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Tilly Navigates California’s Shifting Labor Landscape

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UCLA Luskin Urban Planning Professor Chris Tilly spoke to the California Sun podcast about the state’s shifting labor dynamics. High-profile strikes, concerns about inflation and the emerging role of technology in the workplace have raised the visibility of worker rights campaigns this year. “The cost of housing, of health care, of college tuition have risen on trajectories that are so out of sync with everything else, including pay,” Tilly said. One experimental approach to addressing these issues is a plan to raise the minimum wage for many fast-food workers in California to $20 an hour and create a nine-member council empowered to make future wage increases. “Having some space where labor interests and management interests and public interests can all sit down at the table and hammer out what might be a good way to go, I think that’s a good thing to do,” Tilly said. “If places like California don’t lead, the prospects for the country look a lot grimmer.”

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Tilly on Job Insecurity Even Amid a Labor Crunch

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Urban Planning Chair Chris Tilly spoke to the New York Times about “just-in-time scheduling,” a labor practice based on customer demand that leads to great fluctuations in employee work hours. While some part-time workers prefer the flexibility of this model, many say it leaves them with too little income or an erratic schedule delivered on short notice. Nationwide, companies are complaining that they can’t fill jobs. Offering more full-time jobs would create a more stable work force, but many businesses are resistant to doing so, believing that the market will correct itself. Tilly said the increased reliance on part-time workers, particularly in the retail and hospitality industries, began decades ago, in part because of the mass entry of women into the work force. “A light bulb went on one day. ‘If we’re expanding part-time schedules, we don’t have to offer benefits, we can offer a lower wage rate,'” he explained.

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Informal Laborers Around the World Are Organizing to Win Rights

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A UCLA-led study of informal laborers in six countries found that, despite differences in local laws and cultures, domestic workers and construction workers are often exploited by their employers because government labor protections are weak or not enforced. However, the study also found that the laborers share common organizing strategies that can improve their work conditions and their lives. Urban Planning Chair Chris Tilly co-authored the report, which looked at informal employment in China, India, Mexico, South Africa, South Korea and the United States. The report focused on workers from two sectors with distinct gender differences: construction and domestic work. These informal workers, who are most often migrants, typically do not have access to protection by standard employment laws and social security-like programs. “This research confirms that informal workers can successfully organize and win rights,” Tilly said. “It offers lessons on strategy for workers in these two sectors and beyond, and it helps us understand how and why organizing approaches differ across sectors and countries.” Tilly pointed to the United States as an example of a country where domestic workers continue to be excluded from core labor standards such as meal breaks, overtime pay and an eight-hour workday. By contrast, construction workers were covered by labor laws in every country in the study, yet they were often victims of exploitation — unless they mobilized to demand protections. The report is a collaboration between the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment and the Center for Global Workers’ Rights at Penn State. — Citlalli Chávez-Nava 

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Tilly on the Deterioration of Worker Protections

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A KQED podcast series on how American workers have lost benefits, power and protections over the last few decades spoke with Urban Planning Professor Chris Tilly, an authority on labor economics. Tilly explained the phenomenon of the “fissured workplace,” where full-time employees work side by side with part-timers, temps, gig workers and contractors. Some classes of workers receive no health coverage, overtime pay, worker’s compensation or other protections, increasing company profits while breaking up worker solidarity. Tilly described a job he held in the late 1970s at a hospital that directly employed not just health-care professionals, but cafeteria staff, custodians and maintenance workers. Now, such positions would be outsourced at many companies, a trend that emerged not from new laws or regulations but from “an experimentation process,” he said. By testing existing legal boundaries, Tilly said, managers and executives discovered that “we could get away with this, there’s nothing stopping us from doing this.” Tilly’s segment begins at minute 23:35.

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Tilly Highlights World of Contracting in Silicon Valley

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Chris Tilly, a professor of urban planning at UCLA, was featured in a KQED report about the role of contractors in Silicon Valley, described by one tech worker as a “two-tiered caste system.” Contract workers have grown in prominence due to the ease of hiring and firing, as well as being cheaper than full-time employees. According to Tilly, “the advantages of the contractor model are even more valuable in the investor-dependent, quick-pivot world of Silicon Valley because it allows firms to quickly scale up and scale down projects with labor.” Despite doing the same work, contractors earn less and don’t share the same perks of benefits and stability as traditional full-time employees. Due to their precarious positions, many contract workers fear losing their jobs by speaking out. While workers in older industries are protected by unions, Tilly explained that “[Silicon Valley] companies start out with a blank slate,” making it difficult for contract workers to organize.

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