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Tilly Comments on Rise of Instacart Services

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Urban Planning Chair Chris Tilly was featured in a New York Times article about the increasing popularity of online grocery shopping services like Instacart. In 2020, online grocery sales rose 54%. The technology needed to fulfill orders is costly for stores, and the workers who pick customers’ items off the shelves often feel the pressure of being timed and tracked to monitor their efficiency. “The guinea pig for this is warehouse workers,” said Tilly, explaining that many of the technologies for online grocery shopping and picking are adapted from warehouses. He predicted that facilities designed specifically for online orders will eventually be expanded as the current system is creating an additional financial strain for grocers. “There is a constant search for how to make this cheaper, more efficient and, in many cases, as a transition to something longer term,” Tilly concluded.

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Tilly Anticipates Friction as Economy Reopens

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Urban Planning Chair Chris Tilly joined KPCC’s “AirTalk” in an episode about decreasing unemployment levels in California. The number of people seeking jobless benefits has fallen steadily all year, but the economy is still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic. As restaurants and businesses plan to open back up to maximum capacity on June 15, many employers are struggling to get enough employees to return to work. “The labor market and the economy have been in a deep freeze” over the past year and a half, said Tilly, who predicted that there will be some points of friction as the economy reopens. “Many workers are not rushing to go back to work, either because they are still burdened with child or other dependent care, they have their own health concerns, or wages are not sufficient,” he said. But he added that markets have ways of balancing themselves out. “When wages increase, workers are going to materialize.” 

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Storper on the Counterintuitive Truth About Global Investment

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Urban Planning Distinguished Professor Michael Storper co-authored an article about the impact of international investment on domestic employment levels for the London School of Economics’ Global Investments and Local Development blog. “The world over, public policies for recovery from COVID-19 have cherished the idea of curbing foreign activities of domestic firms in order to boost domestic employment and wages. This represents a fundamental misconception about outward foreign direct investment,” Storper wrote with scholars Riccardo Crescenzi and Roberto Ganau. The authors conducted an in-depth analysis of U.S. local labor markets, detailed in a paper recently published in the Journal of Economic Geography. They found that firms with direct investment in other countries create jobs at home, a counterintuitive fact in an era of populism and calls for curbing global economic integration. The authors noted, however, that there is a downside in the form of increasing intra-regional inequalities between high-skilled and low-skilled workers.

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Ong Highlights Economic Obstacles Facing Asian Americans

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Paul Ong, director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge at UCLA Luskin, was cited in Los Angeles Times and USA Today articles about economic hardships among Asian Americans in the United States. Many hotels, restaurants, shopping centers and beauty salons were forced to close at the beginning of the pandemic, and a report by Ong found that Asian Americans accounted for one in four workers within those sectors. Now, long-term unemployment levels among Asian Americans have been exacerbated by a surge in anti-Asian sentiment. Among all racial and ethnic groups in the United States, Asians have the largest income gap between the top and bottom 10%, and this trend has been accelerated by the economic shutdown caused by the pandemic. Ong explained that Los Angeles’ Chinatown “was hit earlier, even before the lockdowns, and it lost much more business and has recovered much more slowly,” a trend also seen in New York and San Francisco.

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Manville Imagines Post-Pandemic Work Life

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville was cited in a Bond Buyer article about how work patterns, commutes and transportation will look after the pandemic is over. The San Diego Association of Governments is drafting its 30-year transportation plan, but some experts are hesitant about investing in transportation projects due to the uncertainty caused by the pandemic. At a SANDAG board meeting, a panel of experts debated how long it will take for work patterns and traffic to return to pre-pandemic levels. While some firms will continue to offer work-from-home opportunities, Manville said he believes that “work patterns will largely return to how it was before the pandemic, as will traffic patterns.” He noted that it didn’t take long after the shutdown in March for traffic to return. “Though Zoom is great, so many companies have mentioned that it’s the unplanned interactions between employees that generate the best ideas,” Manville said.

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Asian American Businesses Hit Disproportionately Hard, Ong Finds

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A report co-authored by Paul Ong, director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge at UCLA Luskin, was featured in a CNN article about combating anti-Asian hate and racism. Asian Americans have been the victims of verbal, physical and economic attacks across the country. One study found that anti-Asian hate crimes have more than doubled during the pandemic. Ong’s report, a collaboration between the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge and the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, summarized the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Asian Americans. The report explained that Asian American businesses felt the economic impact of the pandemic earlier and more deeply than others because of xenophobia and racialized blaming. “Unemployment severely impacted the more disadvantaged Asian Americans,” Ong wrote. While many businesses have struggled during the pandemic, discrimination has exacerbated the impact on Asian American businesses.

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Wolff Accuses Grocery Stores of Manipulative Behavior

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Urban Planning lecturer Goetz Wolff spoke to People’s World about Kroger’s decision to close three of its grocery stores in response to the Los Angeles City Council’s vote to require large grocery and drug store chains to offer front-line workers an additional $5 per hour for the next 120 days. “Let’s not forget the history of Ralph’s in our community during the last big labor dispute,” Wolff said. “They were found guilty by the federal government [in 2003] and forced to pay $70 million in restitution for using fake Social Security numbers, illegally hiring strikebreakers and stealing employees’ money.” He added, “We shouldn’t be surprised they’re still acting like bullies in our community.” Kroger, the parent company of Ralph’s and Food 4 Less, made $2.6 billion in profits last year, and this closure will eliminate more than 250 jobs. “They’re trying to intimidate workers and community members again,” he said. “The community should call out this kind of behavior as manipulative and unacceptable.”

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Wealth Work Industry Is Unsustainable, Tilly Says

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Urban Planning Chair Chris Tilly spoke to Spectrum News about the inequity of the wealth work industry, which has grown exponentially during the pandemic. Many individuals who lost their jobs during the pandemic turned to gig work, which often revolves around making the lives of the upper classes more comfortable. Most gig workers are independent contractors and do not have health care or retirement plans. According to Tilly, this model is unsustainable and is accelerating the inequality gap. “There is something wrong about that business model,” he said. “We don’t want businesses that only make money because they’re not paying people enough to live on.” Tilly explained that a floor must be set on the wealth work industry through advocacy, unions or regulation. “If these jobs are going to be with us, great, but let’s make them sustainable, living-wage jobs,” he said.

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Tilly on What It Will Take to Improve Retail Jobs

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The U.S. retail industry has been rocked by COVID-19, but the momentary spotlight on essential workers shows little sign of bringing lasting improvements to their work lives, according to an article co-written by Urban Planning Chair Chris Tilly. Only regulatory pressure promises to strengthen protections for retail workers, Tilly and co-author Françoise Carré concluded in the piece for the Good Companies, Good Jobs Initiative. The COVID-19 shutdown, along with rapid technological change, has triggered high levels of unemployment and undermined employer interest in basic job improvement measures, they wrote. On the tech front, “the e-commerce boom is most obvious, but a less visible — and quite ominous — shift is the spread of worker surveillance,” which has led to complaints that faulty systems have been used to discipline employees unfairly. Tilly and Carré are co-authors of the 2017 book “Where Bad Jobs Are Better” and collaborated on a chapter in 2020’s “Creating Good Jobs: An Industry-Based Strategy.”

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Tilly on Barriers Facing Union Organizing in Tech

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Urban Planning Chair Chris Tilly spoke to KQED about the obstacles facing Silicon Valley workers who want to unionize. In recent years, tech employees have protested lack of diversity, mishandling of sexual harassment claims, and the second-class treatment of temporary workers and contractors. White-collar tech employees recently formed Alphabet Workers Union at the parent company of Google. According to Tilly, Silicon Valley companies such as Google have done a lot to make it difficult for workers to form unions. “There are a lot of barriers to building worker solidarity within Google,” he said. “Google and other tech companies have been effective at fissuring workers, hiring some as contractors, others as temps and also outsourcing labor around the globe,” Tilly explained. Workers are physically separated and have different employment statuses, including different wage and benefit packages, making it difficult to organize them around common goals.

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