Issue Position: Empowering Our Workforce to Drive Economic Change

Issue Position

California's workforce and economy is like no other. We are home to one of the most diverse and innovative workforces in the country, and we have the fifth-largest economy in the world -- but we know that our economy is not working for everyone. Meanwhile, the economic recovery and progress that we have seen since the Great Recession is due squarely to the grit and innovation of our workers. They are the backbone of our thriving community life, and our state government must work hard to ensure that all workers benefit from our state's economic prosperity.
As your Assemblymember, I would:
Champion unions in the aftermath of Janus
Protect our immigrant workers
Move the needle on equity in the workplace
Leverage higher education to drive economic justice and progress
Keep big corporations accountable
Champion small business
Build a 21st-century care economy

California's workforce and economy is like no other. We are home to one of the most diverse and innovative workforces in the country, and we have the fifth-largest economy in the world -- but we know that our economy is not working for everyone. While we have the highest concentration of billionaires and millionaires in the country, at the same time 40% of the population is living at or near the poverty line. Meanwhile, the economic recovery and progress that we have seen since the Great Recession is due squarely to the grit and innovation of our workers. They are the backbone of our thriving community life, and our state government must work hard to ensure that all workers benefit from our state's economic prosperity.
Our changing economy also brings with it new workforce needs. As our economy evolves with new jobs and technology, we must pass legislation that also champions our workers in new innovative ways. As the right-wing tries to diminish the power of unions, we must bolster and expand the power of California unions. And in an age of growing income inequality, we need to ensure that people who come here to work can afford to live here, and that all workers can find homes. We must address these income inequalities at the state and local level head-on by passing workforce, housing, and safety net policies that protect and benefit our most vulnerable workers.
As your Assemblymember, I would:
Champion unions in the aftermath of Janus
Protect our immigrant workers
Move the needle on equity in the workplace
Leverage higher education to drive economic justice and progress
Keep big corporations accountable
Champion small business
Build a 21st-century care economy
Here's how I would fight for our workers and help grow our economy:
Champion Unions in the Aftermath of Janus
Unions are essential protectors of workers rights and need to be at the table on all our workforce policies. We all should have the unequivocal right to collective action and collective bargaining, and that right is protected and upheld for us through the hard work of unions.
I have spent two decades working with and for the Labor movement fighting for workers' rights. I have experienced firsthand how union power and voice make our workplaces and communities more just and prosperous. Unions not only help their members, but they serve as the counterbalancing force to unchecked corporate power, which impacts all workers.
The Janus v. AFSCME decision unfairly weakens unions' ability to ensure these worker protections and will especially hurt women of color, who disproportionately work in the public sector and who already face a double pay gap. In the aftermath of this decision, I support legislation that helps unions reach out to their members and that makes it easier for to organize by increasing penalties on employers who violate labor laws. We should also use union-led project labor agreements and community benefit agreements as much as possible to ensure fair and just hiring and contracting practices within local communities.
In order to address the shrinking power of unions in the long-term, we can explore large-scale reorganizations of union activity by sector (as is used in Europe), and build broad wage boards to enact strong protections for workers across entire industries -- a tool used recently in the Fight for Fifteen.
Protect our Immigrant Workers
As the Trump administration continues attacking our immigrant neighbors and ICE ramps up its unjustified raids and deportations, we must protect the rights of our immigrant workers, both documented and undocumented. Besides this being a clear social justice issue, our immigrants are critical to the success of our workforce -- California has more immigrants in its workforce than any other state, and undocumented immigrants alone make up 9% of California's labor force.
We should be proud that California has passed many laws ramping up undocumented workers protections in recent years (like AB263, AB450, and SB54), but we must carefully monitor their implementation to make sure we're getting them right. Employers must not be able to get away with wage theft or substandard working conditions by threatening to call ICE if someone complains. This dynamic hurts us all -- it blocks access to justice for immigrants, damages employer/employee relationships, undercuts the bargaining power of workers and unions, and contradicts our core values. We must also increase funding for the California Attorney General's Office, so that we can continue using our legal system to fight back against federal attacks on undocumented worker rights.
Move the needle on equity in the workplace
All workers should have access to a truly livable wage that takes into account local housing and living costs, and all workers should have the same opportunities for wage increases and promotions, regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or religion.
In California, we have made progress towards this reality -- but we have more work to do. Women are currently paid 86 cents to the white male dollar, and full-time black and Latina women workers make even less -- 63 cents and 43 cents, respectively. Two-thirds of minimum wage workers are women and disproportionately women of color, and almost three times as many women as men work in occupations with poverty-level wages. This is unacceptable -- we must keep pushing the needle on pay equity and income inequality in California.
To ensure livable wages for our workers struggling with poverty, we should continue to push for minimum wage increases, reform Prop 13 to increase revenues for affordable housing and better schools, and bolster our safety net by modernizing and expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit. We should establish a Working Families Tax Credit that would expand the definition of work to include more of our low- and middle-income workers, and include students and caregivers in our workforce definitions. We should expand our unemployment insurance system to create a short-term "job-seekers" allowance that allows workers to weather disruptions in the workforce.
We must also make it easier for current workers to plan for childcare or educational opportunity by expanding the work done in Emeryville to pass a statewide Fair Work Week Law, which would require employers to provide advance notice and predictability of scheduling or face fines. And we should carefully watch the implementation of Stockton's Universal Basic Income program, which is an exciting pilot that will give 100 residents $500 a month for 18 months -- no strings attached. If we see positive outcomes for project participants, we should consider implementing the Stockton's model throughout California.
As we work towards pay equity, we must also toughen our stance on workplace harassment and address inequities around how our workers are treated. With the onset of the #MeToo movement, we've all seen the horrifying statistics about workplace sexual harassment, and we know that low-income workers experience this harassment most. While #MeToo helped shed light on systemic misogyny and sexual misconduct, most women, and especially low-income workers, do not have the resources and vast support networks to so publicly and thoroughly confront their attackers and gain retribution. We can address this by getting rid of non-disclosure agreements that enable perpetrators to hide their crimes, and collecting better data across the board in our workforce that presents a fuller picture of the sexual assault implications for victims of color.
Leverage Higher Education to Drive Economic Justice and Progress
We will never see true equity in our economy until we eliminate the generational wealth and opportunity gaps that people of color continue to see as an effect of our shameful history of segregation and redlining. Especially since affirmative action was banned in California, we've seen a dramatic reduction of students of color in our colleges and universities. We must create more and better opportunities for our low-wage workers and people of color to access our higher education system, so everyone has the opportunity to build wealth and opportunity in their career. That means repealing Prop 209 to lift the affirmative action ban, increasing diversity among our students, faculty, and staff, and covering tuition and living expenses for low- and middle-income students.
We must protect and re-invest in job training programs that have a technical and vocational focus in order to bolster our workforce development, keep our students out of lifelong debt, and provide all residents opportunities to find good-paying jobs. And as our economy evolves, it's important that we offer job upskill opportunities so that everyone can find and hold a good job in an age of growing automation. This can happen at our community colleges: as a California community college graduate myself, I know from personal experience that community colleges are a vital means of combating socioeconomic inequality and providing everyone, regardless of financial background, with the opportunity to succeed. I applaud our recent efforts in this work through the passage of AB235, which expands pathways to existing and new types of apprenticeship programs.
As we wrestle with growing income inequality, the investments we make in education can help all communities while supporting state workforce needs. But we must invest more public dollars in our higher education systems to accomplish this -- see my education plan for more on these ideas.
Keep Big Corporations Accountable
As our workplace evolves, we should hold companies accountable to correctly classifying their workers -- no one should be designated an independent contractor just so that their employer need not provide them with a benefits plan. This hurts workers and costs us billions of dollars each year in lost payroll taxes. We must hold companies accountable to the California Supreme Court's recent ruling on the Dynamax lawsuit, which tightens the rules on who can and cannot be classified as an independent contractor.
We also must uphold high standards for employer transparency and anti-wage discrimination. California's Fair Pay Act already serves as a model for many other states to protect people of all genders, race, and ethnicities from employer wage discrimination. But we still need more access to data on employee salaries, so that employers and legislators can better understand where pay gaps exist and adjust their hiring and promotion policies. Our government should pass SB1284 as an important step in these efforts, which would require businesses to report data on their workers' earnings. And as income inequality grows in our state, we should also pass legislation that incentivizes corporations to close the earnings gap between their top-paid and median workers, and encourages employee ownership and appointments to boards.
While companies like Amazon are transforming our consumer economy, too often we hear of their fulfillment center workers or drivers subject to inhumane working conditions. We currently provide substantial tax credits and incentives to companies through programs like California Competes-- we should attach conditions to these incentives that require large companies to meet a "corporate accountability checklist." This should include commitments to fair wages and workplace policies for workers, transparency around worker harassment policies, and other good corporate practices.
We also need the booming California tech industry to step up to the table and invest further in state and local projects and programs that bring wealth to low-income communities. The economic progress and prosperity that these companies bring to California is exciting, but that prosperity is too often only felt by a small part of our workforce. With their innovative work structures and benefits programs and climbing profits, Silicon Valley and our other tech hubs can and should play a major role in piloting new initiatives, contributing to local economies, and building community pipelines to tech jobs through collaboration with our schools.
Champion Small Business
Small business and entrepreneurship have always been and continue to be at the foundation of California's economy and vibrant workforce. Opening their own business gives people the chance to build and sustain income and assets for themselves and their children, which is critical to eliminating our generational wealth gaps. Business ownership is second only to home ownership as a leading source of wealth.
Today, there are 3.9 million small businesses in California, which employ 49% of our workforce. In 2018 alone, small businesses created 283,000 new jobs in our communities. 1.9 million of these businesses are minority-owned, and the fastest-growing population of small business owners is women of color. These businesses have the power and potential to innovate in new ways and address needs in our communities -- like the Oakland-based Josephine Meal Company, which hired local cooks, who didn't have the means to start their own restaurants, to sell meals to Oakland families, nonprofits, and community groups. But Josephine Meal Company had to shut down this year because of a lack of financial and technical resources -- a fate all too common for small business owners. We can and should prevent such closures by better supporting small business owners with the access to capital and technical assistance to ensure their businesses, and their employees, thrive.
Data shows us that California small business owners are overwhelmingly eager not just to make a profit, but to embrace robust employer practices that provide workers with the same competitive and fair benefits and wages that we champion in our unions and big businesses. Many small businesses aren't able to offer robust benefits because it's unaffordable, not because they don't think their employees deserve it. They just need more supports from the state in order to do this well and keep their businesses thriving.
First and foremost, we can support entrepreneurship and employee rights at the state level by providing more quality access to the capital that these employers need. We should expand funding for nonprofit lenders and programs like California Capital Access Program (CalCAP), which helps small business owners get the loans they need from banks and avoid loan defaults. We need more legislation like SB1235 that requires more transparency and toughens our standards on fair treatment, fair debt collection practices, and nondiscrimination requirements from lenders and brokers. When SB1235 is passed, we should make sure that the Department of Business Oversight implements it with fidelity. And we should make sure that California collects sufficient small business lending data to monitor our success in these efforts. These measures are especially important to support entrepreneurs of color and women entrepreneurs, whose credit denial rates are disproportionately higher than their white and male counterparts, and who are given overall smaller loans and higher interests rates, even after taking creditworthiness into account.
Community entrepreneurs also need better access to technical assistance and resources to manage their business well. Anyone who has paid taxes knows that managing any assets, let alone a business and multiple workers, is often a frustrating and bewildering experience. We need to make sure that our small business owners have the training and guidance they need to keep their business afloat and give their workers fair wages and competitive benefits. California recently increased its financial investment in a federally matched small business support and technical assistance program. This program provides small business owners strategy and technical assistance for free, and disproportionately serves women and minority entrepreneurs. We should continue to invest further in this network and collect data on how these services help small business employers and workers in our evolving economy.
Finally, we must double down on our efforts to expand and bolster Medi-Cal and Affordable Care Act protections, paid family leave and explore and expand new portable benefits options like CalSavers -- small business owners' abilities to offer competitive health insurance and benefits depends on it. With the right level of state support, small business can continue to be a vehicle that drives our economy forward and promotes justice and community power throughout California.
Build a 21st Century Care Economy
By 2030, caregiving will be the single largest occupation in California. Nearly everyone will need care at some point in their life: when they have a child, if a parent needs long-term care, or if someone gets hurt and needs to take medical leave. Yet although the cost of child and elder care at daycares or in-home care is through the roof, our caregivers are still some of the lowest paid workers in our society. And caregivers are disproportionately women of color, who were excluded from the National Labor Relations Act decades ago -- part of our shameful past that we can rectify in California through concrete policy reform. Specifically, I believe we should consider implementing a Universal Family Care plan, drawing from work done in Hawaii and Maine. We can start by establishing a commission that would include domestic workers, care providers and those needing short- and long-term care, to determine if California could use these best practices in its own program.

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