly what we don't want. They have earned unemployment insurance, and they should be able to access unemployment insurance,” Gonzalez said.

The amount in strike funds, she said, varies based on the union and can be depleted. Allowing workers to collect unemployment benefits isn’t about tipping the scale in favor of the workers but being “humane” and providing them a social safety net.

“This really just keeps people afloat,” she said.


Why UC workers say they must sleep in their cars to do their jobs for the wages paid

Cathie Anderson
Wed, August 23, 2023 


Xavier Mascareñas/xmascarenas@sacbee.com

LONG READ

Veronika Honcharuk drives 133 miles one way to get to her job in San Francisco from her home in Placerville. She logs patients’ admission information in the emergency department at UCSF’s Helen Diller Medical Center.

She works 12 hours a shift, three days a week. To clear enough money to cover her parking ($300), gas ($600) and her car payment ($400) each month, she must put in a week and a half at her job.

Honcharuk’s employer frequently offers her the opportunity to work overtime, she said, and she usually takes it because she needs the money.

But if she works those extra hours, she will likely sleep in her car until the next shift rather than making the journey home and back. The drive time would eat up five to six hours.

Step into the world of low-wage workers at the University of California where overtime is a necessity, affordable housing is a super-commute away and cars double as bedrooms. Now, thousands of UC workers are demanding a wage increase that would allow them to alter this reality.

“I’d love to get a new car. It would definitely help to pay my mortgage and to put more money into savings,” Honcharuk said. “There’s not a lot left over once you’ve paid a mortgage and car bill and the phone bill and all these bills. They all add up. You don’t have a lot to put aside for security.”

The UC Board of Regents could better the lives of nearly a quarter of UC employees with pay increases that would equal to 2.5% of its current operating budget — or even less, according to researchers for Honcharuk’s union, AFSCME Local 3299. They make their case for two separate wage proposals in a report being released Wednesday titled “Priced Out: The University of California’s Role in the Affordability Crisis.”

The University of California, responding to a query from The Bee, said it had not yet seen the AFSCME researchers’ report but that its leaders are open to discussing the wage proposals. Outside a recent regents meeting, AFSCME workers shouted their demands for a $25 minimum wage and across-the-board wage increases of 5% for AFSCME members currently earning more than that. The union and the UC will open talks on a new contract in January.

“UC is aware of and has been reviewing the union’s public campaign around $25/5%,” system leaders said in a statement issued by the UC Office of the President. “If that is the economic proposal that AFSCME brings to the bargaining table in January of 2024, the university will seriously consider it, working with AFSCME through the bargaining process to identify economic terms that are fair, competitive, and reflect the varying economic markets across our state. “

Union: Inflation outpaces pay hikes

While inflation has soared by 12% in California since February 2021, the AFSCME researchers said, pay raises haven’t kept up. In 2020, after three years of bargaining on a new contract, AFSCME workers received a 6% across-the-board wage increase and 3% raises in each successive year. Essentially, this translates into a 5% pay cut for these employees, the researchers said.

The UC Office of the President, however, said that wage gains for AFSCME workers have averaged 5% annually over their four-year-contract because they have received not only across-the-board pay hikes but also annual step increases based on job performance.

AFSCME researchers said a third of their members and none of the unrepresented student workers qualify for step increases, and pay increases for these workers pale in comparison to the market-based adjustments that the system has given higher-paid workers.

Average pay for UC chancellors has jumped by 34% since 2021, to the equivalent of $320 per hour, they said, and pay for senior managers rose 12% over a similar time period to $226 per hour.

Even before those salary bumps, the researchers said, these affluent employees were far better-positioned to weather escalating inflation than AFSCME Local 3299’s membership.

Those inflationary pressures jolted Honcharuk, 22, and her husband last year when their landlord told them that the monthly rate on their three-bedroom duplex in Carmichael would jump 24.4% to $2,800.

After discussing it, the couple decided that, rather than paying so much on rent, they should put that money into a home where they could build some equity.

“We thought, if we’re gonna be paying almost $3,000 for rent, we would look for a larger place or like a good place to live so we can still take in our parents who had to move out of the state,” Honcharuk said. “When they come to visit, we want some space for them.”

Honcharuk was born in Carmichael, but she quickly realized that she might not find a home there in her price range of $500,000 or less. The couple toured numerous Sacramento-area homes, but many required extensive repairs, Honcharuk said. By looking farther in a more rural county, she said, they finally found a three-bedroom home in Placerville.

Commute times climb

Since the move in December, Honcharuk said, her commute has taken two to three hours one way, up from the 1.5 hours she spent on the road from Carmichael. Four days of work had covered half the rent in Carmichael. Honcharuk now must work six days to earn half their mortgage payment.

The couple could not have afforded so much space if they lived closer to their jobs in San Francisco. Honcharuk’s husband Mike has been working as a supervisor in the ophthalmology department at a different UCSF medical campus. Both applied for jobs at health care systems in Sacramento but didn’t have any luck.

AFSCME researchers say renters in San Francisco pay a median price of $2,665 for a one-bedroom apartment. For 20% more than that, the Honcharuks acquired their three-bedroom house in El Dorado County.

The median pay for AFSCME service and patient care workers is $29.22 an hour, the researchers said, but federal data show a worker would have to earn $51.05 an hour to cover rent and other living expenses near the UCSF campus. Honcharuk earns about $30 an hour.

In 2017, half of the UC’s service and patient care workers could not afford a one-bedroom rental close to work, the researchers said, and 6% of workers would have spent more than half of their gross income on housing if they had rented a place near work.

Today, the researchers said, those numbers are worse: 70% cannot afford the one-bedroom rental, and 15% would have to devote more than 50% of their gross pay to housing if they lived near their UC job. Looking at pay data for only service workers, the researchers discovered that 95% cannot afford a one-bedroom rental close to work.

Davina Woods is one of those service workers. She is a senior custodian at UCLA and has worked there for 12 years, but she earns less than $25 an hour. She and one of her daughters had split rent on a duplex in Long Beach, just a 30-minute drive from her workplace, but five years ago, the duplex owner sold the place and served them with notice that they had to move.

Mother and daughter ended up moving to a four-bedroom family home in San Bernardino, and together with Woods’ two sons, they pooled their money and took over the mortgage payment from an elderly relative.

“I do what I have to do to make ends meet,” Woods said.

The commute to UCLA from San Bernardino takes an hour and 25 minutes on a good day, Woods said. But she often encounters traffic problems, she said, so she leaves the house at 1:30 p.m. so she can start her shift on time at 5:30 p.m. She gets off work at 2 a.m.

Workers push for bigger pay hikes amid labor shortages

Both Honcharuk and Woods said they are regularly asked to take on extra work because of a shortage of workers. While Honcharuk frequently works overtime, Woods said she has been charged with cleaning more areas in the same amount of time. Woods said she is working injured now, coping with tendinitis as well as carpal tunnel syndrome.

“People retired; people quit. People moved to daytime or from daytime to overnight. They have to take time off with injuries,” Woods said, “and they don’t replace them. The positions are open. So they expect us to do their work and do ours, too, and they call that swing.”

Low-wage and middle-class workers nationally tell employers that their pay doesn’t reflect their value to their organizations, said Robert Bruno, director of the labor studies program at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

For four or five decades prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, workers in middle-income or working-class jobs just didn’t have much leverage to negotiate pay or pay increases, he said, accepting raises barely keeping up with inflation.

The gap in income inequality transformed into a gulf, he said, but after being deemed too essential to stay home, many low-wage workers are demanding employers close this gap.

Eight out of 10 Californians with annual incomes below $40,000 said the availability of well-paying jobs in their region is a problem, according to a survey on “Californians and their Economic Wellbeing” released in November by the Public Policy Institute of California.

In that same poll, more than 70% of all Californians surveyed said the income gap between rich and poor is getting larger and they think the government should do more to address income inequality.

Before AFSCME launched its campaign, another big union — this one representing nearly 100,000 people — launched a campaign in spring 2022 urging municipalities around the state to set a minimum wage of $25 for health care workers. The labor group, known as Service Employees International-United Healthcare Workers West, has won approval of its measure in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Downey, Inglewood and Lynwood.

Sacramento City Council Member Katie Valenzuela also tried to get her colleagues to consider a measure like the one SEIU-UHW had backed in other cities, but she said it was effectively killed in committee — at least for now.

“I introduced it because it was really common-sense legislation,” Valenzuela said. “The data shows that you need to be a two-income household, even at $25 an hour, to potentially afford living in Sacramento County.”

Valenzuela said she hopes Democrats in the California legislature will push through Senate Bill 525, introduced by state Sen. Maria Elena Durazo of Los Angeles, to make SEIU-UHW’s proposed $25 minimum wage for health care workers a statewide requirement.

If SB 525 becomes law, more than 469,000 health care workers would gain an average wage increase of more than $5.74 per hour, about a 30% jump in pay, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, Labor Center said in an April 2023 report titled “Proposed Health Care Minimum Wage Increase: What It Would Mean For Workers, Patients and Industry.”

“The low wages paid to health care support workers, direct care workers, and health care service workers in California means they struggle to meet their basic needs; these low wages also significantly contribute to the difficulty in maintaining adequate health care staffing across the state,” wrote labor center researchers Enrique Lopezlira and Ken Jacobs. “Staffing shortages impact patient care, leading to increased wait times, longer hospital stays, and inadequate treatment of chronic illnesses.”

The California Hospital Association and other groups have opposed the bill, however, saying it will raise costs by roughly $8 billion annually and cause severe financial distress for hospitals, nursing homes, physician offices and other health care providers.

“The increase in labor costs will require reducing or eliminating health services to balance revenue and expenses,” CHA Vice President Rony Berdugo wrote in a letter to legislative leaders. “In extreme cases, it will mean bankruptcy and outright closure, especially for those hospitals that are already on the financial brink.”

The hospital industry succeeded in getting referendums challenging the ordinances in Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Downey on the ballot, so implementation is on hold until citywide votes can be held.

The California Nurses Association also has opposed the measure, saying that registered nurses already earn significantly more than $25 an hour and this measure could send a signal to employers that its OK to pay them less than their current median salary.

Why AFSCME Local 3299 is taking up the fight at UC

Even if these local and statewide mandates passed, they apply only to state government and its political subdivisions such as cities, counties and special districts. The University of California is a public trust, not a political subdivision, state courts have ruled, so it cannot be compelled to follow state or local minimum wage laws.

The AFSCME researchers also linked low pay to staffing shortages, pointing out that a number of UC executives have noted that hiring has been challenging during and since the COVID-19 pandemic. The UC often has run a cash surplus, UC finance chief Nathan Brostrom told the regents at a meeting in January, largely because job vacancy rates are three times higher than they were before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jo Mackness, an assistant vice chancellor at UC Berkeley whose portfolio includes oversight of dining and residential halls, told the regents at a meeting of the finance and capital strategies committee in November that Berkeley is finding it “increasingly difficult” to hire at the pay rates offered at that time.

“One of the areas where we save money is we haven’t spent as much money on compensation, largely because we haven’t been able to fill the vacancies across the system,” she said. “That is beginning to emerge as a risk factor for us, as a university, as a system.”

UC leaders, in the statement sent to The Bee, acknowledged that, to recruit and retain workers to AFSCME-represented jobs in several markets, they have had to offer pay above what is required by the contract.

“These adjustments have varied by locations and positions but include market increases for senior custodians and custodians, adding steps to the lead custodian scale, and providing referral and retention bonuses,” according to the UC statement. “In addition to these AFSCME-specific increases, over the last several years, UC has added to the benefits it provides all employees, including providing care and bonding leave and an infertility benefit. The University will continue to review what additional benefits are necessary to retain its employees and maintain a healthy and supported work environment.”

Both Woods and Honcharuk said they’ve watched as colleagues have come and gone, some saying they could make the same money with less of a workload, some retiring and others leaving for jobs that pay more.

Claudia Preparata, the research director for AFSCME Local 3299, said her research on pay explains why: “During the COVID-19 pandemic, our members were the heroes on the front line, like (they) literally were going into work, putting themselves at risk. They did not have the luxury of being able to work remotely. And every day you would hear about frontline heroes. Now ... what the data reinforces is they are literally the ones in the system to be the most left behind and that is very stark.”

5% of UC operating budget covers 62,000 workers’ pay

It is virtually impossible to spend a minute on a UC campus or in a UC hospital without somehow being touched by work done by one of 62,000 people who earn less than $25 an hour.

Like Honcharuk, they check in patients. Like Woods clean hospital rooms, classrooms, lobbies, libraries, offices, operating rooms and many other spaces. They serve food. They weed, mow grass, spread fertilizer, pick up litter. They enforce rules, monitor who comes and goes, patrol the property.

Although the 62,000 represent about 24% of the UC workforce, their combined wages make up 5% of the system’s operating budget, Preparata and senior researchers Geoff Goodman, Owen Li and Kate Spear wrote in their “Priced Out” report.

Li, Preparata and Spear shared highlights from their report during a video conference with The Bee, stressing that their proposals are intended to benefit both unionized workers and undergraduate students. Some of those student workers are trying to earn enough to meet the yearly self-help obligation in their financial aid package, which averages $9,900.

In reviewing demographic information on both the students and AFSCME members, the researchers found that about 80% of each group are people of color.

The UC houses only 38% of its students, so many undergraduates are competing with staff for affordable housing close to UC campuses and hospitals, the researchers said, putting upward pressure on rents. And, they noted that a 2022 UC survey found that 8% of students experienced homelessness, up from 5% in 2016.

Housing, however, is not the only cost weighing heavily on wallets. A 2021 accountability report from the UC found that 44% of students reported being food-insecure.

That same report noted that 35% of UC students received Pell grants, indicating they come from households earning $50,000 or less in income.

Yet, living near a UC campus brings with it higher-than-average prices for basic expenses such as housing, food, taxes and health care, according to Daniel Masterson, a professor in UC Santa Barbara’s Department of Political Science.

He found that the average cost of living in counties with a UC campus is not only 47% higher than the national average but also higher than the average cost of living in other counties with universities — even higher than the top 50 non-UC schools.

The UC has taken steps to help with food pantries, grocery gift cards, meal vouchers, the researchers said, and the California legislature has appropriated millions for emergency meal services, CalFresh enrollment clinics and rapid rehousing.

Pay as a preventative strategy

But pay raises, Li said, could be a preventative strategy. Here are two proposals that he, Spear and Preparata floated in their report and the rationale behind them:

In the first, the researchers argued that the least UC could do is to restore the buying power that its personnel have lost since 2017. Back then, 6% of AFSCME-represented workers would have had to spend more than half their income to get housing near work. By 2022, AFSCME researchers said, calculations showed 15% of workers were in that boat.

If the UC raised the minimum wage for these workers to $25 and gave the remaining AFSCME-represented workers a 5% wage increase, the researchers said, the portion of AFSCME members facing that severe housing burden would fall to 4%.

The pay boost would also allow students to earn enough money to meet their self-help financial obligation, without working as many hours, Spear said.

Right now, she said, about 11% of undergraduates are working more than 20 hours a week, even though research suggests n students work working such hours negatively affects students’ academic progress and performance.

At $25 an hour, student workers could earn an additional $600 a month if they worked 15 hours a week.

If the UC instituted a $25 minimum wage and the recommended 5% wage bumps, Spear and her colleagues said, the system’s operating budget would grow by 0.7%.

In the second wage proposal, AFSCME researchers suggested the UC pay the median hourly wage that it would take to ensure a full-time California worker could afford housing. Known as the statewide housing wage, the figure is $33.84 an hour.

That tops the median hourly wage of $29.22 that UC service and patient care workers are making and the median pay of $16 an hour for students, the researchers said.

This proposal also calls for a 5% wage bump for workers already making above the suggested $33.84 minimum wage.

The statewide median housing wage would have been more than enough to cover rent on a one-bedroom apartment near UC Merced, UC Riverside, UC Davis, and UC Los Angeles, researchers said, and at this pay, no UC worker would have to spend more than half their income to live near work.

If the UC instituted the hourly $33.84 minimum wage, its operating budget would grow by 2.5%, researchers said.

UC officials said that, when evaluating the union’s economic proposals, they would carefully review market data for AFSCME positions by location and prioritize providing fair wages and an equitable and healthy work environment. Any decision will be informed by the university system’s financial constraints and operational needs, they added.

AFSCME links pay to staffing shortages, quality care

AFSCME researchers said they also are anxious to end staffing shortages in the UC’s health systems because of the consequences for both employee well-being and patient care.

The Berkeley Labor Center’s Lopezlira and Jacobs, in their report on SB 525, also saw a connection: “There is ample research linking higher pay, reductions in worker turnover, and improved staffing levels to better quality of care for consumers,” they wrote. “Increasing pay to health care workers can be expected to improve patient outcomes, including shorter hospital stays and lower mortality rates.”

Jacobs and Lopezlira shared results from several studies, including one that found “a 10% increase in the minimum wage significantly improves key quality of care indicators in nursing homes, reducing the number of quality of care health inspection violations by 7.4%, the use of restraints on patients by 3.3%, and age-adjusted patient mortality rates by 3.1%.”

On average, 12.1% of the higher payroll costs from SB 525 would be offset by lower turnover costs, the Berkeley Labor Center investigators wrote, and the proposed wage increases would raise operating costs by about 3%.

Labor and policy experts disagree on the overall economic effect of these wage increases.

Michael Shires of Pepperdine University said these proposed pay increases are part of an inflationary spiral in which wage increases lag or follow rising prices. Other government bodies will face pressure to provide comparable wage increases to employees, and businesses in other will eventually have to follow suit to compete for workers.

“The bottom line is that these proposals will eventually lead to higher prices, wages and taxes,” Shires said.

But University of Illinois’ Bruno said that, while such arguments have been made since the minimum wage was instituted, decades of analysis have shown that raises play a small role in inflation.

“These kinds of concerns about raising wages have … never borne out. At $20 or $25 an hour, you’re really barely in the lower middle class. In some cities, you are able to afford nothing more than a studio apartment.”

Concerns about housing costs loomed large in Honcharuk’s childhood home, she said. When she and her brothers started working, the family no longer qualified for housing assistance, so they all had to pitch in to help pay the rent.

Her parents, she said, long dreamed of buying a home in California but were never able to afford it.

“My mom didn’t work for a while. She took care of our younger siblings. She worked on call as a dental assistant whenever she could,” Honcharuk said. “My parents weren’t able to buy a home until they moved out of the state (last summer). They moved to Missouri where they could afford a home.”

Biden admin to fund $4M study linking climate change to child labor, trafficking in Nepal, grant docs show

Danielle Wallace
Wed, August 23, 2023 

The Biden administration is funding a $4 million project to determine a connection between child labor and climate change in the South Asian country of Nepal.

The U.S. Department of Labor on Monday announced the availability of $4 million in federal taxpayer dollars to be released through its Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) "to fund a technical assistance project in Nepal to increase the responsiveness of local communities to child labor and/or forced labor in the context of a changing climate." Interested parities have until Oct. 9 to apply for the massive grant, and award decisions are expected to be announced by the end of December.

One of the desired outcomes is "increased understanding of the link between climate change and vulnerability to child labor and/or forced labor risks," while another is "increased implementation of child-centered, gender-sensitive and socially inclusive climate adaptation initiatives," according to documents released on the federal government's grant website.

The Labor Department said applicants must propose strategies "based on a gender equity and social inclusion analysis to identify potential barriers of access to and control of resources and decision-making faced by men, women, boys and girls from diverse backgrounds and underrepresented populations, and how these barriers will be overcome by the project."

President Biden's Department of Labor is aiming to fund a $4 million study linking climate change to child labor in Nepal.

"Locally-led" climate change strategy, according to the grant details, should be collaborative with the Nepalese government to address the "priorities of climate-vulnerable populations, such as children, women, indigenous populations, and other disadvantaged groups."

"While further research is needed on the link between climate change and child labor and forced labor, there is evidence of climate change increasing vulnerability to labor exploitation and trafficking, gender-based violence and trafficking of women and girls, child labor, and forced labor and trafficking," the grant documents say.

Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., who sits on the House Judiciary Committee, is among critics who ripped the Biden administration for shelling out $4 million toward this study.

"The Biden administration’s priorities are simply absurd," Johnson told the Washington Examiner. "While 5.8 million Americans are out of work, Biden’s DOL is spending money to investigate how 'a changing climate in Nepal' impacts child labor?!?"

Students hold a poster to mark the World Day Against Child Labor in Kathmandu, Nepal, June 12, 2022. (Getty Images)

"This failed, woke approach to governance is destroying our country," he added.

Fox News reached out to the Department of Labor for comment on the grant and the GOP criticism but they did not immediately respond.

Kathleen Sgamma, president of Western Energy Alliance, an energy and public lands trade group with 200 member companies, told the Examiner the Biden administration is trying to use climate change as an "explanation for everything" instead of offering viable solutions to lift the Nepalese people from poverty.

"One way to do that is by helping them access more reliable, affordable energy in the form of oil, natural gas, and coal, which would actually reduce the poverty that causes families to have to rely on child labor," Sgamma said. "A convoluted study about climate change does nothing to lift families out of poverty and free children to go to school instead of work in sweatshops."


In recent years, the number of children working in the brick kilns of Nepal has boomed after the 2015 earthquake and the COVID-19 pandemic, Getty reported.

"The real irony is that misguided climate change policies in the West that favor intermittent solar energy over reliable fossil fuels are actually directly leading to slave labor in China, where solar panels are made by enslaved Uyghurs," Sgamma added.

Tax forms show Thea Lee, deputy undersecretary and leader of ILAB, which will distribute the grant funding, served as president of the progressive Economic Policy Institute think tank between 2018 and 2021 and has also sat on the board of the Congressional Progressive Caucus Center, the Examiner reported.

The Labor Department said Nepal ranks 10th on the list of countries most at risk of climate change, according to the Global Climate Risk Index 2021. The World Bank estimates that 80% of Nepal’s population faces "climate-related peril," according to the grant details.

Nepal also has pernicious rates of child labor and forced labor, the Labor Department said, estimating 1.1 million children are in child labor, 222,493 of whom are in hazardous work and 85% are working in agriculture. Agri