May 2021
Turning the Tables: Participation and Power in Negotiations
Turning the Tables: Participation and Power in Negotiations, forthcoming from Jane McAlevey, Abby Lawlor, and the UC Berkeley Labor Center, illustrates best practices for building the power to win in today’s challenging union climate.
January 2021
The Undocumented Graduate: A Symposium Hosted by the Undocumented Research Cohort
The Undocumented Research Cohort (URC) set out to better understand the undocumented experience at Cal. Drawing on in-depth interviews with undocumented students, we present their diverse experiences at the University, focusing specifically on the differences between those who at DACAmented and unDACAmented, as well as STEM and non-STEM. While we await immigration reform, URC provides recommendations to improve the undocumented student experience at UC Berkeley.
Ideas to Boost Wages in the New Economy: Ten Essays on Raising Wages for U.S. Workers
The Washington Center for Equitable Growth will hold a launch event for a new essay series on how to raise wages. The forthcoming book collecting the series, Ideas to Boost Wages in the New Economy, features 10 essays by leading scholars on policies to boost wages for U.S. workers by addressing underlying structures and dynamics in our economy.
December 2020
Fits and the Tantrums: Training Early Care and Education Professionals to Afford Children Full Humanity
Early intervention studies have shown that high quality early care and education programs can yield $4 to $9 returns for every $1 spent, indicating this arena is a vital public investment for long-term social welfare and economic viability. Early care and education programs, however, vary widely in quality, leaving this return on investment unfulfilled. In this presentation, Brita A. Bookser will discuss how state and local uptake of quality improvement initiatives benefit from integrating social justice and critical race frameworks…
November 2020
Good Jobs and Bad Jobs over the Business Cycle: Implications for Inclusive Monetary Policy
Can monetary policy be more inclusive of and benefit people from low- and moderate-income communities? Join IRLE for a virtual talk with dissertation fellow Chaewon Baek, whose latest working paper seeks to shed light on this question, which is at the core of policy discussions. Baek studies heterogeneity in labor market arrangements and implications of this heterogeneity for welfare calculations and optimal policy. Baek's work documents that the experience of regular and irregular workers over the business cycle varies considerably.…
October 2020
From the Edge of the Ghetto: The Quest of Small City African-Americans to Survive Post-Industrialism
Alford A. Young, Jr. will discuss his new book, which presents a case for how configurations of race, class, and gender surface for lower-income African Americans in their struggle to come to terms with post-industrialism.
July 2020
Reevaluating the US Safety Net During and After COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to unprecedented levels of unemployment and economic uncertainty. Support systems designed to help working people during moments of temporary instability are proving insufficient when work has dried up and the long-term picture is so uncertain. Is it time to rethink our social safety net, for the pandemic and beyond? Are universal basic incomes part of the solution? On July 1st, at 1 PM PDT, O-Lab and IRLE will host a one-hour conversation addressing these questions…
April 2020
[CANCELLED] Exclusion and Extraction: A Symposium on Criminal Justice Contact and Labor Reallocation
February 2020
Democratic Policing and Officer Well-Being
Kimberly Burke will present findings from her recent mixed-method study, which provides new evidence about the impact of institutional prioritization of procedurally just and community-oriented policing tactics on officer well-being and occupational stress. Specifically, this research speaks to a body of knowledge evidencing that patrol police officers experience routine occupational discontent emergent from failed or poorly drafted attempts to improve police-community relationships. While these top-down institutional efforts to build trust and mutual respect between officers and the communities they serve…
Colloquium with Kuochih Huang: Do Incentivized Managers Pay Their Workers Less?
Since the 1980s, Chief Executive Officers' (CEO) pay has exploded, largely in the form of equity-based incentive compensation such as stock awards and options. Using a two-tiered principal-agent model, we show that aligning managers' incentives with shareholder interests through equity-based pay can lower workers' wages. Analyzing a sample that matches firm, manager, and worker information in the U.S. economy over the period 1992-2016, we show that higher equity-based pay is associated with lower average wages across various measures of pay…
January 2020
Special Event: Labor & Research from the UK
Join IRLE January 21, 1-4 pm, as we welcome researchers from the Centre for Decent Work, Sheffield University, UK. They'll share research on how bogus self-employment, labor and automation, and Brexit are affecting UK and European workers. Schedule 1:00 - 2:15 pm | Bogus Self-Employment and the Platform Economy in Europe This presentation, which will be given by Jason Heyes, Dragos Adascalitei and Edward Yates, will examine the development of labor markets and labor market regulation in European Union (EU)…
December 2019
IRLE Holiday Party
Celebrate with us at IRLE's annual holiday party. Friends and family (including kids) are welcome. Refreshments served.
November 2019
Book Talk – On the Outside: Prisoner Reentry and Reintegration
America’s high incarceration rates are a well-known facet of contemporary political conversations. Mentioned far less often is what happens to the nearly 700,000 former prisoners who rejoin society each year. On the Outside examines the lives of 22 people—varied in race and gender but united by their time in the criminal justice system—as they pass out of the prison gates and back into society. The book takes a clear-eyed look at the challenges faced by former prisoners as they try…
October 2019
The Triumph of Injustice: A Book Talk with Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman
Social Science Matrix is honored to co-sponsor this upcoming book talk with authors and UC Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, focused on their new book, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay. The book presents a forensic investigation into a dramatic transformation that has taken place in recent decades: even as they became fabulously wealthy, the ultra-rich have had their taxes collapse to levels last seen in the 1920s. Eschewing anecdotes…
Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor
Join us for a conversation with book author and longtime New York Times labor correspondent, Steven Greenhouse. His latest book, Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor, is an in-depth look at working men and women in America, the challenges they face, and how they can be re-empowered. About Beaten Down, Worked Up In an era when corporate profits have soared while wages have flatlined, millions of Americans are searching for ways to improve their lives, and they’re often…
