Events

Presentation pertaining to the CA Work and Health Survey

IRLE Director's Room 2521 Channing Way, Berkeley, CA

On January 24, IRLE and the Labor Center will co-host a presentation by Ed Yellin and Laura Trupin regarding the California Work and Health Survey. The baseline survey is now available to researchers and a follow-up survey will be fielded in 2025. Come learn about this new resource. About the Talk Ed Yelin and Laura […]

Maya Rossin-Slater on Maternal and Infant Health Inequality: New Evidence from Linked Administrative Data

IRLE Director's Room 2521 Channing Way, Berkeley, CA

About the Talk Light refreshments and reception to follow the talk. Professor Rossin-Slater will discuss her latest research using linked administrative data that combines the universe of California birth records, hospitalizations, and death records with parental income from Internal Revenue Service tax records to provide novel evidence on economic inequality in infant and maternal health. […]

The Bargaining Power of Older Workers and the US Labor Market

Workers over age 55 are projected to fill more than half of the 11.4 million net new jobs created between 2016 and 2026. Despite their numbers, older workers’ bargaining power in the labor market has been declining, threatening to suppress wages and working conditions for all workers.Ghilarducci, a nationally-recognized expert in retirement security, will discuss […]

Unbound: How Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We Can Do about It

Do we have to choose between equality and prosperity? Many think that reducing economic inequality would require such heavy-handed interference with market forces that it would stifle economic growth. Heather Boushey insists that rising inequality actually undermines growth in three ways. It obstructs the supply of talent, ideas, and capital as wealthy families monopolize the best […]

The Future of Work: Myth, Reality, and What We Should Do About It

Discussions about the future of work have focused on the idea that technology will soon reduce or alter the need for human labor in many occupations. Has this conventional narrative failed to focus on the key challenges facing workers today and in the future?Osterman will offer a perspective on these discussions, and how they relate […]

Inside the Black Box of Organizational Life: The Gendered Language of Performance Assessment

Do formal evaluation procedures really reduce bias? As an organizational practice, are they a smokescreen concealing bias or a great leveler that bolsters meritocracy?While organizations formalize evaluation procedures to help achieve meritocratic outcomes, they often fail to eliminate bias in practice. Managers play a key role in applying such procedures, but researchers have been unable […]

The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder: Labor’s Last Best Weapon

When Steven Burd, CEO of the supermarket chain Safeway, cut wages and benefits, starting a five-month strike by 59,000 unionized workers, he was confident he would win. But where traditional labor action failed, a novel approach was more successful. With the aid of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, a $300 billion pension fund, workers […]

Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital

In Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital (Harvard University Press), Clausing makes the argument that Americans, especially those with middle and lower incomes, face stark economic challenges due to rising income inequality and wage stagnation. But these problems do not require us to retreat from the global economy. On the contrary, an open economy overwhelmingly […]

Intersectional Histories, Overdetermined Fortunes: Understanding Mexican and US Domestic Worker Movements

What determines whether movements of informal workers succeed or fail? Using cases of domestic-worker movements in Mexico and the United States, Tilly seeks to  build upon the literature on social movements and intersectionality by adding historical analysis of the movements’ evolution through a cross-national analysis of movement differences.Historically, these two movements have been propelled by multiple […]

Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison

In his talk, Western will bear witness to the lives held captive in America’s experiment with mass incarceration. Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison tells the stories of the men and women he met through the Boston Reentry Study, a series of interviews his research team conducted with people leaving prison for neighborhoods around […]

Race and Network in the Job Search Process

Racial disparities persist throughout the employment process, with African-Americans experiencing significant barriers compared to whites. This talk will help us gain a deeper understanding of racial labor market stratification by bringing new theoretical insights and original data to bear on the ways that social networks shape racial disparities in accessing employment opportunities.Existing scholarship points to […]

The Distributional Effects of Minimum Wages: Evidence from Linked Survey and Administrative Data

Voorheis will discuss the implications of his research finding that minimum wage policies increase long-term earnings of low-wage workers, and possibly reasons for the persistence of those effects. Rising income inequality and stagnating economic mobility have prompted state and local governments to focus on higher minimum wages. As these policies expand, an understanding of how […]

Pros and Cons of Designing a Job Guarantee Program

Policy makers frustrated with slack labor markets, diverging wage and productivity growth, and continued lag in the incomes of Black workers have increasingly begun to consider legislation that would guarantee everyone a job.The right to a job has been part of U.S. policy debates before. The preamble to the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act, passed in […]

Seminar on Inclusive Economies for Cities and Regions

Register Introduced by Karen Chapple, City and Regional PlanningChris Benner, UC Santa Cruz: "Inclusive Economies: Conceptual, Measurement and Process Issues"Incorporating insights from ecological economics, theories of social well-being, and concepts of pro-poor and inclusive growth, this talk will discuss insights from the application of a five-dimensional framework for analyzing and promoting more inclusive economies originally developed […]

Reflections on the End of the Safety Net as We Know It

Banatao Auditorium at UC Berkeley

It’s been over fifty years since President Johnson declared war on poverty, and each year, our federal and state governments spend billions of dollars trying to alleviate it. So why are some 45.3 million Americans still living below the poverty line? Why is there still no consensus on what can be done to reduce poverty? […]

Politics At Work: How Companies Turn Their Workers into Lobbyists

In 2010, the landmark Citizens United Supreme Court decision upheld corporations’ right to participate in politics, declaring that limits to their political spending would infringe on freedom of speech. But money is not the only political resource that corporations can use. Private companies have access to – and control over – powerful human capital in […]

Regulating the Human Supply Chain

It’s no secret that recruiting guest workers can be a shady business. Often, the fraud and extortion that guest workers face are blamed on a few bad apple recruiters, who are targeted by criminal regulation that almost never works. But the problems are bigger than bad apples. Structural forces encourage abuse, from the subcontracting common […]

Working Together: How the Supreme Court divided the civil rights movement and labor leaders

Once, activists dreamed of an all-inclusive movement for poor people. But then came the 1950s – labor began to decline as a social movement, and civil rights leaders turned away from their early focus on labor rights. What role did the courts play in pushing these movements apart?Professor Fisk finds that the era’s labor laws, […]

Author Talk: Richard Reeves on America’s Dream Hoarders

Banatao Auditorium at UC Berkeley

We know about the one percent. The ultra-rich. The billionnaire class. But author Richard Reeves writes it’s the upper middle class that matters most. Those top twenty percent of earners are becoming more effective at passing wealth to their children, and – through zoning laws, schooling, occupational licensing, college application procedures, and the allocation of […]

Precarity and Dependence in the “Sharing” Economy

The sharing economy debuted to grand claims about its ability to change the world for the good--it would encourage social connection, use assets more efficiently, and be better for the environment. For earners on platforms, it promised flexibility, freedom and the ability to become a "micro-entrepreneur." Ten years in, the reality is far more complex. […]

Author Talk – The End of Loyalty: The Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Rick Wartzman’s new book, The End of Loyalty, details the erosion of the social contract between corporations and employees since World War II, the decline of American labor and the current rise of populism in the United States.Wartzman follows four corporate giants – General Electric, General Motors, Kodak, and Coca-Cola – […]

Beyond “Resistance”: A Bold Plan for Work With Dignity via a Federal Job Guarantee

NEW LOCATION: 2521 Channing Way, IRLE Director's RoomIn 2017, Liberals in the United States are calling for “resistance” to regressive policies. Grassroots movements like the Fight for $15 show a desire for an offensive strategy on the left, but Professor Hamilton suggests that they do not go far enough. Raising the minimum wage still leaves […]

Survival of the Fittest: the Impact of the Minimum Wage on Restaurant Closures

Please note that this event will take place exceptionally on a Thursday.Opponents of minimum wage increases have long worried about their impact on restaurants, which often rely on low-wage workers. Dara Lee Luca and Michael Luca will present research on raising the minimum wage in cities such as San Francisco, where they find that higher […]

Absence, Substitutability and Productivity. Evidence from Teachers

It’s not unusual for employees to miss work from time to time. Little is known, however, about how worker absences affect productivity, and how employers cope with absenteeism. We do know that in schools, disruption can be especially harmful. IRLE Visiting Scholar Asma Benhenda will present research, based on administrative data on French teachers and […]

Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital: Evidence From the Golden Era of Upward Mobility

Please note the change in date for this event.The first half of the twentieth century witnessed an extraordinary expansion of educational opportunity in the U.S. Professor Taylor will explore intergenerational links in educational outcomes during this golden age of upward mobility, using household data from the 1940s. His research shows that for white, black, Chinese, and […]

The Changing World of Work, Societal Linkages, and Political Parties in Latin America: IRLE Dissertation Fellow Talk

In the golden age of Latin America’s labor movement, unions were the main representatives of the popular interest and, for many citizens, unions were their main tie to the political arena. But the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s sent many workers into the informal sector – work that is untaxed, unregulated and, historically, underrepresented politically. Recently, […]

The Dynamics of Household Economic Security Around A Birth

Newborns require a lot of resources. And with the changes in income composition that come with a birth, many families face financial uncertainty. This has implications for children’s health and development, women’s economic security, and public program design. This research finds that households see significant and enduring declines in economic security before and after a […]

Indigenous Mexican Farmworker Youth: New Research In Development

Dr. Holmes will present new research in development on indigenous Mexican farmworker youth in California, Washington State, and the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico. This mixed-method qualitative research will explore hierarchies of race, class, gender, and language, as well as sources of strength and resilience among Triqui and Mixtec farmworker youth. In addition, the project will focus on […]

Intergenerational Income Mobility in Canada and the United States

223 Moses Hall

Please note that this event will be held at 223 Moses Hall.Intergenerational mobility is about twice as great in Canada than in the United States, but varies significantly within each country. Our sub-national analysis of six different indicators finds that the national border only partially distinguishes the close to one thousand regions we analyze within these […]

Taking A Pass: How Jobs Stay Gender-Segregated

Jobs are notoriously gender-segregated. But examinations of companies' hiring data often don't show a female disadvantage, even for male-dominated jobs. Many audit studies, on the other hand, do. This discrepancy can be partially explained by accounting for "failed searches" - cases when employers decide not to hire anyone from the applicant pool they receive. Professor […]