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 seven reasons older workers have lost bargaining power:Eroding retirement income security;Decline of unions;More insecure employment relationships;Persistent age discrimination;Geographical immobility;Ineligibility for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC); andOlder workers’ relative propensity to work for smaller firms.  Register  About the SpeakerTeresa Ghilarducci is a labor economist and nationally-recognized…

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 educational, social, and economic opportunities. It also subverts private competition and public investment. Powerful corporations muscle competitors out of business, in the process costing consumers, suppressing wages, and hobbling innovation, while governments underfund key public goods that make the American Dream possible, from schools to…

Los Angeles County operates the largest jail system in the United States, which incarcerates more people than any other nation on Earth. At a cost of nearly $1 billion annually, more than 20,000 people are caged every night in L.A.’s county jails and city lockups. But not every neighborhood is equally impacted by L.A.’s massive jail system. In fact, L.A.’s nearly billion-dollar jail budget is largely committed to incarcerating many people from just a few neighborhoods. In some communities, more than one-million dollars is spent annually on incarceration. These are L.A.’s Million Dollar Hoods.Led by Prof. Kelly Lytle Hernandez, the…

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 to the need to address the challenge of a large—and seemingly persistent—low wage labor market. He will assess a range of strategies for addressing the challenge of low wages, and make the case for a greater focus on training and human capital approaches than has…

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 to observe the thought processes guiding managers’ decisions. In this talk, Correll will allow us to peer into managers’ heads through an analysis of the language they use when evaluating employees’ performance. Using written performance reviews at a Fortune 500 technology company, Correll investigates whether…

After Social Security, the Food Stamp Program touches the lives of more American families than any other element of the social safety net. What is the impact of this program on the long-term outcomes of children who receive these resources early in life?Hoynes uses the rollout of the Food Stamp Program between 1961 and 1975 to examine the impact of an increase in economic resources during childhood on human capital, labor market outcomes, neighborhood, and mortality. Using novel large-scale data from the 2000 Census, American Community Survey, and Social Security Administration NUMIDENT, this research analyzes data on 43 million individuals.…

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 streams of activism corresponding to shifting salient intersectional identities and frames, always including gender but incorporating other elements as well. Comparatively, the US domestic-worker movement recently has had greater success due to superior financial resources and greater political opportunities – advantages due in part precisely…

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 Boston. They were trying to understand what happens when people return to a community, and the challenges faced by them and their families. How did they look for work and housing? How did they manage their addictions or mental illness, and why did some return…

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 two processes by which networks perpetuate racial inequality in the labor market: network access and network effects. In the first case, African Americans may receive fewer job leads through their social networks than whites, limiting their access to employment opportunities. In the second case, blacks…

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 minimum wage increases affect earnings growth is critical. However, commonly used public datasets offer limited opportunities to evaluate this relationship. Using administrative earnings data from the Social Security Administration linked to the Current Population Survey, we gain valuable insight into how effects of the minimum…

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 1978, vows to “translate into practical reality the right of all Americans who are able, willing, and seeking to work to full opportunity for useful paid employment at fair rates of compensation.” That intent clearly has not been actualized. When the Act was passed in…

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 by the Rockefeller Foundation. Defining an inclusive economy as one that is equitable, participatory, growing, sustainable and stable, this initiative developed specific indicators that can be used to analyze progress towards more inclusive economies along these five dimensions at national and sub-national levels.  Drawing on efforts…

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? And why does “poverty won the war” (Ronald Reagan, 1986) remain a political mantra?In this talk, Dr. Danziger will review the economic trends that have increased poverty and the safety net programs that have reduced it. He’ll also highlight recommendations from a recent bipartisan report…

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 the form of their employees. Professor Hertel-Fernandez will discuss his new book, Politics at Work, and the huge impacts corporations are having on elections and public policy by mobilizing their workers.The discussion will be moderated by Kim Voss of the UC Berkeley Sociology Department and Ann…

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 in guest worker recruitment schemes to cost pressures from global competition.The process is best understood as a human supply chain, into which low wage workers are often fed. Reframing labor migration in this way helps us integrate it into our ideas of global supply networks.…

Professor Brand will explore the complex ways in which the shock of job loss impacts workers' health, career achievement, and economic outcomes, and how these effects reverberate in their families and communities.

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, which were hostile to picketing by labor organizers, encouraged civil rights advocates to distance themselves from labor movements. When the Supreme Court finally granted First Amendment protection to civil rights picketing that it had long denied to labor picketing, that decision cemented a divide between…

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 internships – more effective at keeping others from getting it. In his new book, Dream Hoarders: How the American Middle Class is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That is a Problem, and What to Do About It, Richard Reeves argues that we can…

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. In this talk, Schor discusses her interview-based research with workers on six platforms, and argues that contrary to the expectations of both boosters and critics, outcomes are highly diverse, and depend to a large extent on workers' non-platform economic situations. The discussion will be moderated…

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 – through the twentieth century’s booms and busts, examining the changing relationships between employers and employees and how much has been lost: job security and steadily rising pay, guaranteed pensions, robust health benefits, and much more."The End of Loyalty is the rich story of how the corporate…

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 many workers unemployed or out of the workforce altogether, especially those stigmatized by race, disability, or having been formerly incarcerated.Instead, Professor Hamilton and his colleagues propose a bold federal job guarantee, providing economic security and decent wages for every American. The discussion will be moderated…