May 7 - 8, 2024 | 9 AM - 3:00 PM | Online
In 1972, Studs Terkel published Working. The book was about good and bad jobs, written in a time when it was possible to extract meaning, economic sustenance, and even satisfaction with many, if not all jobs. Now, as current economic and political forces drive down wages and erode worker protections, we find sustenance is often impossible and meaning has been stripped from modern work.
The Third Annual Conference of the California Labor Lab focuses on the state of working today and the recovery of workers’ voice. With continued low unemployment, worker expectations and an increased sense of empowerment may again produce some leverage in the labor market. Some signposts of that leverage include increases in local minimum wages, successful efforts by labor unions to increase wages and improve working conditions in previously unorganized industries, and white collar workers’ resistance to demands to forgo remote work.
This conference is organized around thematic modules that explore the experience of working in the contemporary economy, with a focus on California, the nation’s largest state and, if it were a nation, said to have the fifth largest economy in the world.