labor

and They said I was one of the lucky ones/ the ones chosen to live.

But while all men aren’t “bad,” they all have inherited a society which severely needs to reconsider what it means to be a boy, and more crucially, what it means to be human.

In this impact issue, we examine the rights and realities of employees in the university and city, especially in light of an ongoing pandemic.

For more than a century, coffee breaks have allowed companies to extract more value from their employees. But maybe our dependence on the beverage has allowed us to extract more value from ourselves, too.

Prop. 22 is a crucial step in gig companies’ fight to protect their business models and create a category of workers without rights.

UC President Janet Napolitano and three experts testified before a U.S. Senate committee Friday on how legislation can address sexual assault on college campuses.

Unfortunately, the LWO and the labor laws that govern the treatment of hourly workers affect the people who can least afford legal counsel or the time and effort it takes to follow through on a complaint of this type. As Taylor herself noted, although she sorely needs the money to which she is probably entitled, she lacks the time and knowledge necessary to secure it. The result is a general squeezing of the permanent underclass in Berkeley. It does no good to raise minimum wage or to require a living wage if the city itself takes every opportunity to deny payment to the most vulnerable class of workers in this city.

The record shows that the better route for working people and their allies is the initiative. Minimum wage activists won an annual cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, in 11 states. Significantly, only in Vermont was a COLA achieved by a legislative body. The other 10 were won via the initiative. The reason is that legislators tend to be more conservative than the voters who elected them. It is not surprising because the business community generally finances electoral campaigns, and furthermore, once in office, the pressure to cater to business interests is enormous. That is the case even at the local level, including the City of Berkeley.