Op-Ed | Gavin Newsom must sign this wage theft bill into law – By Matt Haney (SFGATE) / Sept 20, 2022
Assemblymember Matt Haney urges Gov. Gavin Newsom to sign Senate Bill 1364 into law
The University of California isn’t just our state’s third-largest employer. It awards hundreds of millions of dollars in service contracts to private companies that provide temporary or contingent workers to UC each year.
This contingent workforce includes thousands of low-wage custodians, food service workers, security services, parking attendants and hospital technicians. These workers are disproportionately women, immigrants and people of color who perform the same jobs as direct UC employees at the same facilities. Yet research has consistently shown that they are treated far worse. Often, these workers are condemned to lives of poverty, even though they work at a taxpayer funded institution that has professed itself as California’s “engine of social and economic mobility.”
“Equal Pay for Equal Work” is a policy that was adopted by UC Board of Regents in late 2019, after a scathing state audit and numerous press reports detailed how the university was misusing these contingent labor service contracts to outsource jobs normally performed by its own employees to private firms that were paying their workers as much as $8.50 per hour less — with almost certainly worse health and retirement benefits.
