I work as a personal concierge at the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills, one of the most luxurious hotels in the world. The title that I hold—the first of its kind in the hotel industry and one that required special training—does not fully explain my job responsibilities.

Unlike a typical concierge, I perform a wide range of tasks, including check-ins and check-outs but not limited to accounting, making special reservations and suggesting points of interest, helping guests with luggage, assisting with package and food deliveries, setting up room decor to celebrate special occasions, answering phones, and fulfilling all kinds of guest requests. Despite the different duties and training of the job, I was still compensated as a regular front desk agent.

The pandemic burdened me with additional duties as the hotel was severely understaffed and extremely busy. The personal concierge team I joined in 2022 had once consisted of 29 members but due to steady turnover, by the time I got the job, there were only six, including me. My colleagues were disappointed and worn out. I knew something needed to change. But what? My personal answer to that question is a long one.

I was raised in Forest Hills, New York by ambitious parents from Mexico City who were studying to become physicians. I had to take on the responsibility of caring for my two younger siblings while my parents were busy with study, work, and dealing with our difficult financial situation. That struggle taught me invaluable lessons about the value of education, of striving for excellence, and of never accepting injustices. My parents taught me to speak up and advocate for the most vulnerable, who tend to be preyed on by the corrupt.

Inspired by my parents, I decided to seek our union’s help in making my job and the jobs of my colleagues more sustainable. I must confess that when I first discovered that the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills was a union property, I thought, wrongly, that the union, Unite Here Local 11, controlled workers and our jobs. But then I studied the union’s rules and our contract and met with union leaders, and soon realized that we workers were the union. We could engage with the union and one another to bring positive changes to our workplace.

Our union contract with the hotel expired on June 30, 2023. With negotiations failing and management handling meetings with bad faith, it was apparent that a strike was inevitable not just in our hotel but in hotels all over the city.

Unity was going to be key to our success. So while the hotel was providing conflicting misinformation and trying to convince us to resign our union memberships, I started a group chat for all Waldorf Astoria team members and union reps. The chat was crucial in allowing us to receive news and updates in real-time, and post images and videos. This information-sharing inspired much of our staff to become fired up and join the citywide union actions that became the largest hotel strike in modern U.S. history. From the beginning, we also had broad support among hotel workers and the public because our demands were based on “five pillars” of change that most people could agree on: a living wage increase, healthcare, humane staffing levels, pension increases, and union growth.

Going on my first strike was scary, empowering, sad, and beautiful. It was a shocking and jarring experience at first—we hadn’t planned to escalate things to this level, which meant risking retaliation. However, as time went on, I began to feel truly empowered and determined to win the fight for justice. The strike made me aware of the realities of my fellow Californians who work in hotels. Thousands of them suffer from homelessness, evictions, serious and expensive health issues, and other precarious financial circumstances.

Throughout the summer and into the fall, hundreds of hotel workers in Los Angeles went on strike in different locations at random times and for a random number of days. We went on strike twice at the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills, for a total of seven days. Our actions took place outside the hotel and in the lobby; it was impossible for guests to avoid us.

Workers striking at the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills. Courtesy of author.

We garnered an incredible amount of support from the public, including hotel regulars, clergy members, UPS workers, culinary workers, and people driving by and honking for us. Support also came from political and civil rights leaders—among them Tom Morello, former West Hollywood Mayor Sepi Shyne, Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman, U.S. Senator Laphonza Butler, State Senator Maria Elena Durazo (our former union leader), and most recently President Joe Biden in Nevada.

We also had to contend with extreme temperatures on the picket lines as well as verbal abuse from some angry patrons and local residents. Hotel managers installed hedges, fencing, and even cages to keep us further from the premises, and hired new security workers to intimidate us in the name of “safety.” Using an app called Instawork, they hired unqualified staff to replace us. At one point they deactivated our digital keyed access. We were lucky; other hotels were more punitive and resorted to violence.

Solidarity was clearly the path to victory. It was disappointing to see a few colleagues at hotels turn their backs on us, out of fear. It was also frustrating to ask for support from major public figures—like U.S. Representative Katie Porter, Governor Gavin Newsom, and Taylor Swift, who toured L.A. during the strike—and not get it.

But most importantly, the overwhelming majority of the union held, in no small part because of the women who represented a majority of the union in our ranks and our leadership. They never took “no” for an answer, and they lifted the rest of us up when we got tired or discouraged. And we kept achieving victories as hotels and the union began reaching agreements in the early fall.

Finally, in the early afternoon on Friday, December 8, I received a message from the director of Unite Here Local 11, Lorena Lopez, requesting a phone call with all the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills union leaders. We were about to begin our third strike at the Waldorf Astoria in advance of the Golden Globes Award nomination announcements at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on December 11. But when I got to the meeting, the feeling was of something bigger and more hopeful. I heard our director declare over speaker phone, “I have some important news to share with you. I want to let you know that I am so proud of you. You worked so hard, and your efforts paid off! Congratulations! The Waldorf has agreed to our five pillars. Congratulations, you won!”

We used our group chat to request every union member meet us at the famous Waldorf Ballroom. Once gathered, I was honored to deliver the good news to everyone as I held back tears of joy: “Thank you guys for being here. As you know, I’m Alaink, and we have been fighting to win a fair contract. We were already planning to go on strike Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. However, new developments have happened, and I am very happy to announce that we have WON!”

Suddenly, the entire ballroom was filled with cheers and applause and faces of relief, bringing many to tears. The strike is over at our hotel, but I feel profoundly changed and renewed. Striking was hard work. It brought unbearable stress and forced me to neglect the rest of my life—including my incredibly supportive husband. But the payoff was worth it.

We won a historic contract of a lifetime that will transform the entire hotel industry and uplift hard-working brown and Black men and women and other marginalized people who will finally get a chance to join the middle class. Housekeeping team members, cooks, and other non-tipped workers will receive wage hikes of $10 an hour over the term of the contract—a 40–50% increase in pay, half of which will come this year. Housekeeping workers at most hotels will earn $35 an hour by July 2027, and top cooks will earn $41 an hour. Tipped workers will see improvements like double-time pay for holidays, vacation, sick days, and increased shares of service charges. Automatic 20% gratuities at full-service restaurants will be 100% shared by staff. Our contract maintains health insurance in which workers pay no more than $20 per month for full family coverage.

We have bigger plans, too, including a new deal for the Olympics that includes family-sustaining jobs and affordable housing. I hope our success will embolden hotel workers around the country—and anyone who is facing injustices in the workplace. Remember to be courageous, to organize, to think big, and to lead with love, dignity, and conviction. The path to victory is only sure to those who do not give up, give in, or stay silent.

The post How We Won a Historic Contract for Hotel Workers appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’ve worked in the fields of the Salinas Valley since I was 18, tending grapes and picking broccoli.

Agricultural work has many contradictions. It is both steady and uncertain. I work constantly but don’t have one job. Instead, I work different jobs for different contractors during the picking season.

I could not have survived without doing this work, but sometimes I wonder how much longer I can survive doing it. Farmwork is getting easier in some ways, and harder in others.

I immigrated here from Guanajuato, Mexico, at 18 to find work and help support my large family. I had relatives in the Salinas Valley, and not long after I arrived, I met my husband, a Jalisco boy who also works in the fields. We had the first of our three children when I was 19 and soon settled in the small city of Greenfield, on U.S. 101, about 40 minutes south of Salinas.

When the kids were young, I tried to work less, skipping some seasons. But we needed the money, which meant more time away from them. Sometimes I found myself working 14 hours a day, six days a week—and getting paid not hourly, but by the box. I remember making just $1 for each box of broccoli I gathered and packed.

The work came with physical costs. I’d have pain in my back and neck and right arm. When I began working with grapes, I found, as most workers do, that I had to pull so hard on the grapevines that I would sometimes fall on my back. The pain could make it hard to sleep. Jorge is good at giving massages, but that isn’t always enough.

It was easy to get sick, especially since the companies didn’t provide gear for working in the wind and in the rain. I’d sometimes get nausea and headaches from the herbicides and insecticides. I believe that my work, including exposure to chemicals, contributed to the complications I experienced in my last pregnancy and to the health and development challenges of my youngest child.

Getting care for injuries and illness has always been very difficult. Companies didn’t offer sick days or leave days to go to the doctor or clinic if you were sick or hurt. And getting the right treatment might mean a trip up to Salinas.

Also, there were no medical benefits or healthcare coverage. My children, as native-born Americans, have always had their healthcare covered under Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program. But as an undocumented worker, I was not eligible for Medi-Cal. When I had to have a gallbladder operation, we were stuck with a hospital bill for $24,000 that we can’t pay.

Some, but not all, of these working conditions have improved in recent years, because of changes in the state laws and regulations for farmworkers.

The laws now require that we be paid hourly. With the higher state minimum wage, I make $16.50 per hour. We also get paid sick leave—at first, it was three days a year, but last fall, it was raised to five. And Jorge and I, like other undocumented people in California, were made eligible for Medi-Cal last year.

Our maximum hours a week are now 40. That means more time for family, for church, and for my volunteer work with Líderes Campesinas, which advocates for and organizes female farmworkers.

The trouble is that it’s often hard to get 40 hours of work these days. Sometimes I get 30 hours or less.

Together, my husband and I now earn $43,000 a year. That’s more than before. But the cost of living in California rises faster than our wages. We can’t come close to buying our home here in Monterey County, where even small houses cost $600,000 or more. And renting a three-bedroom house in Greenfield can cost $3,000 or more a month.

When all three children lived at home, we paid $2,800 to rent a three-bedroom. Now that our kids are growing up and moving out, we have a smaller place with two bedrooms for $1,600 a month.

You may have read about agricultural companies providing housing for workers. But that housing is almost always for guest workers who come here from Mexico or other countries under visas, stay for a few weeks or months, and then go home. I’ve never received any housing support.

Despite all these challenges, our lives have been blessed. I’ve always made enough money to send $200 to $300 a month to my mother. And we are so very proud of our three children.

Our older son, 26, graduated from Fresno State and is working in Monterey. Our 20-year-old daughter is entering her junior year at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Our 17-year-old son, soon to be a high school senior, is raising a prize pig that he will sell to help pay for college next year.

But we also feel frustrated at the obstacles to a better future.

My husband I have both tried to go to school. I’ve long wanted to become a teacher and work in early childhood education. I’ve taken some community college classes and even did some training. But I haven’t been able to finish a degree or get a job—because I’m undocumented. My husband, who wants to be an electrician, faces the same barriers.

The biggest thing this country could do for us would be to legalize our immigration status.

We have been living here, and paying taxes, our entire adult lives. We should be like anyone else—able to train for better jobs, collect unemployment when we lose our jobs, buy life insurance and better health insurance, and find a house that we can purchase.

Perhaps, someday soon, all of that will be possible.

The post California Farmworkers Stand on Uneven Ground appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the U.S., there is a chasm between what the labor laws say and what workers experience as their everyday realities. That’s because employment here is based on private contractual law, or agreements between two parties—and the deeply misguided assumption that those two parties have equal bargaining power.

We need to bridge that chasm. Doing so will require stronger unions; more aggressive legislation by Congress; more resources for, and enforcement by, local and federal agencies; and changes in our courts, which have been hostile to labor enforcement and unions.

Until all that happens, the best model we have for enforcing labor laws is in California.

You could call it the California Model of Co-Enforcement. Or you might call it the San Francisco Model, because that’s where it started. Whatever you call it, the idea is this: Since governments lack the capacity to enforce the laws by themselves, they must work in tandem with entities that have long histories of efforts to empower workers, like S.F.’s Chinese Progressive Association and Filipino Community Center.

Through co-enforcement, government agencies enable the worker centers to pursue the pay, rights, and fair treatment workers are entitled to under the law, but that they don’t always get in employer-friendly legal systems.

The co-enforcement model did not appear overnight. It took years of workers organizing, building, and winning to create it. Co-enforcement supplemented the state’s Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA), passed in 2003, that “gives workers a fighting chance in court” to confront their employers’ wrongdoing, according to a UCLA Labor Center report.

Now, the model is threatened. Business groups have bankrolled a ballot initiative that would all but eliminate workers’ rights under PAGA. If the initiative were to pass, it would deaden the state labor agency’s ability to contract with non-governmental entities or attorneys to enforce worker protections against violating employers. And that would not only threaten the progress workers have made under PAGA—it would threaten the co-enforcement model itself.

The story of the California Model starts at the turn of the 21st century, with the closure of San Francisco garment factories. Community organizations that had focused on organizing these factories, especially the Chinese Progressive Association, began reaching out to workers in other low-wage job sectors. Realizing the common struggles across trades, the city’s worker centers banded together and fomented a movement that led San Francisco voters to approve a local minimum wage law in 2003.

The minimum wage catalyzed San Francisco’s development into the site of the broadest range of worker protection laws of any municipality in the United States. Among the city’s worker mandates are paid sick days, a health care coverage mandate, protections for formerly incarcerated workers, secure scheduling, paid parental leave, pay equity, and time and space for lactation.

To enforce these new laws, San Francisco extended investigative and enforcement powers to its Office of Labor Standards Enforcement, known as OLSE. But even with a staff that had grown to two dozen, OLSE couldn’t investigate and enforce every violation of these labor standards. So, in 2006, the city established its novel model of co-enforcement, a series of formal collaborations with community partners that had a history of supporting workers, such as the Chinese Progressive Association.

The idea behind co-enforcement was simple. Community partners already served as important anchors for marginalized workers. Now, they could build on that past work and train those workers to identify, report, and fight back against wage theft and other violations. OLSE had a particular interest in empowering low-wage, immigrant, and limited-English-proficiency workers to target their efforts in communities where wage theft is most likely to occur.

As OLSE created and boosted funding for these contracts with community partners, the initiative became known as the “community collaborative.” I was once involved in overseeing these contracts and the network of partnerships. The partners included the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, Dolores Street Community Services (which had a long history of assisting refugees, homeless people, AIDS patients and LGBT people), Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus, Young Workers United, La Raza Centro Legal (a half-century old advocate for the Bay Area’s Latinos), and the Filipino Community Center, which had been founded in 2004 to support Filipino airport screeners who had been laid off.

One of the victories that emerged from San Francisco’s co-enforcement model was a $4.25 million settlement with the popular dim sum restaurant Yank Sing, which was forcing workers to work 10-plus hour days without breaks, stealing tips from workers, and belittling an otherwise vulnerable workforce almost every day. With help from the Chinese Progressive Association, Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus, and UNITE HERE Local 2, which assisted with strategic research, the workers not only won unpaid wages but also achieved a workplace transformation for the restaurant’s nearly 300 employees.

The changes included meal and rest breaks, paid sick days, wages higher than the local minimum (including a 5% raise for non-tipped workers), non-mandated holiday pay and vacation pay, full health coverage with no deductibles, and the right to take up to four weeks of approved time off without risking their jobs—something many workers needed in order to visit families in China. The settlement even included an apology.

Since then, San Francisco’s co-enforcement approach has spawned imitators. Beginning in 2013, several other cities (among them New York City, Seattle, Oakland, San Jose, and Emeryville) developed offices similar to OLSE, and seeded co-enforcement partnerships with local community organizations.

In 2016, the state got in on the co-enforcement action. The California Labor Commissioner’s Office—then led by the pioneering labor lawyer Julie Su, who is today the acting U.S. labor secretary—formed the California Strategic Enforcement Partnership. Rather than wait for the long and often futile process of filing complaints, and conducting hearings and trying to collect judgments for unpaid wages, the state began using co-enforcement to target wage theft in six low-wage industries: agriculture, car washes, construction, janitorial, residential home care, and restaurants.

The state partnered with the National Employment Law Project and 14 workers’ rights and legal advocacy organizations. Among the initiative’s most publicized successes were enforcement actions for harsh treatment and illegally low pay at the Los Angeles-area car washes.

This new model of workers’ rights enforcement has made California a labor enforcement laboratory, and at the right time. As other major California cities have followed San Francisco’s lead—passing minimum wage laws and other worker protections and supporting enforcement—they have empowered workers, influenced industry practices, and found ways to build a more sustainable enforcement system throughout the state.

Co-enforcement is necessary because of weak federal labor laws, and dangerously low rates of unionization. (One study by the Economic Policy Institute concluded that less than 2% of the nearly $50 billion in wages stolen annually is ever recovered by workers.) The co-enforcement models have inspired other vehicles for worker empowerment.

When the pandemic hit, it was the S.F. co-enforcement model that inspired the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency (LWDA) to partner with 61 community organizations throughout the state and create the COVID-19 Workplace Outreach Project (CWOP). This government-community partnership deployed “trusted messengers” to those frontline workers, to ensure the safety, health, and well-being of all citizens. Similarly, the Domestic Worker Rights Education and Outreach Program (DWEOP) ensures that housekeepers and nannies—workers who unfortunately do not enjoy the right to unionize—nevertheless can be educated about and trained in their labor rights and their employers’ responsibilities.

The co-enforcement model has some challenges. Building relationships between workers and the officials of government agencies—both of whom are busy working, and not in the same places—can be hard. Government procedures that require confidentiality can be difficult to square with the community’s desire for transparency. But the deeper the co-enforcement model has taken root, the better the outcomes that have emerged—for business, consumers, the agency, and for workers themselves.

There have been many promising lessons. One is that such collaborations render government officials more knowledgeable about labor violations, and sophisticated in their approach to enforcement. The second is that the state agency can only fulfill its mission with the support of community partners (which is why the November 2024 ballot initiative to gut the Private Attorneys General Act is such a threat). The most important aspect of a co-enforcement model is that it enables an organized and informed workforce to demand and attain compliance with the labor standards to which they are entitled under law.

Co-enforcement provides direct connection, funding, and legitimacy that can be game-changing for empowering workers. It also provides enforcement agencies with a trove of new education and connections to the underground economy. Co-enforcement is a win-win-win for workers, for community organizations, and for government agencies seeking effective and efficient ways to enforce laws in the low-wage sectors.

We need this California model of win-win-win to go national.

The post How San Francisco Became a Labor Enforcement Laboratory appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

By all accounts, the 29-year-old woman I interviewed was a successful freelancer. She described herself as an “arts worker able to support myself in New York.” When the pandemic started, she lost all of her gigs, but she was established enough that one of her clients gave her two weeks of severance.

As a member of what I have termed the “officially unemployed,” she qualified for, and received, unemployment insurance. The stability of weekly unemployment benefits was a stark contrast to the usual volatility of her career. It raised uncomfortable questions.

“Why am I doing this? Why shouldn’t I get a real job? That has benefits and other nice things that I can rely on, that I won’t have to gig work for the rest of my life,” she told me. “I imagine a real job being a 9 to 5, or something that’s regular and consistent, that has benefits that are connected to it, and maybe one day you’ll retire from it, and they’ll give you money for that. I don’t even know. I can’t even fathom it.”

For years, it’s been clear that the idea of what constitutes a “good job” is changing. For the baby boomers’ generation, it often involved a salary, a private office, paid vacation, regular raises, health insurance, and a 401k with a decent company match. For the parents of baby boomers—aka the “greatest generation”—a good job offered a pension instead of a 401(k), and crucially, was enough to support a family on one income.

Academics generally define a good job as one that pays well, offers opportunities for advancement, and allows for control over one’s work environment. Good jobs allowed workers to work from home during the pandemic and continue to offer remote opportunities. Bad jobs offer low wages, little in the way of benefits or opportunities for advancement, no autonomy, and no control over termination.

Yet, as I note in my new book, Side Hustle Safety Net: How Vulnerable Workers Survive Precarious Times, when many workers dare to dream about a better tomorrow, they don’t talk about a good job or a bad job. They just want a “real job.”

A real job can be a good job, but it doesn’t have to be. As one gig worker in my interviews defined it, a real job includes “full-time hourly work” that offers “benefits” and “more financial security.” As another worker explained, a traditional job meant “I’m going to get either the same amount of pay every week or just know that I have the same hours every week.”

The hundreds of gig workers I’ve interviewed over the last eight years utilize numerous synonyms in discussing a real job: “proper job,” “traditional job,” “a jobby career,” “a real person job,” and “a big girl job.” For all of the headlines proclaiming that the gig economy is the future of work, the fact is that a large majority of workers who have been doing this work—including freelancers and gig-platform workers—want full-time work in their future. A 2019 survey conducted by Axios and Survey Monkey found that 79 percent of respondents would rather have one stable full-time job than multiple jobs with the option to choose how and when they want to work.

As a 23-year-old New Yorker who had worked as a personal assistant, dog walker, and babysitter explained, “I don’t want to wake up one day and be 40 years old and still doing those types of jobs. I still want to have something proper going for myself.”

This lack of “real work” is not limited to rideshare drivers and food delivery workers, either. It is increasingly found in other fields thanks to shadow gig platforms that offer business-to-business staffing. Instawork places workers in 1099 jobs in restaurants, while AllShifts focuses on gig-based nursing jobs, and Roadie offers store delivery work. Even professional jobs aren’t free from app-based gig work thanks to Graphite, Catalant, and Business Talent Group, platforms that are used by almost all Fortune 500 companies, according to the Harvard Business Review.

For companies, the benefit of gig work is that it allows them to outsource risk to workers. Workers take on the risk of slow periods where a lack of demand can leave them scrambling for income, the risk of a platform “deactivating” them without warning or recourse, and the risk of occupational injury from hours spent driving or working in unsafe places. Workers also face the risk of sexual harassment or otherwise uncomfortable experiences with clients who think anything goes behind closed doors. And workers have found themselves hired for scam tasks or driving passengers engaged in criminally questionable activities.

In addition to these risks, for many workers, piecing together little jobs is not financially sustainable. Thirty-two percent of gig workers report it is very difficult to cover their expenses and pay their bills compared to 18% of W2 service sector workers.

There are efforts to make gig work into better gig work, such as New York City’s minimum wage for delivery workers, but few efforts to turn gig work into real work.

One exception is the California law known as AB-5, which required that workers be classified as employees if their work was a regular part of the company’s business. The goal of the law’s authors was that employers would reduce their reliance on independent contractors or 1099 workers, and instead classify those workers as employees—thus turning gig work into real work. But a myriad of exceptions managed to undermine the goal of the law. Then, Lyft and other gig economy giants spent $200 million convincing voters to adopt Proposition 22, which exempted platform-based gig workers from AB-5 rules (at least until the California Supreme Court rules on the legality of their exemptions).

Faced with these challenges, many gig workers attempt to create “real job” security and income stability through “polyemployment,” meaning working multiple jobs. Taking on multiple part-time or gig-based jobs is a way for workers to ensure that they always have some money coming in. Indeed, a recent report from H&R Block notes that millennials—who are now between 28 and 43 years old—average two jobs each, with “nearly one in three intending to work for an app-based company.”

But any temporary stability and security offered by such polyemployment is often a mirage. Job hunting continues to be a daily, if not hourly, activity as workers wait to be summoned by platform algorithms whose lack of clarity and transparency means that workers don’t know if work today means work tomorrow. Meanwhile, any technical difficulties they experience with the apps can lead to income losses.

There are solutions. One of the problems with AB-5 was that it was limited to California. Employers could—and did—simply shift their workforce to other states. A national equivalent to AB-5 would circumvent that option.

Another option would be to penalize companies when more than 20% of their workforce is classified as independent contractors. Companies that have frequent layoffs are required to contribute more to state unemployment insurance coffers. Why not do something similar for companies that rely more on gig workers? Gig work might not be exactly as precarious as unemployment, but it’s close.

Likewise, 401(k) plans are mandated by the IRS to be tested annually to ensure that they’re not just a wealth-building tool for the highest-compensated employees, but are beneficial to all employees. Similar tests—comparing the ratio of gig workers to employees—could be required to ensure that real jobs are available to everyone who works there.  If we don’t allow companies to hoard retirement savings for their senior employees, why should we allow them to hoard the “real jobs” themselves?

As for the unemployed arts worker in the opening vignette? She’s now a staff member at a local nonprofit. She has health insurance, paid time off, and a 401(k) with a match. She was one of the lucky ones. She got a real job. But she still freelances on the side.

The post Can a Side Hustle Be a ‘Proper’ Job? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Rideshare driving can be the right job for the right person, but you should also know the drawbacks.

On and off for nearly 10 years I have been a rideshare driver for both Uber and Lyft here in Hollywood. I’ve worked early mornings, late nights, and around concert venues. I’ve even driven passengers around Coachella a couple of times.

I have seen many changes from both companies in that time, along with new laws that have drastically changed what picking up passengers in one’s personal vehicle is all about.

For example, it wasn’t long ago that drivers had no idea where the trip was going until the passenger was in the car and we started the ride on our app. Not only that, but canceling rides and declining rides frequently could get you tossed off the platform.

Today, the driver has more control. You can see where the trip is headed before you even accept a ride, and you can decline as many as you want with no blowback.

This is not because the companies took drivers’ needs into consideration. It’s because, in their quest to prove to regulators that drivers are not their employees, they were forced to stop acting like employers. If we’re independent contractors, that means they can’t punish us for when or where we work.

Never think for a minute that the giants care all that much about drivers, our safety, or our financial well-being. As drivers’ earnings continue to decline while earnings for the companies go up—as noted in a recent Forbes article—neither of the rideshare giants have shown much concern for drivers. Keep in mind that both companies have aggressively and publicly been working on ways to use robot cars to replace humans.

Most drivers last 90 days or fewer. It has been like that for years, and neither company seems interested in improving that churn because every day new drivers sign up. But that shouldn’t deter you.

One of the top reasons drivers love the gig is because you have the freedom to work when you want, and the ability to drive where you want to go.

Let’s say you’re a driver and you want to go up to Santa Barbara this weekend. Conceivably you could only accept trips heading north and get paid for the journey. Obviously, it will take longer to get to Santa Barbara than if you were driving just yourself. But the rides will more than cover the gas you’ll use, and you might even have some good conversations. Usually, passengers are wonderful.

Of the numerous tips I have for driver colleagues, the first is to be prepared. Have water and snacks for yourself. Have a phone charger that works on multiple devices—not just iPhones—for passengers. Have $20 in ones and fives in case someone wants to tip you in cash because you’re incredible and won them over.

Store a towel, barf bags, and a warm jacket in your clean trunk. Keep your gas tank at least half full, because you never know when someone might want to go far, quickly, in an offer you can’t refuse.

In over 8,000 trips I’ve driven, I’ve only had to stop for gas once. It wasn’t just embarrassing because it made me look unprofessional in front of the passenger. I learned that if you stop the car for more than a few minutes, Uber will call and text both you and your passenger to make sure neither of you are being assaulted. That’s well-intentioned, but annoying for everyone.

Avoid picking up people at bars or big parties. One of the worst things that can happen is that a drunk passenger gets sick. There are plenty of folks who need rides in your city and more than enough drivers. Choose wisely. If they come stumbling down the driveway needing assistance to stand upright, do not feel guilty jetting off before they get too close to the car.

Have a dash cam. Sometimes driving is wonderful and funny, but sometimes it’s scary and unsafe. Yes, these companies know where you and your passenger are, but in the heat of the moment you are nevertheless alone. Even if the dash cam only has a minute of video and audio, it will help if you need evidence that you did nothing wrong.

Meanwhile, you don’t really know the identity of that person in the back seat. Neither Uber nor Lyft require passengers to use their real names as their display names on the app, and “J” or “Baby” or “Junior” won’t be much help if you need to talk to the authorities after an altercation and they ask you the passenger’s name.

Watch informative YouTube channels like “The Rideshare Guy” and be sure to check out “Show Me The Money Club” videos where two experts discuss strategies and changes each week.

Take notes at the end of each day, and take a photo of your odometer/trip meter so at the end of the month you can write down how many miles you drove in a little journal for your taxes. You can write off a lot of things while driving (like your cellphone, music streaming subscriptions you play for the passengers, and water you might provide) but you definitely want proof, especially for mileage.

Another important tip is, ironically, to forget about tips. Passengers do not tip often, well, reliably, or in a predictable manner. Over the years, Uber has gone from encouraging passengers not to tip and pretending the tip was included to reluctantly adding a tip button to the screen.

It is so clear that if they are not getting a cut of something, they have zero desire to encourage it even if it means rewarding their best drivers. Uber and Lyft arrange billions of trips a year, but they have yet to show they care about the quality of those trips.

But you can still care. Have a clean car: Go to a car wash frequently and take a vacuum to the carpets, seats, and trunk. Have hand sanitizer for both you and your passengers.

Another thing to do is confirm with the passenger where the trip is going. You can do it casually as part of the conversation, but you need this info because it also confirms that the correct person is in your car. Yours might not be the only white Prius outside the Hollywood Bowl, and you don’t want the wrong person to put in their ear pods and fall asleep, only to leave you both very sad when you discover a half-hour later that you are far from where they wanted to be.

Final tip: I don’t talk about politics, sex, religion, tips, or drugs. Most trips are less than 30 minutes long. If they want to talk, let them do most of it. Talking about oneself is most people’s favorite thing to do. You’ll be shocked and delighted by what these strangers will tell you if you let them.

No matter where you are driving, you have a great opportunity to get paid to see parts of your city that you’ve never seen and to hear stories from the mouths of beautiful human beings who, collectively, have traveled the globe and have ended up with you. Let them sing their songs.

Which has been known to happen—literally—on some of the best rides I’ve had.

The post Tips and Tricks From an Uber Driver appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

During the past decade, California’s prison system has undergone a whirlwind of change. In part, this reshaping has come in response to federal court orders to reduce prison overcrowding and improve unsatisfactory living conditions.

At the same time, initiatives by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), the state legislature, and voters have gone into effect that prioritize prisoner rehabilitation. Their impact has been especially profound for prisoners serving life sentences, including me. Suddenly, many lifers have become eligible to appear before the parole board decades sooner than their sentences allowed.

That has shortened the time and space between inmates and the world of jobs and careers outside the walls.

The success of these initiatives has created momentum that is shrinking the space further. Under a mandate to create more rehabilitative opportunities for prisoners who would be released sooner, CDCR has allowed some of us lifers to leave high security yards like the Level IV, 180-design facilities—a design that allows a 180-degree view of all cells and dayrooms from the prison control room—where I’ve spent most of my time.

If you’re a lifer with good behavior, you are more likely to be an override transfer to a lower-level yard. Getting to a lower-level yard means access to far more programming.

In prison, “programming” refers to the rehabilitative opportunities available to prisoners at a facility. Much programming involves employment. CDCR offers job-training courses under the Office of Correctional Education. These so-called CTE (Career and Technical Education) programs include courses in construction, business, energy, information technology, public services, manufacturing, and transportation. The courses are aligned with industry certifications, state licensing requirements and apprenticeship programs.

Inmates can also get jobs and develop occupational skills through the Prison Industry Authority (PIA). The PIA operates as a business venture on a profit-loss basis, producing a wide range of goods and supplying various services within California prisons. It seeks to create working conditions for inmates much like those of private enterprise and to help inmates develop productive work habits that they can use upon release.

Many inmates covet PIA jobs due to the training and apprenticeship opportunities afforded there, and the higher prison wages. This “higher” is relative: PIA jobs range from 35 cents to $1 per hour, while most non-PIA jobs pay from 8 to 37 cents an hour—though those numbers are supposed to go up soon.

I arrived to the CDCR in August 2001. Over the next several years, my misconduct, lack of personal accountability and unwillingness to rehabilitate myself kept me housed on some of California’s highest-security facilities, where extended cell confinement, violence, and limited programming are the norm. Not until March 2022 did I set foot in a lower-security yard.

Having dug myself into a hole during my first 15 years in prison, it took me nearly 6 years of disciplinary-free behavior and positive programming participation to earn the behavioral override that sent me to the lower-level Ironwood State Prison.

That means I have little experience with CTE programs. In 2008, while housed in Kern Valley State Prison, I was assigned to office services and earned certificates for proficiency in several Microsoft programs, filing and records management, and keyboarding.

My lack of experience is not unusual. Very few inmates I know who spent time on 180-design yards received job training there, let alone gained an industry certification in a vocation. Instead, many 180-facilities followed a similar pattern: CTE courses might be offered for a few years, but then they were shut down. A course might resume but would rarely gain traction, or last long enough, to train meaningful portions of 180-yard populations; other courses were never restarted or replaced.

There were often justifiable reasons that courses were shut down. At some yards, the levels of violence led to months or even years of lockdowns. Maintaining CTE staff and resources was often impossible given budget pressures. And lifers too often viewed the courses as pointless given their lack of hope for ever being released. Under such conditions, CTE programs had little realistic chance for lasting success.

But now, times have changed. Sentencing reforms have restored hope for release to many lifers, giving them incentive to participate in programming. Violence also has declined on 180-design yards. Lockdowns continue, but not at the same frequency or duration.

One big contributor to this atmosphere of change has been the introduction of self-help classes. There are now numerous weekly classes available on topics like addiction, gang recovery and victim impact. The classes emphasize personal accountability, empathy, remorse, insight and healthy emotional expression.

The classes can help inmates deal with perhaps the biggest barrier to change: uncertainty. What will my change look like? What will it mean for my life? What will it mean for me as a person? These are the difficult questions every prisoner seeking to fully rehabilitate himself must figure out, come to terms with, and commit to making real.

When I decided to accept change in 2016, I did not have the answer to any of those questions. By chance, self-help classes started on my yard later that year. But given their high demand and the length of my sentence, I was unable to enroll at that time. By 2018, however, I was participating in several self-help classes that began the process of clarifying how change would manifest in my life.

Then I got a PIA job and received job training during the pandemic—opportunities which played a major role in reinforcing my commitment to rehabilitation and expanding my perspective on change. Being an offender custodian—my PIA job—is not a glamorous job. I worked in the facility clinic and mostly cleaned bathrooms, holding tanks, and offices. Yet I also learned chemical handling and safety, floor care, and proper cleanup for blood and bodily fluids. I earned a certificate and money to pay down the restitution I owe for my crimes.

I was extremely fortunate to land the PIA job.  In many situations, inmates like myself serving life without parole are automatically excluded. Even when it is allowed, there is still a 25 percent cap on the number of lifers in an institution who can hold PIA jobs.

The job complemented my self-help work. It taught me skills I would have never learned otherwise, gave me a sense of responsibility and normalcy, and allowed me to feel pride for doing something productive. It enabled me to exercise the new identity I was working to create.

About seven months after arriving to D-facility (a Level III yard) in Ironwood, I was assigned to auto mechanics. It was a truly hands-on CTE course. I had access to torque wrenches, drills, a wheel-alignment machine, crank cases, cars that actually run, and so much else one would find in a mechanic’s garage.

It had been a long journey. It took me nearly seven years on 180 yards before I was assigned to a vocational class, and another 14 years and that transfer to Ironwood to be assigned to my second such class.

It need not be that way for others. Now, prison conditions on 180 yards pose far fewer problems to the operation of CTE courses compared to the past. With self-help classes available, inmates will also have far more opportunities to begin the rehabilitative process. Plus, tablets are in every California prison now and provided free of charge, allowing inmates to connect to online resources.

CTE courses combine hands-on training with textbook assignments. For inmates on 180 yards enrolled in CTE courses, the textbooks could be downloaded onto their tablets to keep course learning going in the event of a lockdown. Revising the current CDCR policy, which currently allows only 10% of a CTE course to include lifers, should be a priority in relation to Level IV yards.

Deeper meaning can be found in job training classes beyond the skills and certification gained. Where prisoner rehabilitation is concerned, it can be the light that shows the best path forward. The CDCR should do more to make such programs a permanent part of its rehabilitative vision at every level of the prison system.

The post With Sentencing Reforms, the Distance Between Prison and the Job Market Is Shrinking appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When you’re working with men and women coming out of prison to find meaningful career trajectories, it’s important to ask them about their prison experience.

Far too often, formerly incarcerated people don’t appreciate the value of their prison journey.

They will tell you, “All I did was work on a yard crew,” without recognizing that such work might prepare them for everything from construction to landscaping to property management.

They will tell you, “All I did was work in the kitchen,” without recognizing that they might have learned enough to get a job in food services, or open their own restaurant.

I work as the Southern California executive director for Defy Ventures, a national non-profit that offers both prison-based and community-based entrepreneurship, personal development, and career readiness programs. We call the people we serve—people who are on a journey out of prison—“entrepreneurs in training,” or EITs for short.

And one big advantage our clients have is the time they spent in prison. The public doesn’t understand it, but prisons offer opportunities. There are leadership positions. Men can push forward independent initiatives. I started a “Grief and Loss” group, and helped facilitate numerous other groups while I was inside.

While in prison, I actually had quite a bit of time to work on myself, in a lot of groups that I was involved in, and also through a lot of books that I had the opportunity to read. People out here have not had the same chance to work on themselves as those who have been incarcerated.

So, as I tell our EITs, all the work you’ve done on yourself can be the thing that sets you apart—even your superpower.

If you think about your prison experience this way, there are opportunities out there for you. One young man I worked with had learned how to install and fix the sprinkler system and mowers while working in the prison yard, and had realized that he was mechanically inclined. We had a CEO of an electric bus company who was supportive of hiring formerly incarcerated people, and was eager to find people with mechanical skills. The young man not only got hired—he also received equity in the company.

I know firsthand about the transition from prison to working life. While serving a life sentence for shooting a man to death when I was a gang member in Southern California in 1999, I spent time at four state prisons in California. At Solano State Prison, my last stop before I was paroled, one of my jobs was to clean the hospital. That proved to be one stroke of good fortune. The other was that I participated in a pilot program of the Defy Ventures program that I now get to help lead.

Once I got out, my brother gave me a job helping with paperwork at his real estate firm so I’d have an income. I knew that real estate wasn’t a long-term opportunity for me, because, as a convicted felon, the state wouldn’t license me. But I did notice that the janitor firm they used wasn’t cleaning the building the way it should be cleaned.

I talked to the building owner and offered my services. I used to run a hospital cleaning crew up north, I explained. I went on godaddy.com to reserve a name and web address for my company, Jade Janitors. I had to get my business license and find business insurance. Then I gave the guy a quote, and was hired the same week. I eventually had six employees, four of them formerly incarcerated.

I didn’t stop there. I helped my family start a restaurant. Within 18 months of leaving prison, I was both working there and at Jade Janitors. Then, in 2017, an opportunity to join the post-release services at Defy Ventures opened up, and I took it, while still holding onto the cleaning business.

I also wrote a book, which was published in 2020. It’s called Sparrow in the Razor Wire. The title is a reference to a moment in prison when I noticed a sparrow, badly injured because it had landed on razor wire, singing its song. From that moment, prison did not feel like punishment anymore—it became a place where I could remake myself into someone better.

We try to create that same feeling with our training. Defy Ventures’ core program inside prisons is called “The CEO of Your Life.” It’s a seven-month program with more than 2,000 pages of curriculum, four books, and twice-weekly facilitations for five hours. There’s another five hours of homework on top of that. At the halfway point of the program, we have a coaching day, where we bring in volunteers from the business world. Finally, the culmination is a business-pitch competition and graduation ceremony where everyone receives a certificate from Claremont Graduate University’s Drucker School of Management.

In this process, we are trying to shift two mindsets: the mindsets of people with criminal histories, and the mindsets of businesspeople. Each needs to recognize the opportunities in the other.

We—the formerly incarcerated—still encounter barriers in business and work. For example, during the pandemic, Jade Janitors lost 70 percent of its contracts because no one was paying to have their offices cleaned anymore. I started filling out a PPP loan for the business. But then I got to question five, which asked me if I was on parole. I answered yes, and the survey wouldn’t let me continue.

Why should my team be discriminated against for something I did over 20 years ago?

I can’t remember exactly how CBS Money Watch found out about what happened with Jade Janitors. The next thing I knew I was hearing from CNN and being contacted by the ACLU. After that Defy Ventures and the ACLU sued the Small Business Administration in a class action lawsuit on behalf of all small business owners with criminal histories. The application got changed, and I was able to qualify for the PPP loan.

Another big issue in California is licensing.

One of our graduates worked in prison as an optician, making glasses. But when he went to work at Costco and had to get a license, his crime from 30 years ago came up.

Another EIT who found an excellent job was performing well, but the company algorithm began saying he had to be fired because he was showing up late twice a month. The problem was that his parole agent would call him in the morning and insist on meeting right that day.

In that case, we were able to talk to management and explain the need for flexibility.

This is why it’s important for the formerly incarcerated to make sure they value themselves. Without knowing your own strengths, you can’t advocate for yourself and your worth.

The post Prison Time Can Be Your Superpower in Business appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What’s a good job for formerly incarcerated people?

When people in the corrections field are asked that question, you often hear this mantra: Get a job, any job. The idea is that work will reduce your risk of going back behind bars. As a result, people coming out of prison feel pushed to take crappy jobs that have difficult schedules, low pay, no benefits, or poor working conditions.

That’s bad advice. In my research with other scholars, we’ve found that formerly incarcerated people just churn through jobs like that. Indeed, taking a bad job doesn’t protect you from recidivism or the other struggles too often faced by the formerly incarcerated. In one study, looking at formerly incarcerated young men in Michigan, over one-quarter of people coming out of prison experienced persistent desperation and struggle, including periods of homelessness; another one-third had intermittent periods of desperation, and struggle for survival.

Instead, we need to think of work for the formerly incarcerated the same way that we think of jobs for anyone without a lot of recent work experience or education. That means formerly incarcerated people need the same things from jobs that everyone does: a living wage, a job ladder to allow for the acquisition of skills and promotion, and stability, especially in scheduling.

When you understand this, you can see why we’ve made only slow progress in employment for formerly incarcerated people.

There have been some gains. Largely due to a tight labor market, we’re getting more incarcerated people in the door. Employers need more workers, so some businesses have been more open to hiring people with criminal records. Also, governments and nonprofits are offering more reintegration programs that include job training.

Changes in laws may have helped, too—like “ban the box” laws that prevent employers from asking job applicants on their applications whether they’ve ever been convicted of a felony. These laws were a response to a surge in harsh sentencing laws and mass incarceration during the 1980s and 1990s.

But “banning the box” isn’t enough. First, employers can still conduct background checks—they just need to wait to do so until later in the hiring process, usually once a provisional hiring decision has been made. Second, when formerly incarcerated people do get jobs, they can have trouble holding onto them. This is partly because formerly incarcerated people often end up in the least desirable jobs, which experience considerable turnover among all employees, not just those with criminal records. The formerly incarcerated often face other barriers to stable employment, too, like housing insecurity, health problems, and parole supervision by a punitive justice system.

And even when formerly incarcerated employees manage to settle in and succeed in their jobs, moving up is tricky. Going up a job ladder is difficult for people with criminal records. Indeed, even moving laterally or diagonally can be challenging within a company, with different bosses having different attitudes. It’s even harder when getting ahead means changing firms. The standards and scrutiny of a candidate with a record are different for entry-level jobs than for supervisory positions. Sometimes, skills training or licensing programs, which people must complete to advance, maintain prohibitions on those with criminal records.

Changes in corporate structure also make upward mobility difficult. It used to be more common for people to rise from the entry-level to upper management of a company. Today’s most profitable and dynamic companies often rely on high-skill or high-education workers. Formerly incarcerated people who work at such companies might well start out working for contractors, as janitors or cafeteria workers. What is their path to becoming employees and rising?

Companies need to do more to support formerly incarcerated workers and create internal job ladders. There are also many ways public policy can assist formerly incarcerated people in their job paths and career trajectories. California’s openness in this area makes it an important laboratory.

I’ve seen possibilities in the research I’ve done with other scholars, based on huge data sets on thousands of young men in the state of Michigan during the 2000s. We tracked these young men for many years after they left prison.

Our findings suggest that California, and other states open to reform, can help in many ways: through greater housing supports (to prevent residential stability), through mental health and substance abuse supports, and through changes to harmful parole systems that often prioritize surveillance and punishment over reintegration. Indeed, my research suggests that people who do best after leaving prison combine multiple sources of support—including employment, public benefits, and support from their social networks and families.

States can make parole less intrusive and more flexible, to meet the needs of workers. Too often, parole involves surveillance and mandatory check-ins that can disrupt job schedules. It also can impose short-term custodial sanctions—like being sent back to jail temporarily—that cost the formerly incarcerated their jobs, housing, and income.

California and other states also could do more to integrate formerly incarcerated people into higher education. Formerly incarcerated people understand the importance of education for success in the labor market. In our Michigan study, we found that more than one-quarter of the young men enrolled in college sometime after leaving prison.

Higher education doesn’t just help with employment. It provides intellectual development, opportunities to establish pro-social peer groups, new social identities, and a sense of belonging and purpose. Research shows it also reduces the likelihood of recidivism.

Changes being made within prisons provide new reasons to be optimistic. Incarcerated students are now eligible for Pell grants from the federal government, making it possible for community colleges and other post-secondary institutions to create new college and training programs in prison. And organizations like the Petey Greene Program, where I serve on the board, are pioneering new educational programs to help those serving time in prisons and jails prepare for college-level study.

When they come home from prison, formerly incarcerated students need more support services, such as academic and financial counseling to succeed, just like other low-income and first-generation students. Colleges should also open eligibility for campus housing or work-study programs, which sometimes bar students with records. Community colleges could help by incorporating more job skills into classes and integrating paid internships since formerly incarcerated students often have to support themselves and their families while they go to school. Also, parole should treat college attendance like employment, making parole less onerous and shorter for people who complete degrees or certificates.

Making such commitments will enrich colleges and universities. At UC Berkeley, where I teach, the Berkeley Underground Scholars, an organization of students incarcerated or impacted by the justice system, have excelled in academics and leadership. More universities have begun similar programs for formerly incarcerated students.

The goal of all such policies is to help formerly incarcerated people find the right job, and not have to settle for just any job.

The post People Coming Out of Prison Need Good Jobs, Too appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I found out about the restaurant from my brother, who was supposed to work there but had another job. It was only going to be for one day but the owner asked if I could work all week. After that, she hired me and I started working with her regularly as a prep cook in her San Francisco restaurant.

At first, the owner was kind, and there weren’t any issues. But, after about a year of working with her, I noticed things changing. She would yell at me for nothing. There were times when I didn’t receive my breaks and I had been working all day.

Then, she stopped paying us.

That was hard. But trying to get wages that are stolen from you turns out to be even harder.

Initially, the owner started delaying our checks. Supposedly, she was going to give them to us on Mondays, then she changed it to Wednesdays and then to Fridays. Then she started saying, “I’ll pay you the next week,” but it didn’t happen. Still, she kept saying that until it accumulated.

My co-workers and I—there were four of us in the kitchen—kept asking her for our payments and she kept saying she would pay us but she never did.

I thought about leaving but it was the pandemic and there wasn’t much work available, so I stayed. But the whole situation was very stressful. I was very frustrated because, if I already worked for the money, why was I not getting paid?

In October 2021 all of us workers decided we’d had enough. We joined together and told the owner that if the checks did not arrive that day, we would not show up for work. She still did not respond. At this point she stopped coming to the restaurant. At one point, she promised to send the checks with someone else, but we never received them.

We called her and her husband and they didn’t answer us. At one point, the owner’s husband offered to pay a portion of what was owed to us but we declined. We wanted to be paid in full and we were not willing to negotiate that. The owner owes me $12,157.90 in wages, plus penalties for not paying me when I was working for her.

That was when she closed the location, without notice, in December 2021. We kept trying to contact her but neither she nor her husband responded.

It affected me greatly because it was the last few months of the year. I got depressed, I got frustrated, my blood pressure went up, I couldn’t sleep. I was very angry with the owner.

That year was the saddest Christmas I ever had. Christmas without money is very sad. It’s a time of year when you try to send a little extra money back home. I’m 34 years old now. And, in my 10 years of living in the United States, that was the first time I was not able to send a dollar back home to Guatemala.

I send money to my sisters and grandparents, who raised me. I fully support them and the money I send is for everything they need—but in 2021, I couldn’t. My good friend had to lend me money just to be able to settle my bills. I couldn’t do anything and I felt tied by the hands.

My co-workers and I kept looking for someone to help us. We didn’t know what to do. We went to local organizations that can help workers, but they were closed due to COVID-19. Eventually, I came across a church and that’s where someone gave me the phone number for Trabajadores Unidos Workers United.

TUWU, as it’s known, is a worker center, funded by grants and grassroots donations. It finds itself at the intersection of economic justice and immigrant rights—all while holding companies and bosses accountable.

A TUWU organizer talked to me that same day I first called. My co-workers and I were able to share our situation. In time, TUWU helped teach us how to organize.

TUWU helped me prepare a case seeking the wages stolen from me. I filed the case with the San Francisco office of the state’s Labor Commission in February 2022. I wish I could tell you that my case was quickly processed and that I got the money I was owed.

But that’s not how things work.

The Labor Commission, at least its office in San Francisco, has huge backlogs of cases. So, the only thing I’ve received since my filing is the news that the commission has approved my case for a hearing.

That’s right—all I know is that I’ll have a hearing, someday. I haven’t received a date for the hearing. I haven’t been informed if the commission will investigate my claim. This is not uncommon. It typically takes years to receive the money lost in wage theft cases in California.

So, I don’t know if I’ll ever be paid the money I’m owed. But I do know that I’m not going to sit and wait in line for my case to be heard.

I’m continuing to fight for the restaurant owner to pay me back. It’s not easy. She continues to hide from us, even though she still owns a pop-up restaurant in San Francisco, and sometimes appears on TV cooking shows.

Since I became a member of TUWU, we’ve had many meetings and tried many different strategies on how to make the owner accountable. I’m hopeful that some of those will work.

I also learned the word “organize” at TUWU. Along with the word, I’ve learned that, since getting justice takes years, it’s important to organize other workers so that they are aware of their rights and how to move quickly when an employer doesn’t honor those rights.

Now, I know how to advocate and organize with my co-workers. I also feel like a part of the community now and I am able to support other workers experiencing the same situation.

It’s still very discouraging. But I hear from other workers who have had cases with the Labor Commissioner’s Office and eventually had their stolen wages paid.

If I get paid, or I should say when I get paid, I’m going to send money to my grandparents and sisters. I will also save the rest for emergencies because you have to be able to cover any situation that may occur. There are times I worry it could happen to me again.

Early in this process, when I thought of what had happened to me at the restaurant, I would feel like crying. Now, I say that it’s like a mountain and I’m going to keep climbing as high as I can. Why would I not try to reach the peak and get my reward? Now, I share my experience with other workers.

The post My Boss Owes Me Over $12,000 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The most important healthcare workers in this country—entry-level workers who do the caregiving and provide preventive services—are often paid poverty-level wages and provided insufficient benefits and supports, said panelists at a Fresno event in the statewide Zócalo Public Square series, “What Is a Good Job Now?”

As a result, the panelists said, there aren’t enough such workers. So, improving health care should start with improving caregiving and other entry-level health care jobs—with higher wages, better benefits like paid leave and health insurance, and career pathways that allow nurse assistants, for example, to become registered nurses.

“A lot of jobs are invisible in our health care system, even though they are very important,” said University of Minnesota health policy and management scholar Janette Dill, who studies the public health workforce. What undervalued jobs like home health care aides or nursing assistants have in common is that most of the workers are women of color, or immigrant women, she added.

“It really speaks to the fact that women’s labor is undervalued in our society,” Dill said.

The event, presented in partnership with the James Irvine Foundation and focused on healthcare, was moderated by Cresencio Rodriguez-Delgado, news director of KVPR (Valley Public Radio). It took place at the Fresno Center, a multi-faceted community service space on the south side of Fresno.

He began by asking panelist Helda Pinzón-Perez, a Fresno State public health professor with expertise in the health issues of rural areas and vulnerable populations, to define the problem with health care jobs.

Pinzón-Perez answered that California and the country badly need more health workers for three reasons. Our aging population needs more care. Rural and underserved communities lack providers. And we all need more preventive care, and caregiving and health education.

But we can’t get more health workers if we’re not willing to make those jobs more appealing to workers.

Asked by Rodriguez-Delgado about what her Fresno State students who are going to health want from their jobs, Pinzón-Perez emphasized that they have many desires and expectations. Among them are competitive salaries, the chance to grow in their careers, and enough free time to attend to their families and their own health.

And most of all, she added, “they are also looking for opportunities to apply what they learn to serve the community.”

A frontline caregiver on the panel, Martha Valladarez, noted that she hadn’t pursued the job. Instead, after years as one of Fresno’s first female letter carriers, she became an in-home supportive services provider to care for her youngest daughter, who has Down Syndrome.

She said she had received no training in caregiving upon taking the job. And she expressed frustrations with its pay—getting a raise required nine years of lobbying Fresno County. And it has been a struggle to secure vital benefits, around leave and retirement. To advocate for herself and other caregivers, Valladarez joined the union, SEIU, that represents in-home supportive service workers.

“We deserve a lot more and we’re going to fight,” she said.

She strongly backed state legislation to raise the minimum wage of healthcare workers to $25 per hour. But she also said that a big issue is that caregivers aren’t paid for all the hours they work—because it’s hard to say no to the people you care for. “This is a job where everyone knows you’re not going to leave,” she said.

Dill, the University of Minnesota scholar of health policy and workforce, emphasized the high stakes of improving health care jobs. The health sector is now the largest employer in the country; health care has transformed distressed manufacturing economies in the Rust Belt and other American places.

But those workers often have to work more than one job because they don’t get full-time hours, or health insurance of their own. They don’t have schedules that allow for respites or breaks that are vital for their mental health, she said. And health care jobs have physical demands that can make them quite dangerous; nursing assistants, she said, have relatively high rates of occupational injuries and infections.

Illustration by Soobin Kim.

Near the end of the conversation, panelists took questions from the audience attending in-person at the Fresno Center.

Rodriguez-Delgado, the moderator, talked about the closure late last year of Madera Community Hospital, in the community to the north of Fresno. “That probably sent signals to people who want to go into health care that it seems unstable,” he said.

In response, Dill noted that hospital closures and the failures to invest in health care personnel are often a function of choices made by “payers”—insurance companies, that tend to value fancy care more than daily hands-on care.

Pinzón-Perez said that mental health care for everyone, including front-line health workers, is important, and more might be done with the evolution of telehealth. Healthcare workers also need to do more work and tasks that are rewarding and seem meaningful, she said.

Pinzón-Perez and Dill both said that there had been an exodus of entry-level health care workers since the pandemic, with higher salaries being offered in other sectors. Those departures have made workloads even more intense in healthcare, Dill said.

Pinzon-Perez, an immigrant from Colombia, said that one way to produce more health workers is to utilize more immigrants who arrive in the U.S. with medical training.

Dill said that extensive data research shows that union membership can also improve the pay of health workers. She added that public policies—including minimum wages, paid leave, and health insurance—can “create better jobs in the lowest levels of the health care sectors.”

And she said there need to be pathways for greater mobility for workers, so they can rise to better-paying job categories.

“A nursing assistant is poverty wages and an RN is middle class in the U.S.,” she said. “Helping people make that transition through the health care sector is one powerful way we can promote social justice.”

The post Better Health Care Starts with Better Health Care Jobs appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.