Previous Conferences

About the conference

The Fourth Annual Conference of the California Labor Lab explored the evolving nature of artistic labor in an era of economic instability and shifting employment structures. As entertainment and media workers continue to organize for fair wages and protections, and as new technologies reshape creative work, the arts serve both as a case study in contemporary labor struggles and a lens through which to examine the future of work itself.

This two-day virtual conference explored the relationship between art and labor. Day One opened with an overview of the arts’ role in California’s economy, featuring presentations from the Commission on the Creative Economy and findings from the California Labor Laboratory’s Work and Health Survey on the scope of arts-related employment in the state. The conversation then delved into key aspects of artistic work, including the growing influence of media conglomerates in film production, the realities of life for actors outside of stardom, and the lived experience of those working in the arts. Day Two shifted focus to how the arts critique and illuminate the changing world of work through discussions interwoven with clips and readings. From literature and film to performance and music, creative expression has long served as both a mirror and a battleground for labor struggles.

About the conference

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 focused 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 was 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. 

About the conference

Through the work of crusading journalists and advocates, the public has been made acutely aware employers are using technology to monitor workers’ performance. Some workers have had to forego mandated breaks – or come into work during an illness – to meet productivity goals. Technology has also been used to help protect workers from harmful exposures on the job and to uncover work-related illness through surveillance of health records and workers’ compensation claims.
This conference was designed to describe the extent of technology use in work, how they are used and why, and what the impacts are on workers and firms. Learners explored both negative effects of workplace monitoring, and how technology can be a force for good by helping make workplaces safer and more conducive to creativity. The conference closed with a discussion of what is being done – and what can be done – to limit draconian uses of technology and to create incentives for the design of more healthful work through policy, advocacy, and community engagement.

About the conference

In recent decades, employers have increasingly made labor part of just-in-time inventory through mechanisms such as using alternative employment arrangements (project- , task- , and contract-based employment), contingent forms of work, and erosion of working conditions. This has led to economic precarity for workers which, in turn, threatens their health and well-being. This conference was designed to describe the changes in employment and the consequences for worker health as well as recent attempts to mitigate the effects of these changes through labor activism within and beyond individual workplaces and firms and responsive public policy.