Senate Budget and Fiscal Review Subcommittee No. 5 on Corrections, Public Safety, Judiciary, Labor and Transportation

That's funny. Okay. The Senate Budget Subcommitee five on corrections, Public Safety, Judiciary, labor and transportation will come to order. Good morning. The Senate continues to welcome the public in person and via the teleconference service for individuals wishing to provide public comment. Today's participant number is 877-226-8216 and the access code is 621-7161 we are holding our committee hearings in the O Street building, room 2100, so we can establish our quorum and begin our hearing.

This is for the quorum. For the hearing. Senator Derazzo.

Here.

Senator Derazzo. Here. Senator Newman. Here. Senator Newman. Here. Senator Seyarto. Here. Senator Seyarto. Here. We have a quorum.

Thank you. Today's subcommittee hearing will cover seven issues related to the Senate's protect our progress plan for labor and workforce development. On April 26, the Senate Democratic Caucus released their hour protect our Progress plan that included broad outlines for budget priorities for 2023-2024 and beyond. The plan for labor and workforce development reflects our commitment to many under resourced and underrepresented workers throughout California, even during fiscal times.

It is our responsibility to continue investing in workers, working men and women, across various industries because they are the backbone of California's economy. We look forward to our continued collaboration with the Administration and the Assembly as we reach a final budget agreement that I hope includes these priorities. We have representatives from our stakeholder and advocacy communities, as well as Department of Finance, Legislative Analyst Office, Labor Agency, Workforce Development Board, Department of Industrial Relations and Employment Development Department. Sorry. Okay. Now let's begin with issue one.

We have a panel of presentations. Doug Bloch, strategic advisor for UC Berkeley Labor Center, Derek Kirk, Assistant Deputy Secretary, for Labor Workforce Development Agency and Tim Rainey, Executive Director, California Workforce Development Board. If you would all come up. Yes. Thank you. Good morning. And any particular order that you all prefer, Mr. Block? Okay. Is this order? Okay, Mr. Block, then Mr. Kirk, and then Mr. Rainey.

Thank you. Hi. Okay.

Thank you, Senator Durazo, for the opportunity to speak this morning. As mentioned, I'm a strategic advisor to the UC Berkeley Labor center, the California Workforce Development Board, the US Department of Energy and many labor unions on high road procurement tools. I had the privilege to serve as one of Governor Newsom's labor appointees on the future of Work Commission under the direction of then California Labor Secretary Julie Sue. Our 2021 report recommended, and I quote, linking state spending to quality job creation with accountability and transparency.

It went on to note that state procurement contracts, tax expenditures and workforce development funding are among the important levers that the state may utilize with her support him. Rainey was able to negotiate MOUs with several state agencies to begin using those levers to achieve the governor's vision of a California for all. When she made the jump to the Biden Administration, she built upon our foundation.

So let me talk about how this is playing out at the Federal Government now, because I think it's very instructive for what we can do here. We all know that the IJA and the IRA alone represent nearly $2 trillion in climate and infrastructure investments, and these include direct funding, loans, tax credits and rebates. President Biden and his agency heads are very clear. They also want to use those investments to create good union jobs, especially for people in disadvantaged communities.

As a baseline, these infrastructure investments include prevailing wage and apprenticeship requirements that all California agencies have experience with. Beyond that, federal agencies are employing high road procurement tools such as project labor agreements and community workforce agreements that include local hire pathways to work for the formerly incarcerated, pre apprenticeships, disadvantaged business enterprises and more. Again, these are familiar concepts to us here in California, and all of this is governed under MOU. Similar to what we have, these partnerships draw on strengths and experience of the different agencies.

For example, energy recognizes they're good on climate issues, but they need labor to help develop and enforce the standards. It's not a one size fits all approach, as each agency is free to develop their own standards based on a set of tools and I'll wrap up in a minute. There are a few core principles across all the agencies that I think we all agree on. Living wages with family sustaining benefits, diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, worker empowerment and representation, job security and opportunities for advancement.

The Federal Government gave us a lot of discretion for what we do with the money once it gets here. And of course, we have a lot of discretion with our own budget, so we need to support the deep discussions the workforce Development Board is leading with our state agencies. It's new industrial policy. We began this work. The Biden Administration took it to the next level. But now all eyes are on us and it's time for us to lead in the creation of a new energy economy.

Thank you.

Good morning, Madam Chair and Members. My name is Derek Kirk. I am the newly appointed Assistant Deputy Secretary of Climate for the Labor and Workforce Development Agency. My role, established in 2022 by the Governor and Legislature, is to ensure that the labor agency is actively engaged with our partners leading California's climate action agenda.

This includes working to ensure that California's workforce is being prioritized as part of our climate agenda, as well as to ensure that we are investing in training opportunities in new climate related fields that will lead to high quality jobs.

I also work to support our four distinct workforce development entities, the workforce Services branch within EDD, the Employment Training Panel, the California Workforce Development Board, and the Division of Apprenticeship standards within DLR as they each work to carry out the climate action vision of the Governor and the Legislature. I want to specifically make mention of the recently submitted report mandated by SB 154 regarding the application of the high road standard to programs within the department's boards and panels under the labor agency.

The Legislature and the Governor defined the high road standard as a set of economic and workforce development strategies to achieve economic growth, economic equity, shared prosperity, and a clean environment. These strategies can include, but aren't limited to, interventions that improve job quality and access, including for women and people from underserved and underrepresented populations, meet the skill and profitability needs of employers, and meet the economic, social and environmental needs of the community.

As noted in the report, the labor agency has taken seriously the opportunity to incorporate these strategies into each of the programs we have facilitated in the last budget year, recognizing the impact that they may have on the lives of Californians. We look forward to continuing to work with the Legislature to ensure that the future funded programs continue to deploy the strategies outlined within the high road standard. Thank you and I look forward to your questions.

Chair Durazo, Senators, thank you so much for allowing us to be here. It's an honor. I did want to say that Mr. Bloch and I had to coordinate what we were wearing today because yesterday we showed up wearing the exact same outfit at the port of Los Angeles and people couldn't tell us apart. So, we went out of our way. To be sure, the yellow tie is twins. Our mother dresses us like twins. It's really tough.

The California Workforce Development Board, as you know, has been expanding the high road training partnership initiative for years. These are industry based, regional coalitions with companies, organized labor, community based organizations, local workforce boards in most cases, community colleges in most cases, and schools committed to the goals of quality jobs, equity and climate resilience. Understanding that job quality and equity are inseparable. You can't achieve equity if you don't pay attention to job quality.

You can't push people who are marginalized, who don't have good jobs now, who are working poor into poor, high turnover, Low paying jobs. So to us, equity and quality of job is inextricably linked. We've expanded this work quickly over a short time. Started with just eight projects in healthcare, hospitality, janitorial, water utilities, goods movement and transit.

We've got 56 projects now across the State of California, including ev charging, forestry, electric bus manufacturing, offshore wind, oil, well capping, utility tree clearance across the entire state, reducing the potential and the ferocity of wildfire and a bunch of others. Broadband is another. I've got a whole list, 56 projects. We have 13 regional coalitions in addition to those focused on the construction sector, high road construction careers. These are creating pathways to good jobs in the trades for women, justice involved, and other marginalized workers and communities.

And we'll have north of 80 projects in the next couple of years with our high road training partnership funds. So we're covering most of the state and we're building these coalitions in every corner of California. The intent is to shape labor markets, shape how companies and whole industries recruit, hire, train, promote and retain workers, and scale that work across every critical sector, especially those that are impacted by climate and workers and communities who are impacted by climate change.

Workforce training is important, but it's not enough on its own. What really works is when we build and manufacture stuff with the intent, the purpose of impacting employment, not as a secondary thing, but as the primary purpose, we use these powerful government levers, procurement and contracting, government procurement and contracting to reduce carbon in critical industry sectors.

What we're saying is, and we do this by shaping markets, we can use that same logic, that same intentionality to advancing economic equity in those same sectors and impacting poverty to actualize these goals. We build these high road training partnerships on the ground aligned with state policy. So the way we put language into contracts and procurement is queuing up the potential of pulling people from disadvantaged communities into good quality jobs all over the state. So policy and program comes together in a very direct way.

It's economic development, it's industrial policy. Some people call it that. To wrap up. There's no one size fits all. As my colleague Mr. Bloch said, when it comes to procurement and contracting standards, there are hundreds of state infrastructure programs, including those in the Federal Jobs Act. IRA and chips, each agency, each Department in each program is different. The standards actually could be fairly consistent, but the application of those will vary a lot across those programs.

That's why we're working very me with the Energy Commission, Caltrans with the Department of General Services and other departments through what we call the high Road Climate Action Partnership. The climate agency partnership, excuse me, HRCAP, advising on high road, sector based workforce projects how different solicitations can be designed to maximize quality and employment and then pull from high road projects on the ground people into good quality jobs that those projects are intended to serve.

In this way, we get to the good jobs, we get to equity, while also addressing the demand for new workers driven by the federal investments. Thank you.

Thank you. Okay, I'll start with my colleagues.

Thank you everybody, for being here. And so, Mr. Rainey, good to see you. I would not have confused you with Mr. Bloch, but I have such a keen eye. But Mr. Kirk, it is awesome to see you. And we knew each other when we were both younger. It's nice to be here.

So, I remember, Mr. Randy, we had a briefing earlier in the year, maybe it was last year, about the port and about goods movement, and thought that was a great example of how the High Roads program should work. My question is actually specifically about as we talk about skills development and market alignment and education, what's the current role and relationship with the community college system as it relates to some of the work that you're doing or considering?

That's an excellent question, and I don't mean to be coy about this. We did sort of intend, with high road training partnerships to stand up a system based on the hybrid principles, but also structured in a way that we knew would work, impact the populations we want to impact. That scaled up, as I pointed out, pretty tremendously across the state, it's now become an attractor for not just community colleges, but also workforce boards. So there's a big system change component to this work.

Colleges are involved in every one of our high road construction curves projects. They're involved in most of our high road training partnership projects. Same is true with local workforce development boards and a lot of schools. So we're pulling them into a way of doing workforce development that has greater impact. It's sector based, but it has the commitment to these principles of quality jobs, equity and climate resilience.

So we're really thrilled with a partnership with the Chancellor's Office, which is co investing in this work with us across the state. And having colleges play a really important role of removing barriers to employment for the people who are going through these programs and getting connected to jobs in these sectors that have really great opportunities for employment. We have Lumina foundation money.

In fact, now that we're using in collaboration with the chancellor's office to work on math remediation skills for pre apprenticeships so that they can enter the trades, a big part of this is choice. They can enter the trades in crafts that require pretty high levels of math. So that's one specific way we're collaborating with the colleges it's a great partnership.

And I appreciate that. It's no small thing when you consider this big state, 116 schools. I'm also the Chair of Education. When you think about the community college's role, it's sort of a dual role. One is workforce preparation. The other is pipeline to four-year degrees. And so, this is exciting, right? It's headed in the right direction, but obviously not a simple thing by any means. And then you have academic Senate that has to be involved as well.

So if that Committee, if the ED Committee can be helpful in that, I'm glad to organize resources to be part of that conversation.

I'd love that. And I don't think it needs to be an either or. I think you can go into the trades and actually keep a foot in the higher education system. And we're also working with the chancellor's office to get credit for the MC three curriculum, which we use in pre apprenticeship. It, number one, gets people on campuses, which is really important, but it also gives them credit. And we know you hit a tipping point with credit that you're going to pursue further higher education.

So for us, this collaboration is also creating an opportunity where the trades may not be the only path for you long term.

Yeah. And as the world changes, I think that is eminently true. So I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you all for you.

So thank you for being here and explaining what each of your roles are in trying to address some of our labor issues in the state. I'm a big believer in the workforce development because it's supposed to connect with who? The community, people in the community that are offering jobs with the training that's necessary to fill those jobs, because it's different in different regions.

My question is, as they're going through, because we have a huge emphasis on the high roads concept, as the students are going through, not all of them are going to become union Members. They're not all going to. Is the participation for the community businesses? Are we steering them away from non-union businesses versus union labor businesses? Is that the economic equity part of this? I'm trying to get a grasp on that concept, that economic equity. What's the definition of that?

Because it seems to be different for different people. So maybe you could give me an idea of where these students are going afterwards. And if anybody is being excluded, because if we're excluding portions, because they're not part of the definition of what we thought is high roads, then that's not economic equity for them.

Right.

That would be unequity. And plus, if we're creating failures for smaller businesses that can't afford to meet all the criteria for the high roads definitions. When they fail, we fail because we have less people that are out there working. So if you could give me an idea what that means to you guys, I'd appreciate it.

Well, I think we're seeing some really good examples from the US Department of Energy. And again, this is about agencies having tools to achieve their equity goals. And that could include contracting with small and local businesses. It depends on how each agency wants to structure the solicitations as they're pushing out money. And so, the Department of Energy is really encouraging applicants to come forward with plans that include contracting with small and local businesses. And again, those may not be union jobs.

At the same time, they're encouraging applicants to come forward with plans to run people through apprenticeship programs and also get community college credit. To Senator Newman's question, there could be things like project labor agreements. There could be agreements with tribal agencies under this. It's. And this is the work we're doing now with some of the state agencies is looking at their individual solicitations and offering them tools to achieve whatever outcomes they want.

And that could include supporting local small businesses, which are an important engine of our economy.

Local small businesses also have different needs, and not just needs, but they have different abilities as far as the economic part of it, especially smaller startup businesses where I've read some of the definitions of our High Road, they can't possibly survive and do that. And if they're being excluded from a process that is trying to get labor into the world, they're going to fail.

That's my concern, is that while we're really focused on the high road for all and everybody has to jump on board or you're going to be cast aside. Well, those cast asides can add up. And adding up means a lot of people that don't have jobs don't have the security. And when they don't have that, we don't have the population anymore, because, frankly, they just leave the state. And a lot of people are doing that right now.

Senator, we don't exclude any businesses from the high road training Partnership grant Fund. We encourage all companies to apply, but we want companies to come with coalitions. We want them to come in with workforce boards and colleges. We want them to come in with community based organizations that could reach into communities that we really want to impact, because we're trying to create pathways to really good quality jobs for people who most need those jobs.

The way the high road training Partnership grant program is set up is it's kind of turning the workforce system upside down a bit. Traditionally, we give people the wherewithal we think they need to be competitive out there in the world, in labor markets, and they sort of fend for themselves. And if they get it, they attach to a job. We kind of write it down as a tick. We check that box, there's a placement.

We're a little bit agnostic to, agnostic about what the wages are and what the job quality is. So the way we've turned it upside down is we're looking for companies that really do work good by their workers. They pay good wages, they provide benefits, they comply with state labor and employment law, they invest in skills training. And if they can't, they come in with a coalition and they apply for our funds. They will have job training money. Economic mobility is a big deal.

So every company in California is eligible to apply if they meet kind of basic standards for good quality. The other thing is we don't expect applicants to come in having all the pillars of high road dialed. What we want to do is have the intentionality around high road. They could come in and work with us through our communities of practice and our technical assistance. We provide and kind of move along that Continuum.

And we've seen small businesses around the state come to us, especially now, saying we're having a really hard time finding workers. We need your help. And they're going to local boards and colleges asking this question. And what they're figuring out on their own is that if we improve the quality of our jobs, we'll attract more applicants and we'll retain more workers if we improve the quality of our jobs. And the state's here to help you do that through the hybrid training Partnership Grant Fund.

I think what we want to do at the end of the day is say to companies in California that if you're doing right by workers, we care about your business, we care about your industry, and we want to lift you up. We want to Fund you. But I think we can say at the same time, there are companies that are exploiting workers. We know that in certain sectors, we want to lock those out of public subsidies and focus on the good companies.

That's the intention behind high road training partnerships.

I think one thing really important to remember is that public subsidies, grants and all those, those are actually public dollars, and they are derived from tax money that is collected from those very businesses that we're saying go through this process. If you don't qualify, we're not helping you with our public dollars, that's their dollars. And we need to remember that everybody needs help. If everybody is successful, everybody will have a slice of the pie.

But if we're cutting people out, trying to engineer a workforce program according to some standards that a lot of people just can't meet financially, and if they can't, they're going to fail. Because I think 90% of the businesses that you go out there think they're treating their workers well or as well as they can.

And if that's not the standard that is set and therefore they're excluded from the program via just not being able to go through the application process or get there, they're still being excluded. And I think we have to be very careful with that because if we lose those type of businesses, we're going to have a bigger workforce shortage.

We'll have a workplace shortage, no place for them to work, as opposed to what we have now, which is we have lots of places to work, but nobody wants to work or nobody's filling those jobs because they have different ideas of what they want for a job. So, thank you so much for your comments. I super appreciate it.

Thank you.

Okay. Thank you. Just along, you mentioned the principles, the common principles. Even though those principles can be applied differently and sector by sector, you sort of threw out quickly some of those sectors that you have experience now with, the high road and high road, meaning we do want people to have sustainable wages, a sustainable climate, and everybody work in the same direction, and everybody doesn't have to apply for these particular programs.

There are a lot of other programs out there, but this one, we want to make sure that it leads to good jobs, good paying jobs. And that's where I get the connection between having a good paying job and an underrepresented community that's never had access to good middle class wages and benefits.

But if you could maybe just take a couple of minutes onto what those common principles are that you look towards with employers, with employers, with the workforce board, with whoever the partners are that you're dealing with. Because I think that's important to understand for this kind of program, it's a high road. It has certain principles. If you believe in those principles, then you'll apply for the benefits that come with it.

And if you can, maybe you can do it by virtue of a particular example of where and how this was set up.

Sure. Yeah. We may do a tag team on this, maybe transportation, construction. I'll take construction as an example sector, because there's been a lot of work done there in setting standards, and they're really important tools. I think they get a job quality. As you know, most of the jobs that are going to be driven by the federal investments, the Jobs act and chips and Ira will be in the construction sector. It'll be traditional trades jobs.

And most of the apprentices that we have in California are actually in joint labor management apprenticeship programs. 92%, the vast majority. So when this stuff gets built, as we invest, the feds and US invest, those workers are going to be dispatched from hiring halls all across the state from a variety of different trades. We have in construction already prevailing wage and apprenticeship utilization. It's a very important. Not every state I learned does this, but we have apprenticeship utilization.

We also have project labor agreements that are very common and I think have the potential of impacting the equity goals that we want to drive. A project labor agreement with those kind of social benefits is called the community Workforce agreement. And we've seen this. It's targeted local hire, or it's targeted higher or local hire, because I think they're really different. Local hires around zip codes, targeted hires around populations.

And it directs investments to hire Californians, which is really important to this work, and keep wages in the communities where we build stuff. So that's a standard that I think applies across the board, but especially in construction. In the context of these Committee workforce agreements, you can also identify the hydro construction curse programs as the place you're going to draw new apprentices from. In those programs, we focus on equity.

So, women, people who are formerly incarcerated, who are justice involved, are well represented in our pre-construction training programs. And you can draw from those if you build that into the project labor agreement through the community workforce agreement approach. The high-speed Rail authority does this. There's a 30% of hours that's stipulated in that community workforce agreement that pulls workers from a targeted national hire. There's also the transformative climate communities, which is through OPR, that does the same. There's a community workforce agreement there.

DGS has done this for all of the state building construction in Sacramento, including the one we're in the Capitol and also at Richards Boulevard, has a community workforce agreement in there that sets requirements for targeted higher, for women formerly incarcerated and other populations drawing from the high road construction careers and CBOs around the Sacramento region. So, we start to see that diversity develop in the trades as we build stuff, as we invest the people's money.

So those are examples in construction, but there are others in other sectors that I think are worth mentioning.

And on those principles, I think we all pride ourselves. California is absolutely the leader on climate policy out of any state in the country. But for the first time that I can remember, we're actually behind the Federal Government on labor standards. And I referred to these good jobs principles that the Department of Labor put out and that are now incorporated into these MOUs with the different federal agencies. And I'll go over these again. I appreciate the question.

Living wages with family sustaining benefits, diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, worker empowerment and representation, job security and opportunities for advancement.

And we appreciated the last hearing that you held with Senator Cortese and heard an amazing story from a company in Livermore called Gillig which outgrew its factory in Hayward after 50 years and was offered subsidies from every state in the union to move out of California and chose to stay here because they wanted to retain the 700 teamsters and nearly 100 painter and allied trades workers that build their buses. 100% made in the USA.

The CEO talked about paying starting wages of $40 an hour, fully paid family health insurance and a pension. And this is one of these places where you will have a dad on the Assembly line working next to his dad and his son. These stories we haven't heard since we were kids. Well, Gillig received California competes tax credits to build their new State of the art factory.

They received a nearly $30 million California Energy Commission grant to help develop the next generation of battery electric buses to fight the climate crisis. And they just received a half a million HRTP grant to do planning to develop a training program to not only train people to build the buses, but to train mechanics from agencies all around the State of California to repair these buses. And those are ATU Members. And I think that's a good example that's also happening at BYD in Southern California.

There's a lot of really good high road stuff happening in the transportation sector.

I look forward to the expansion into other sectors. You mentioned about going just numerically from 56 to 80 projects and different industries. We know, for example, there's a lot of support for the entertainment industry and I think all the elements could be there or should be there to expand the recruitment from underrepresented communities that would definitely work in the entertainment industry. Good high paying jobs with benefits and all sorts of things to look forward to.

So is that an example of a sector that's already doing high road or do we need to recruit them to join the high road?

I think they just did.

Okay.

Yeah, I think they've got a proposal in that we're reviewing now, and it is a sector, I think, that's ready made for the high road model. The nice thing about the sector is you've got a lot of different employers, and what they need is kind of a hub, like a hub spoke model that can recruit people from the community, again, who would better reflect the demographics of Los Angeles into this industry.

So they need a center, and this is what I think they're looking to Fund that will provide the training. And then really, almost like the trades, is dispatch workers to different employers in the entertainment industry. So I think what they're coming up with is really important, not just for equity, but also for supporting the companies in the industry, which is going through a lot of changes.

You well know, Mr. Kirk, you mentioned, because you're doing with climate, if you can just chime in here with either example of what's coming or how you think this high road approach will work.

Yeah.

Thank you for the question, Senator. I think that there's a lot of opportunity in the climate space. As the Governor and the Legislature have both said, California takes an all of the above approach to the ways in which we apply climate change mitigation and really climate action to the work that we're doing.

We take that seriously at the labor agency and with all of our departments and are working diligently with other agencies, like the California Energy Commission on the future of offshore wind, with the critical minerals space down in the Inland Empire and the southern border regions, to identify ways that as these new industries are emerging, that we're able to walk alongside of the communities and the employers and the industry and the workers to develop systems in a really positive way from the get go, rather than trying to come along behind them to change the systems that are already in place.

I think that will allow us a really unique opportunity to ensure we aren't excluding people, that we are building an industry and building communities in really appropriate ways.

Great. I just have, Mr. Rainey, I think with regards, since this is the Budget Committee, there was for the HRTP and Health and human services funding included. Has the funding in the current year been appropriated on that, and how much and will it be dispersed before the next budget year?

Yeah, so it was $135 million over three years, and the first tranche of funding, we divided up equally $45 million in the first year that's been allocated. So, we've awarded 13 projects and we're working on finalizing the contract so we can disperse those dollars really soon. So, the work has been done on the first tranche of money.

We're actually into the second tranche now because we accept applications all the time on a quarterly basis, and we have enough project, more than enough projects now that are good to burn down that second tranche of funding. And, of course, we can't spend that money until the budget is enacted and until we work with the state controller to release the funds. But we've already reviewed enough really great applications for funding that exceeds the second tranche of funding.

The third one in 24-25 will probably burn into that also before we get to that year, because there's just so much demand for this work out there that the funding is not going to keep up. It's exciting, but it's also like, holy cow, there's a great deal of demand, and this is terrific work.

That's great because it's got all the pieces that we want in it. And then, Mr. Rainey, if you could tell us about the implementation of AB 181 and SB 674.

Sure.

That's our buses, right?

Electric buses, yes. We're working with Department of General Services now, so they've invited us into conversations about how to look at their own solicitations for that, and they're asking us for advice on the workforce. So just the kind of relationship we have with the Energy Commission and with the CPUC and others, we're sitting down at the table and working through how they get the best workforce impacts from their dollars. And, of course, a lot of that's spelled out in the budget language and also in 674.

So we have real nice guidance on what standards to put in there. So a lot of that conversation is going to be about how you apply that in the different programs, in the language for the solicitation, and then tracking those outcomes, which is a big part of what the Committee is asking for.

Okay. And I'll just end on this. Having come out of the hotel and restaurant industry, we tried with employers several times to how do we come up with a training program that's really going to up the skills that are needed and to recruit more diversity into the industry? I know people think of the industry as already being diverse, but in several sectors, it was far from being diverse.

But what really made a difference, and we tried with different partners, community colleges and others, but what really made the difference in terms of recruiting and the training, the desire to do the training and to stick with the training, was that they were going to have a good job at the end.

That's right.

A good paying job. And without that, we found that we could work with other partners, and that was great. Maybe in the initial recruitment into the program, maybe they stay through the training, but then the word gets out that you're left out there hanging and you don't have a good job, and that's not a good place to be. We waste a lot of money that way. So I appreciate that there know all the pieces here.

And I think the hospitality training academy is doing fantastic and really getting just hundreds of people trained, like you said, from sectors that have been underrepresented in the past. Okay. Any final words before we move on? Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. We'll go on to issue two, which is the California youth leadership program. You're sticking around?

I reckon I'll stay.

Okay. Mr. Toppin. Mr. Toppin. Mr. March. Mr. Alamo. Mr. Rainey. Ms. Garcia. I think that's via Zoom. And Ms. Carrillo? Also, via Zoom. Right. Okay. So, is that the order? We should do it.

Okay.

All right, Mr. Toppin, you go first.

Thank you for issue two. So, yes, discussing the proposed reductions to the California Youth Leadership Corp. Program, the Budget Act of 2022 included 60 million over three years for those pathways for the California Workforce Development Board. The Governor's Budget proposes to withdraw 10 million in 23-24 and 10 million in 2425 as part of the proposed budget solutions and includes those reductions in the proposed trigger that would restore that funding should there be sufficient General Fund next year.

Okay, Mr. March, anything to add to that?

Andrew March and Department of Finance. Nothing to add right now, but happy to answer questions.

Okay. Mr. Alamo.

It's challenging.

Make it challenging.

Very good. Good morning. Alamo with the Legislative Analyst Office.

Chaz Allen with the Legislative Analyst Office. There. That works better. Thank you, Madam Chair. As you know, the Senate budget plan does include a continuation of the funding for this proposal at the amount that was included in last year's budget act. Happy to answer any questions specifically related to that or the governor's proposal or anything else. Thanks.

Okay, great. Thank you. And then we'll move on to Mr. Rainey.

Yeah, I know Rosa is on the line, and I think she'll have a chance to explain the program, so I won't try that because she's much more articulate about that. But again, it was three tranches of funding. The first tranche, $20 million, we've already put out to the California Youth Leadership Corps, actually through Emerald cities, which is the grantee on behalf of the CYLC, to do the program work.

We're in the process of executing that contract and releasing the dollars to the program, and I think they're primed to start getting the work done. This is actually building on a model that started a couple of years ago. So the funding came and they hit the ground running. So the second two tranches of funding would be reduced by $10 million each, given the budget.

Okay, we'll come back. Ms. Garcia, I know you're on Zoom. Go ahead.

Hello, everybody. So, my name is Rosa Garcia. I'm Executive Director, California Youth Leadership Corps and the Community Learning Partnership. Chairwoman Durazo and Members of the Committee, it's an honor for me to join you today. Thank you for your extraordinary commitment to serving and empowering marginalized students and communities across California. At a time when many are questioning the value and strength of our nation's democracy, it is imperative that our nation and state do more to civically engage and empower historically marginalized youth.

CYLC has tapped into the desires of young people to tackle critical issues such as racial and economic justice, climate change, public and community health, immigration, and much more in order to create positive change in their local communities, thereby strengthening their ability to participate in the nation's democratic institutions and to help foster a more equitable and inclusive democracy. First, I want to begin by urging this Committee to restore the $20 million cut for California Youth Leadership Corps in the governor's proposed budget.

CYLC has developed a unique, holistic, cohort based model that prepares marginalized youth with experience in community organizing, leadership and advocacy skills, and the post secondary credentials necessary to assume leadership roles as organizers, change agents, and nonprofit leaders. Integral to this model are intensive and holistic supports to promote college and persistence completion. Those enrolled in these community change, learn and earn career pathways receive robust supports including academic and social emotional supports, career coaching, leadership development, and mentoring.

To be clear, this budget reduction is a threat to the success of CYLC because it would eliminate CYLC programs by half in budget years 23-24 and 24-25 right at a time when we are reaching our maximum impact.

This budget cut would deny scores of historically marginalized students, young people who are eager to make a difference in their communities with an opportunity to access these pathways, increase their economic security, receive critical supports to succeed in college and the workforce, and to improve their overall health and well being. For the past two years, in collaboration with our partners, CYLC has worked tirelessly to pilot and ramp up community change, learn, and earn career pathways across the state.

I am pleased to share that we have formal partnerships with Deanza College, East Los Angeles College, Los Angeles Trade Tech College, Los Angeles Mission College, Fresno City College, Riverside City College, and San Bernardino Valley College. In addition, three community colleges located or near underserved communities have expressed interest in participating in CYLC. We are currently in conversation with these campuses to bring them on board. Our community college partnerships have allowed us to make substantial progress.

We have created teams with college faculty and staff to build out the components of CYLC. First, we have worked with campuses to adjust our academic programming. Second, our CYLC pilots have developed their work based learning internships and have identified over 75 base community partners. And third, we are continuing work to work with partners to develop intensive and holistic student supports, leadership development activities, and mentoring. Most recently, CYLC has worked with its national partners to launch a community based immigration legal services career pathway.

This pathway would expand the number of well trained legal advocates, practitioners, paralegals, legal assistants, and nonprofit leaders in underserved immigrant communities. This partnership includes the Catholic Legal Immigration network known as Clinic CDSs, community based immigration legal services organizations that are recognized by the US Department of Justice, and selected community colleges. Given the student demand for this pilot, CYLC intends to expand this pathway to other immigrant communities across the state.

With current year funding, CYLC has also been working to build partnerships with language justice advocates, interpreter training providers, and CBOs led by indigenous migrant leaders to co create a language justice career pathway, which would increase the number of qualified interpreters in immigrant communities. As I mentioned previously, a budget cut of 20 million would eliminate community college partnerships and the students they serve by half and undermine our progress and commitments. It would adversely impact our ability to offer these pathways to over 580 students.

The reduction in funding would clearly impact the overall income, outcomes and sustainability of this initiative. Since the inception of CYLC, we have served over 150 students. I am pleased to report that CyLC launched all five community college partnerships and we have begun all activities for these programs. We expect to serve 583 students and partner with 20 community college partners. With current year funding funding over the three year period, we plan to serve 1750 students.

CYLC did experience administrative and bureaucratic delays and challenges related to the pandemic. For example, it took longer than anticipated to have MOUs approved departmental contracts processed and executed, and to develop a process for onboarding and facilitating payments to CYLC student interns. However, we have worked with our partners to resolve many of these issues. Our teams are excited and actively planning, recruiting, and interviewing students to participate in CYLC with current year funding.

As I close, I want to share that there is interest from our colleagues nationally to replicate CYLC in at least nine other states. As you are aware, California has a reputation for leading the nation in developing innovative models to address some of the most pressing issues of our time. We believe that CYLC is one of those transformational models. Thank you for inviting me to testify today.

We are grateful to the Committee for Supporting Critical investments for CYLC, and I urge you to restore funding for 20 million in the governor's proposed budget. My colleague Brenda Carrillo, our program lead for CYLC Denza will speak to the impact of our work thus far. Thank you very much.

Thank you. And if we could keep it to a few minutes. Ms. Carrio, thank you. Welcome.

Thank you. So esteemed Chairwoman Durazo and Members of the Senate. Today I stand before you with a sense of purpose and urgency. I'm here to advocate for something that can make a difference in the lives of countless young people in California. I'm here to ask you for your support in reinstating the $20 million budget allocation for the CYLC program. My name is Brenda Carrillo and I'm the program lead for CYLC at Denza College.

For the past two years, I've had the privilege of working with some of the most inspiring individuals in our community. They come from non traditional backgrounds, including first generation individuals, people with disabilities, people with immigrant backgrounds, student parents, former foster care youth, and formerly incarcerated individuals. I stand before you as an immigrant, a queer person, a disability student who shares many of their experiences.

Through my involvement with CyLC, I have witnessed the awe inspiring, life changing impact that providing young people with a platform to tap into their inner power can have. These individuals have lived through unimaginable struggles and have emerged from them with an unrelenting drive to make a positive difference in their lives and the lives of others. They are now more determined than ever to create a positive change in our community. They have so much to share, so much wisdom and perspective on what affects our communities directly.

Yet they have never had a chance to be heard, to be believed, or to be valued for everything they are, and not just seen as everything that they lack. I'm here today to ask you to give these young people the chance, as you heard from our Executive Director, the CYLC program was created to prepare the next generation of young people to become community organizers. But what does that look like?

Through the program, we not only provide the space for individuals to develop leadership skills and engage in community organizing, but we create a space to foster their personal growth and generate healing. The program has been transformative in engaging people who might not have been in higher education before by having them go through the courses in a cohort model. But not just any cohort. A cohort that consists of a wide range of lived experiences.

Experiences that help affirm their lives, their identities, and their struggle as something that are systemic and not something that is inherently predetermined due to who they are, where they come from, or what they look like. Investing in CYLC is investing in real people, people who want to create lasting change, change that is radical, change that centers their voices, which is what we need to move forward, not just for the sake of results or numbers, but in the efforts to truly heal our communities.

People can't leave their experiences, their traumas.

Hello?

She's gone. She's gone.

Frozen.

She's over there, but not over there. I've never understood why they can't see. There should be screens up here.

We'll try to get her back on. Meanwhile, we'll move on. Okay? Right. Okay. All right. Colleagues, questions or comments? Anything? No. Okay, I just have a couple of them. To Department of Finance. What were the issues that led or determined this program to reduce the amount or eliminate the amount? I'm not sure. The terminology now.

Yeah. Thank you, chair. So, the reductions, sort of, as mentioned throughout, sort of the Governor's Budget documents, and we've brought it up in previous hearings, sort of two, the overall strategy sort of reflect reductions to one time and limited term investments from the previous few budget acts with the intent of preserving the core departmental programs and services without touching the state's budget reserves. And so given sort of the multi year funding available for this, that's sort of what made this considered for the reduction.

And either you and or Mr. Rainey has the funding in the current year been appropriated. How much? And will all the funding be dispersed before the next budget year?

Yes, Senator, the first tranche of money was allocated. Actually, the contract was executed. We're just waiting now for the disbursement of the funds which we work with the state controller on. So that 1st $20 million is going to go out really soon.

So that'll be dispersed?

Yes, that's correct.

It'll all be dispersed. And maybe. Mr. Rainier, Ms. Garcia, what would be the impact on the program and the outcomes if this funding was reduced? If you give some short answers, please.

I'm sure it would reduce our programs by half, so it would interrupt the work. So we're very concerned about that.

Anything else, Mr. Rainey?

Yeah, it was divided into three chunks of funds, equal amounts. In the first year, they're going to serve 583 students. So that's with the full $20 million. In the second and third years, that number of students will have to be reduced by half because the money was reduced by half in the second two years.

Okay. All right, I think I have that. Is there anyone want to give a final? No? Okay. Well, we appreciate you all very much. Thank you for presenting on this program. Thank you, Ms. Carrillo, and sorry you dropped out. And thank you, Ms. Garcia, for all the work that you do with our youth. Appreciate you very much. Okay, we're moving on now to issue three, which is women in construction priority.

Mr. Toppin, Mr. March, Mr. Alamo, Adele Burns division, apprenticeship standards, and Meg Basie, Executive Director of Trades Women. Please come on up here and join us. Okay.

It does. Mr. Toppin or Mr. March, who wants to share?

I'll take this.

Wants to give us the good news.

Thank you. Chair issue three, the Patrick Toppin, Department of Finance. The proposed reductions to the women in construction priority unit. The Budget Act of 2022 included $15 million in ongoing General Fund and trailer Bill Language and established the Women in Construction Unit at the Department of Industrial Relations. And of course, built on the 2021 investment of $15 million for a Woman in Construction Priority initiative. The 2023 Governor's Budget poses to pause that funding for two years, subject to the restoration of the trigger.

Okay, nothing, Mr. March.

Nothing to add, but happy to answer questions.

Okay.

Mr. Alamo again, Chaz Alamo with the Legislative Analyst Office. Similar to the last item that you heard, the Senate plan, as you know, proposes to continue the funding level, ongoing at $15 million a year without the pause that was proposed in the Governor's Budget.

Okay, thank you.

And now, Ms. Burns, I'm here to provide any additional updates that would be helpful and to answer any questions. So if you'd like to hear a little bit more. Very happy to share the microphone with Meg.

Okay, Ms. Vasey.

Thank you. My name is Meg Vasey. I'm the Executive Director of Tradeswoman, Inc. We serve all of California, but primarily direct services from Bakersfield north. But we have strong partnerships in Southern California and Women in Construction is sort of my life's work.

I started as an apprentice electrician in about 1979 and have worked my way through with the tools until 1998, when I took a turn and went to law school as part of the career development and the opportunities that exist for people in blue collar work that can go on in the future. I would like to say that I was able to make that change because I had a strong economic backing and had put my family on firm footing.

That allowed me to go return to school and take the role I now take in terms of trying to represent more diversity, particularly in construction. But for all women in the trades in California, the Women in Construction Priority Unit has a singular position in several places. You know, the. The long over the years, women in construction are still under 4% of the trade's workforce. The overall sector, maybe 10% when you include project managers, estimators, back office staff, the whole industry sector.

Still a tremendous underrepresentation given that we're 50% of the workplace. Women is the we here. But still, it's a pernicious issue. And again, the apprenticeship program and the Infrastructure Dollars are public dollars. I'm fully aware of that and appreciate and embrace that and the Women in Construction Priority unit has been an effort to really look at that gap and say we as the state have an obligation to take this on and figure it out and improve this gap, because these are high wage jobs, skilled jobs.

And that's not to say other jobs aren't skilled, but the skilled trades have a particular meaning. When I say that working with your hands, going through education, having family sustaining wages, without a college education, these are opportunities that the apprenticeship programs offer. This is their best opportunity. And the women in construction priority unit set us on the path to really grapple with this policy issue on a state basis and put funding towards solutions.

We have just started on this process and I'll refer to my colleagues here on the update on the funding situation. But I will say that putting a pause, putting this in the regular budget was a tremendous message. And it was a message that was heard not just in the State of California and from my community of tradeswomen, but it was also heard by the infrastructure funding agencies at the federal level.

They have put in the Department of Energy, commerce, Transportation, have put out competitive grants that the states are competing for, and they have put in DEI language into those grants. And this obligation on the part of the state was a part of our willingness to make this important, and it has been listened to. The Department of Labor has taken cognizance of it. The Women's Bureau is putting out this as a model for other states. It's a really important initiative that's gotten national, has a national profile.

Now a pause has two negative effects. The first is practical. We are starting really important initiatives and I can speak and I don't want to take too much of your time because I know it's a long day, but if you wish, we can tell you the initiatives that we are starting at Tradesman Inc. Under this funding that we haven't had the opportunity to do before.

And they particularly involve a contractor engagement component, which is really a missing piece of some of the other initiatives that have gone before. And I believe that we have the tools and with the funding we can make a real difference by giving contractors tools and also bringing public agencies together to look at one of the pernicious issues for maintaining women and other workers on the job site, which is the job site culture, which can be improved, but we need some tools to help people do it.

I won't go into any more of the practical pieces, but those kinds of initiatives require multi year funding. They're not a one and done. This is a difficult issue. We're at 4%. I've been in the trades over 44 years. Please, we're working on this. Let's put our shoulder to the wheel. But it's also, as I said, the message. We have put out a big message.

We put a marker on the national stage as well as in the state and to our construction industry that we're going to change this. We're going to put our shoulders to the wheel and make a change. If we put a pause on this issue, we withdraw all of that messaging. We say, zero, we really didn't mean it. We're not really trying to change anything.

We're going to let the old situation of three to 4% women in these trades and three to 4% women in the construction apprenticeships, and we're really not serious here, we would undo a tremendous amount of goodwill and positive, practical efforts that are now underway. I respectfully give my time.

Great. Wonderful colleagues. Questions or comments?

Just quickly considering this issue relative to the last issue, Ms. Basi, I think your point is well taken. We're looking at trying to make systemic change here, and it seems to me you're making a really good case for not pausing the effort. It's often hard, I think, for us, when you think about an increment. Right.

$25 million, $20 million across this big state, this big budget, and for us to think about it in terms of the return on the investment, kind of the leverage it creates and relative to other prospective uses. Right. Because clearly we have a challenge fiscally. But it does seem to me here that you are absolutely right that if we're looking to change the composition of the construction workforce and we started, we need to keep going.

And I would agree that, all things considered, this is certainly worthy of restoring these cuts. And I do appreciate your input today.

Thanks.

So thank you for coming today and helping us understand what your program, this program that you've been involved in so long is about. One of the questions I have, what would you consider success at the end of the day for a program like this? Is it to have 50% construction workers be female? Or how do we measure success while we're.

I have an anecdotal answer.

Anecdotals are fine. I have them, too.

Just to say, when I started in the trades in '79, I thought that we would never be at 50% in construction. Construction industry is hard. It's hard for everyone, men and women. It's a rough industry. You have to have a lot of grit and a lot of stick to fitness and also appreciate what it does offer, which is working outside, having a lot of Independence, a sense of self worth. I mean, it offers a lot as well as being a difficult trade.

And I appreciate and enjoyed those benefits as well. They fit my personality, but it's not for everyone. And I didn't think it was necessarily for 50% of the women in the workforce, but I did think that we would be at 10% by 1990, and maybe the sort of climax number would be around 20%.

Success in this context, I think, is one of the things that I would like the Department of Industrial Relations to have a chance to set up some measurements, to give us some background data, and then measure our progress over time, which is something that we haven't had on a sustained basis. And this would allow us to set forward those benchmarks and measure what we would really be looking at and where we could be going.

When I came into my position at Tradeswoman Inc. In 2009, there were 627 women in construction apprenticeships in the State of California. Now, I looked around Oakland, California, which is where our headquarters are, and I thought, I can find 627 women who could be good in construction work. We have tripled that number. It's not a lot, but that's something significant, and we can do that again. But it does take a focus, and it takes a plan, and we have this opportunity now. Right?

Because that's what I see. A program like this, the value in that is expanding the opportunity for people who do want to go in that field. Because if you start, here comes my anecdotal. I joined the fire service in 1980 and very much similar. We're trying desperately to diversify the fire Department workforce makeup, and we went through extraordinary lengths to try, and we tried everything to recruit and specifically females, but also more diversity from all walks of life.

And the female part of it was super difficult. And from my perspective, I have three daughters. Not one single one wanted to follow in dad's footsteps. It was more an issue of, hey, there are females out there that want this job, and it needs to be open for them when they want it, but we can't force them into it and set a goal that we'll never attain, because the desire for that type of employment is not there.

I like what your program is doing, which is opening the doors. And I rode with a female construction worker the other day on the plane home, and she was delightful, a young lady that was. She kind of moving up the ladder already, and just the type of person that needs to be doing that type of job. She just loves it, but she didn't have a lot of friends that want to do it with her.

I just want to make sure that we're focused on just opening up those opportunities like you seem to be doing, and trying to measure the success, but not thinking that if the population is this, that that's failure. If we don't hit that, because then if that's the goal and we never hit it, then people are going to think it doesn't need the funding because we're not hitting the goal. I think the program is really worthwhile and we need to ensure that.

We don't cause it to fail.

Thank you, Senator. And if I could just follow up with one short note. Appreciate the Committee's time. One of the things that we find is a lot of women don't even know these jobs exist. So the women who could be successful, which is we don't really know what that looks like because so many women have no idea that these jobs are open.

And oftentimes we find the parents of the women that we are successful with said, if only I knew when I was younger, this could have been a job for me. Now we have to test that out again.

You may think it's there for you, but as you start going forward, and I want to lift up some of the work that we have done with pre apprenticeship program training, which allows everyone, but including women particularly, to sort of see if these jobs are a fit for them and then put them on a road to success. But we don't know what that number looks like yet.

Thank you for all the work you do in there.

Thank you, sir. Go ahead.

So, Adele Burns, I'm the Deputy Chief at the Division of Apprenticeship Standards within the Department of Industrial Relations. And just to add to the conversation a little bit around the goals. So, as Meg mentioned, we've been sort of bumping along at three to 4% women in construction for 20 years, I think. But I think also in terms of thinking about the goals that we set, everything's relative. Right? And if we look to other states, the percentage is higher.

In some other states, like in Washington, they've been doing some really interesting things and I think the percentage in Washington is closer to, like, 11 or 15%.

I don't know that.

I haven't looked recently.

Yeah, but it's a lot higher than four. Yeah, exactly. A lot higher than four. And I think that you were just sharing before this that in the. Was closer to 11%. So we know it's not systemically stuck at 4% based on the people in the industry. We know that there are things we could be doing.

And so one of the goals that's been put forth in the equal employment and opportunity Committee of the California Apprenticeship Council is to, over the next three years, try to double that 4%. So it's something we're putting out there. Obviously, there have been some funds put towards it, but we feel like if we zoom out both historically and geographically, we can see that it's thoroughly attainable in other times and labor markets. So why can't we at least aspire for that?

Please?

I just want to agree kind of forcefully with both of your comments. Right. Everything is relative, but there's, I think, a good saying that you can't be it if you don't see it and to Senator Ciara's points, we need to open doors. But there really is a challenge in exposing people, opportunities in a state this big, this diverse, and then conveying to them that these are possibilities, especially during that point in your development, your schooling, when you're best suited to join these industries.

And so we haven't really done that very well. Again, $15 million is a lot of money to me personally, but with respect to the investment, it's a very small investment for this very valid effort. I think to pause it again would not only be unfortunate in the short term, it also defeats some of the work that you've done to this point, and that continuity is super important as we build on those investments.

So I know the chair shares my sentiment, but I really do appreciate you being here today.

Thank you, Senator.

Thank you so much. Just a couple of more questions. The funding that has been appropriated has been dispersed. Could you talk about that?

Yes, absolutely. Very happy to give that update. So, as you know, in 2021 and 2023, $15 million was allocated in each of those budget years to kick off this effort. And within the Department of Industrial Relations, we engaged in a variety of stakeholder conversations, including, of course, with Tradeswomen Inc. Winter, with that EEO Subcommitee of the CAC, and a variety of other stakeholders to really try to listen and understand how can we best utilize this funding to really move the needle and be effective.

And where we landed was that we wanted to create a grant program, which is the equal representation in construction Apprenticeship grant program. And of the $30 million received to date, $25 million of that was allocated to that grant program.

And the additional $5 million is being used to hire folks within Dir, both at Das, but actually also in the communications team in Dir, to do much of the outreach and building the movement and worker rights and all of those things that are envisioned in this Woman in Construction Priority unit. So, in terms of the grant, to come to your question about the utilization of the funds.

So the equal representation in construction apprenticeship grant, it has two parts to it, it has supportive resources for childcare, and it has outreach and community building. So those were the two categories of the grant. And we have released the solicitation, received a number of proposals, and we actually just on March 14 announced the awardees of that process. So we received 38 applications from 25 different entities because folks were applying to both categories of the funding sometimes, and we got $57 million worth of requests for funds.

And of course, in the awarding process, we strove to award funding to as many eligible entities as possible, but maybe at a slightly lower amount than they requested. So ultimately, 27 applications were awarded to 19 unique lead entities, and with eight of those entities receiving both categories of the funding. And so even though only 44% of the funds were awarded of what was requested, 76% of the entities that applied to us were able to receive the funding.

And that allowed us to spread the funding across the whole state and also across a variety of occupations in the building trades. So the final breakdown of the funding was 16.6 million, or 67% of that $25 million went towards supportive resources for childcare, and $8.3 million, or 33% of the funds went to outreach and community building. And we are currently in the contracting phase and hustling as quickly as we can.

And our goal is to have all of those funds encumbered before the end of this fiscal year. I know we're hustling. We're hustling.

We're close.

We're very close.

Take it away from you.

You better hurry up.

I know we're on it. Trust me. And we're actually in the coming week, actually, we've just sent out a few contracts and we'll be sending out a few more contracts this week to be signed. So we're very close to that finish line.

And the performance period on this is a two year performance period, and so it'll be through June 30 of 2025 is the performance period for the grant, and then that remaining 5 million from that 30 million allocated to date will be used for staffing within, like I said, within DAS and within DIR. And we have been working on the duty statements, getting the jobs posted. We have not actually hired the people, but the jobs are posted.

So again, we're getting very close to hiring folks both to help implement the grant but also to help build programs to support this incredible community of grantees, which Tradeswomen, Inc. Is a part of, and also to do a whole outreach and communications campaign around this incredible career opportunity. So that's the update on the use of the funds to date.

Okay, so really I was going to ask about participation data, but you don't have any.

We don't. We have, of course, in the reporting, we are going to be asking for exactly who are the participants that are being funded, and that's most concrete. On the supportive resources for childcare side, outreach and community building is a little bit broader in its applications. As Meg was speaking know, working with contractors, there's a lot of different components that go into that.

So the participant numbers on that are going to be a little bit different, but we will certainly be happy to come back to you a year from now to be able to give you some of that initial participant data in terms of where the funds are going.

And this kind of answered my last question, but maybe, Ms. Vasey, the focus, it seems like for this funding, this initial funding is on childcare. I assume that came from the kind of work that you do, but I was going to ask, what is it that would be most helpful to getting more women into the trades?

Well, one of the things that I say about this is that the barriers to entry and retention of women in construction are multiple, and that has two outcomes, the first of which is there's no one secret lever that's going to solve the issue and going to improve outcomes for women. But the flip side of that is there's so many different things you can do that could improve the outcomes. You can make incremental change without changing the entire workforce issue.

Our recent survey showed that of existing women in the construction trades, that childcare is an important impediment, but not necessarily the main one. That the main impediment is actually work site, job site culture, and the hours of work that are available to women because there's an implicit bias that prevents women. There's explicit bias, lack of training. There's a package of things that make it more difficult for women to get as many hours of work in construction as men. There are different ways of looking at that.

So again, picking out those things and really honing in on what's necessary is a part of what we can do under this project. However, entry into the field, childcare is a tremendous impediment that the training opportunities that the state has made available, which have been effective in bringing more diversity into construction through pre apprenticeship entry. Childcare is a tremendous impediment for women who often are already working low wage jobs, looking to get good jobs. They can't take time off.

They can't risk their childcare situations for outcomes that are more difficult for them to fill the childcare needs of. So the childcare initiative will make a big difference, we expect, in terms of the bringing women into the field and then also help in their retention. But there's other aspects of the retention that the retention and outreach side of the Erica grants will bolster, and we hope to be part of that solution.

Care is because the hours of work in construction industry require different kinds of care.

It is part of the issue, unfortunately, I know I'm not telling you a secret here, that childcare is a major impediment across all women in the workforce. Right. But the special problems in construction are the very early work hours. I often had to.

I mean, I have three children that I provided care for while I was working with the tools, and I would wait in the morning for the person to come to my house in fear that they wouldn't come at 5:30 in the morning, so that I could make that gap between when the childcare program opened and when the schools opened.

From 5:30 to 8:00, depending. And then you have unscheduled overtime or scheduled overtime, very difficult to find those hours. And there are some models that have been proposed under this grant, and there are also models that are in operation in other states that have shown and are proving to be effective in meeting that gap. Yes.

One last thing, probably for Ms. Vasey or maybe Ms. Burns. So, clearly, you've been doing this for a while. Instigating interest and enrollment is one thing, but retention is another. Right. So what's kind of the appropriate span to have an idea to see if a program or an approach is working? I'm sure it's more than two years. Right. And I think this is, again, an argument for maintaining this program because first year probably see a certain amount of participation.

Hard to see what that does to the workforce in the long term. So in your experience, I assume it's longer to have a good data that shows kind of what your real retention rates are and what the kind of the career progression looks like within retained participants. Right. But it's got to be more than two years.

I look forward to having the tools to measure data over several years. We really haven't had that focus in the programs within Das, for example, even though they have an overview of the bulk data of women. But again, at 1.0 we were at 2% women. The 627 I mean, there's a lot of anecdotal data there rather than data.

The Department and the apprenticeship council are making new commitments, both within the women in construction priority unit effort and on their own, to be more mindful of data and to drill down on the retention issues.

And I'm sorry to go on, but this is a passion of mine that oftentimes an apprenticeship will be canceled and it will look like the apprentice lost interest, but you have to drill down below that she wasn't getting work, or she did have a childcare issue that she couldn't solve, or what was the reason that it looked like she lost interest, but she may not have lost interest.

There may have been substantive support, service issues that we could have addressed that would have kept that person in the program. And again, that's a loss of funding for the trades, for the contractors, because these are jointly funded programs by the industry and they don't really want to lose people. But we really haven't drilled into that kind of.

I would think that represents a lost opportunity for learning as well.

So what I'll just add is that we have a data dashboard that DAS maintains. It's a publicly available data dashboard, both of registrations and also of completions. And it's a very cool tableau dashboard where you can click on the gender or the age or the occupation and see the data spliced in that way. So that is an effort that is out there and available to folks to tinker with. I know Meg has tinkered with it a lot.

But in addition, in that EEO Subcommitee of the California Apprenticeship Council, we are really looking at this data. And that Subcommitee has recently been, the mantle of it has been taken up by Commissioner Sherry Learmonth, and she's been working very closely with Meg, with us, to look at that data. And we're very cognizant that we're making this investment, that the $30 million investment made already and that indeed, the women's bureau like this. Meg is completely right. We've been talking to the Women's Bureau.

They're very excited about this, and they want to be seeing how we're moving the needle. So we are taking a look at the data now to have a benchmark to say, where are we starting? And then I do think initially there's a top of the funnel situation, like we need to get more women. But absolutely the completions is another piece that already the CAC is talking about.

We spent a bunch of time in the last quarterly meeting talking about exactly this topic, and so I think it's something that we look forward to working with this community of grantees. We now have 19 entities that have received a whole bunch of funding to be working on this issue. We're doing some hiring, and so we hope to really be assembling a community of folks, in addition to the Committee, specifically to this effort, to really keep working on this issue.

And you're right, it's not just two years. Right. This is something that we're going to look at over time.

Right. So thank you. I will say, Ms. Burns, every time you come testify, I leave excited about the work that DAS is doing. Well done. And thank you, Ms. Vasey.

Thank you. And thank you to both of you and everyone here. But you're all sticking around. Really appreciate this is a women's caucus priority. It's really important. I know it's important to all of us. And the Administration will get this additional information to help us negotiate continuation of funding. So that's what we're pushing for.

My appreciation for your time this morning.

Thank you. Okay, wait, I just jumped one. Issue four is the Covid-19 workplace outreach program. Mr. Toppin, Mr. March, Mr. Alamo, Deanna Ping, Chief Deputy Director of the Dir on Zoom, and Jorah Trang, are you here in person? Okay. Chief of Staff and equity WorkSafe. Equity WorkSafe. Okay. You're in here in person. All right. Mr. Toppin or Mr. March.

Thank you. Chair Patrick Toppin, Department of Finance. This is the issue for the reductions for the Covid-19 workplace outreach program, or lovingly called CWAP Budget act in 2022. Included 50 million General Fund over two years, 25 million in current year, and 25 million in the budget year. To continue the CWAP program. Governor's Budget proposes to eliminate the $25 million in the budget year. As part of the proposed budget solutions, I will defer. Happy to answer any questions.

And as you mentioned, joined by Deanna Ping, Deputy Director for DIR.

Okay, thank you, Ms. Ping. Wait. Were you going to say something, Mr. Alamo? Ok. All right, Ms. Ping.

Hi.

Good afternoon, Madam Chair. Diana Ping, GW Director for DiR. Happy to answer any questions about our work so far with the program or anything about this funding item. Thank you.

Thank you. Okay, your turn.

You get it?

Okay.

All right, I'm on. Well, thank you so much for allowing me to speak. I'm Jora Chang. I'm the Chief of Staff and equity at Worksafe. We're an Oakland based statewide organization and we work to protect workers'dignity, health and safety throughout California. And we do this by convening and working in solidarity with many coalitions and CBOs, many of which were part of our network in CWAP.

We're also a Member of the California Coalition for Worker Power, which is a coalition focused on building the economy, building an economy where workers have the power to demand safe and dignified work. So I want to give you a little bit of background. I started out with CWAP, actually as a consultant alongside Alice Berliner of Socal Kosh, Southern California Kosh.

And we helped LWDA, specifically Julie Sue and Young Sung Park and their team, in the preliminary stages to formulate and create, design the structure of CWAP, the outreach and recording and data collection process, CBO recruitment, and the implementation. So I was kind of there from the very beginning, and I've seen how it's grown.

We were then regional leads for the Bay Area, and when we were regional leads, we were able to work with organizations such as Bay Rising, who had this extensive experience doing outreach, and then organizations that had less experience, such as Black Culture zone, whose experience was more community based through trusted messengers in their community. So CWAP has been a really valuable community effort. It's created an infrastructure that wasn't there before, and this infrastructure strengthens state agencies'effectiveness.

It builds the capacity of local organizations to support communities, and most importantly, it strengthens workers and communities. And it's really exceeded the expectations. We started out in a pandemic emergency situation. And just to throw some numbers at you, because I know we all love numbers. Just in February 2021 to May 2022 alone, there were 1.9 million workers reached through two way interactions.

So not just a document or a flyer being given to a worker or a text message, but actually giving something to someone and talking to them about it. And that's how you really engage workers if there is some kind of transformational change or understanding or awareness that you want the workers to have. And we did this through 38 counties. We hit 96% of the state's population, which was 300% of the state's goals. And we did it with groups with linguistic and cultural expertise in 46 languages.

California itself has 200 languages, and so 46 languages makes a little dent in those 200 languages, but it's a significant dent. And for work, say, for example, we were able to do outreach with Vietnamese workers in Vietnamese, Latinx workers from Central America, and my imam, and then Ethiopian workers in Tarunya. So, a really vast diversity of workers. The number 68 cbos is often shared with you in terms of how many cbos we engage throughout the state.

But I could tell you that it's actually much more than that because each CBo, many cbos have a whole network of community based organizations that they would outreach to. And I can use one example. One of our outstanding cbos was Stepford, and they engaged in Santa Clara County with multiple organizations, two of which I can just recall off the top of my head, was Powee's, the Filipino Association of Workers and Immigrants, and the day Worker center of Mountain View, among many others.

And by doing this, they were able to create like a sub coalition within Santa Clara County to do their work. So a lot of times we look at CWAP as a pandemic response, but it's really much more than that. It was something that we've been working on, advocates have been working on to create for many years. Some of us have been able to do it on a small scale.

So Worksafe, for example, has been collaborating with the DOSh, the calocia, and we've also collaborated with the labor Commissioner's office. This really is the future of how California is going to conduct work with communities. And we can see this because we did it with the census, we did it with CWAP, and the Governor has even set up the Office of Community Partnership and Strategic Communications.

This is really critical to really not only advancing the human connection between the information you want to give workers and workers, but also advancing the division of Calocas and the labor Commissioner's ability to engage in enforcement work across a vast network of workers that they can never really reach because they just don't have enough staffing. I mean, I think the numbers for that are pretty clear in that there are millions of workers and only so many CAL inspectors and investigators and community liaisons.

So the human connection is really, really important. And we can see this because this all started with Julie Sue's effort. I don't know if you remember, but wage theft is a crime. She did this amazing effort, but her infographics and her materials would have just sat on countertops if it had not been for the human connection. The CBOs that engaged in that. And so, it's really scary for a Low wage worker to engage in issues around their rights in the workplace.

They can know it, but to actually do something about it, to create an environment where they can feel empowered to do that, that's really challenging. And CWAP was able to do that because it raised the bar, basically, not just for the division, for us, the CBOs, but also for employers. If everybody knows what their rights are, then the employers also know what they're mandated to do in strengthening workers. So, we see it as a baseline for engaging workers in the future.

It has been instrumental in creating an infrastructure where, if there is a future emergency, climate justice. We've seen this with the floods in this year, and the state agencies need to have a rapid response engagement. There's already an infrastructure set in. So what we're afraid of happening is if this money was to be taken away, the infrastructure and all the momentum that we've spent to build this will be eliminated or will fall to the wayside. CWAP didn't start out perfect. It had a lot of bumps.

I should know because I was part of the beginning phases, both in the preliminary and then in the rollout of CWAP 1 - 2 - 3 and now we're on four. And currently, well, I don't know if they're calling it four, but it's the current iteration where they're engaging UCs. So it's like an evolution that I'm seeing here. Before, when we started, we involved an outside agency or corporation to come in and kind of help us with the Administration. Now we're talking to UCs. That's an improvement.

Talking to labor organizations that have the expertise. And so I would urge you all to continue to Fund this effort because job quality and overall individual and community health and wellness is what the aim is, and this will go a long way towards that effort.

Thank you. Thank you very much. I have a few questions, but colleagues.

I got one, quick thing. So the analysis here references something called an interactive outreach activity and numbers of what constitutes an interactive outreach activity.

I can answer that, please.

Yeah, sorry. Hi, Dan and Ping DIR. And so, the way that the activities are characterized is.

Yes.

There's two.

So to your point, highly interactive peer to peer engagement. So that can be door to door canvassing, community canvassing, phone banking, that could be trainings both in person or virtual, as well as like a meeting or an event that is going to have significant interaction with those who are attending. And then we also have educational outreach activities which could be text banking, emailing, also booths or tablings at a resource fair maybe where you're handing out flyers as well as leaving behind materials.

So would that be the equivalent, I mean, these are big numbers, right? So I assume that's the equivalent of an impression. Right. That's an interaction as opposed to an activity as I would naturally understand it.

And that's what I was trying to explain, is that workers may know about their rights, but doing something about it, feeling comfortable about it, really having it sit and instill in them takes more than that. It takes a relationship, takes a human connection. And trusted messengers are talking and giving people information. But it's not the first time they've engaged with them. They've also engaged with them in community resources, providing things that they needed during the pandemic, having celebrations with them. They're there all the time.

Right.

They're in their community. And so that's the two way.

Got it. So it's basically an interaction. It's an interaction. An activity would seem to suggest, like the larger program. So it's an.

Yes.

Yes.

Got it?

Thank you.

Great. I just want for a Department of Finance, and then also from Mr. Allen, is did you consider using special Fund source to continue cwap instead of proposing a cut?

Thank you.

Chair.

Yeah, we, the Department of Finance, have not sort of investigated whether or not there would be an eligible Fund source that would support cwap. We don't have a determination at this time. We're aware that there's been conversations about using the labor and Workforce Development Fund, also known as the Paga Fund, which can be used for outreach and enforcement activities, to support CWAP.

While we don't have a determination on whether or not that would be an eligible Fund source, we would just note that labor code 2699 j, which governs the penalties that go into that Fund, has non supplementation language that may limit the use of the funds.

Okay, thank you. Mr. Alamo, any opinion on that, please?

Chaz Alamo again with the Legislative Analyst Office. First thing I'll point out, as you all know, but just to clarify, the Senate plan does propose to continue this funding at the agreed upon mount at the Budget act level. Sort of stepping back, both this item and the next item include questions in the agenda about alternative funding sources to the General Fund rate.

Thanks.

The economic and state's revenue landscape has shifted since the Budget act was enacted, and so our office, in conjunction with staff, are considering alternatives to the General Fund. I think a bit of historical context might be in order here. Before the Great Recession, the Department of Industrial Relations and overwhelming majority of its activities were funded with the General Fund.

During the state's difficult economic decisions that were made during the Great Recession, those General Fund resources were pulled, typically out of the Department of Industrial Relations, and other funding sources were identified that were not General Fund for some of the core operations of Dir that continued in the years after the Great Recession and only recently, as the state's General Fund condition has improved substantially. So, let's think 2017 onward. Have additional General Fund initiatives been added to DIR?

And that is how I would characterize the last couple of years of proposals. And these are the types of proposals that the Administration has said they've identified for either temporary reductions or pauses now that the landscape has changed. So, in thinking about steps the state took during the Great Recession under some of these similar pressures, identifying alternative Fund sources, we think there are two options the Committee might consider.

The first is the option my counterpart from the Department of Finance mentioned, the labor and Workforce Development Fund. This is otherwise known as the Paga Fund. It would seem that the statutory provisions governing of the use of the funds in the labor and workforce Development Fund fit relatively nicely with the uses of this proposal itself, given that it's intended to be used for education and outreach.

We would note that because of the Paga funding structure, it's not clear that this Fund would be a good use for an ongoing Fund source because the state doesn't have necessarily administrative capacity over the annual amount of funds that are going into the labor and Workforce Development Fund. So it might be a better source for one time or short term in nature initiatives.

The other option that we think the subcommittee and staff should consider here might be to look toward the state's sort of there is a revolving Fund that Dir taps and assesses each year to Fund the majority of its programming, and that revolving Fund is funded with a surcharge on employers' workers compensation premiums.

There could be an instance where some of the funds that are funded with that surcharge would meet the same sort of statutory requirements or statutory direction that both this item and the next item, item five in your agenda, would include. And so we would raise that issue for this Subcommitee to consider, not necessarily a full recommendation, but just as an option in the coming months with negotiations with the Administration about the item and the next item. Thanks.

Great. Thank you very much. Just going back to the actual CWAP programs.

Ms. Ping, the funding in the current year, if it's been appropriated, we covered that. And the funding being dispersed before next budget year.

Yeah. Thank you, Madam Chair. And so, like was mentioned earlier, so the funding item that we have is actually going to be the fourth iteration of CWAP. And so that's something that we're in the process of finalizing our contracts for and expect to have it encumbered by the end of the year. And so our assessment is that the program is going to run from the late summer or early fall to the late summer and early fall of 2024.

And so that timeline was actually created in consultation with many of the organizations that have participated in CWAP, because we just finished a third iteration of CWAP that was in coordination with the Office of Community Partnerships and Strategic Communications, which is in the Office of Planning and Research, also known as OPR. So that just finished in March, and that ran from the summer of 2022 to March 2023. And so we expect that to be the timing for this current budget item.

Okay. And my final question to Ms. Trang, what's the purpose and the impact of redoing rebranding the program so that these activities continue post pandemic? How do we get to changing it from COVID to much broader?

I was trying to address this by pointing out that Covid-19 the pandemic, was really kind of an impetus to look at issues that have been in the worker community for a long time. And it was like an opportunity for everyone to come forward and work on the things that they've actually already been working on for a long time and create a program to address Covid-19 that was killing many people.

So it was just the start of collaborative relationships that we've been trying to build for decades to increase the effectiveness of Kalosha and the Labor Commissioner Dir, in essence, to increase the strength and ability of workers to self advocate, to raise the bar, as I said, for employers, and to strengthen the community. So I feel like there is a whole other evolution or phase that CWAP can undergo, that we built the infrastructure for it.

We just need to keep going so that we can move this beyond just information provision and into community sustainability, worker sustainability for long term. And so that's what I'm hoping to see, is that already we're talking to workers about issues that are Covid-19.

There's so many things involved in a worker's life when they were contracted Covid-19 and our CBOs have already been talking to them about all those things and so I'm hoping to see a rebrand where we can really amplify all of our CBOs skills and what it is about the community that they're trusted to provide to make it the program even more robust than it already is. I hope that answers your question. Yeah.

I just want to touch on that a little bit. Clearly, to your point, we, in effect, kind of learn by doing and discovered in some way another better model for educating workers on their rights. But I do mean, it's important to have clarity of purpose and clarity of mission. And so to Mr. Alamo, I mean, the Leo has always been very, I think, good and articulate in your advice to us about defining programs, not sort of sliding into them.

So what are your thoughts on this segue that we're clearly discussing, moving from a pandemic spawn program to something that is much more generalized without either a statutory basis or clearly articulate admission?

I should start Chas Alamo with the Lao. I should start by saying we have no formal positions or thoughts or haven't done specific research.

It may or may not be on.

Haven't done specific research. Is that better? On this question of transitioning the worker outreach program under a Covid umbrella to a broader worker outreach program, and dare I say it, this post pandemic period that we are entering, I will add that the opportunity appears to be right now to do so. This Subcommitee hearing and this budget negotiation are about that transition. So insofar as our office can be more useful to you and to the chair and to staff, we would be happy to.

That might be as simple as directing some follow up questions to the Department and some stakeholders about what that transition might look like, what the need is under the broader umbrella going forward relative to Covid specific example. But to amplify points in our experience, we have seen in other budget areas a framework of cbos or state partners that's developed under an emergency or a crisis, a narrow set of circumstances that appears to also serve some purpose in a broader sense.

So this wouldn't be novel as far as the state experience has gone. But I think, again, looking at it now with a critical eye and reaching out to our office for any assistance that you might have on this particular question is the time to do it.

And I do appreciate that. And I don't mean by any way to discount the kind of opportunity before us. But I do believe it's important to be clear as we make this transition, particularly if we're going to set you up for success in the future and have a good idea of kind of what the mission is and how to quantify success and resource for it. So thank you. Appreciate it.

And might I add just real quickly, before the pandemic, the office of Julie Sue, and specifically I can point to Sebastian Sanchez because I think he's still there. He might have moved somewhere, but they were already working on a job quality know future of work and workers. And I don't quite understand the, I'm not a part of the LWG, but I do know that there might be some building blocks already that we can build on.

So this is clearly perhaps subject matter for another discussion at some point. But to Mr. Almond's point, we have a budget before us, but we probably, as a Committee should look at kind of the broader framework so that we can render that clarity. Thanks.

Thank you very much for your presentations and certainly have a lot of support. We got work to do on it, but I have a lot of support. We're moving on to issue five, domestic worker health and safety. Mr. Elamo, Ms. Alvarenga and Ms. Wahid, if you all would come up here and make your presentations. Good to see you all. Ms. Chalamo, do you want to get started?

Happily. Chas Alamo with the Legislative Analyst Office the Senate's again, you're cursed today, the Senate's budget plan for the upcoming fiscal year includes funding for a domestic worker health and safety outreach and education program. The funding specifically would be $9 million per year per for five years, for a total of $45 million, and it would include a couple components related to outreach and education for domestic workers.

A Fund to be used for the purchase or procurement of particular equipment or upgrades needed in some domestic work environments, households in this case, as well as trailer Bill Language that would move forward some health and safety standards at Cal OSHA to be developed in the future. Happy to remain on the panel for any additional questions, but otherwise, we'll turn it over to your other panelists.

Go ahead.

Thank you, chair Durazo and Committee Members for the opportunity to speak today. My name is Kimberly Alvarenga, Director of the California Domestic Workers Coalition. We're requesting a General Fund allocation of $9 million in fiscal year 2324 and each of the four subsequent fiscal years for a total of $45 million over five years to implement the recommendations of the SB 321. Household Domestic services employment, health and safety Committee.

The funds will be used to eliminate the exclusion of privately paid household domestic service employees from the California Occupational Safety and Health act to expand the existing domestic worker and employer outreach and education program to include health and safety outreach and education for domestic service employees and employers and to establish a financial and technical assistance program through the Division of Occupational Safety and Health to assist Low resource household domestic service employers with compliance.

There are over 300,000 nannies, house cleaners and home care workers in California that act as a bridge to independent living for seniors and people with disabilities and become partners in parenting our children and caring for our homes. Domestic workers are largely immigrant women of color who work to sustain their families and communities.

Unfortunately, domestic workers have been historically excluded from most basic labor protections, and today, household domestic service workers are the only group of workers that are still excluded from occupational health and safety rights under Cal OSHA. These exclusions are rooted in a long legacy of racism and slavery in our country that were intentionally designed to deny black women workplace protections.

Additionally, the unique nature of domestic work occurring in isolation, one on one and behind closed doors has left domestic service workers vulnerable to injuries and illnesses without any recourse. This year, California has an opportunity to continue the progress it has made for this industry and to lead the nation in rectifying this historical wrong.

In 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 321 to begin to address these inequities, creating an Advisory Committee composed equally of domestic workers, employers and health and safety experts to develop industry specific health and safety guidelines and to make policy recommendations to the Legislature to strengthen the health and safety of household domestic service employees in the home work setting. In January of 2023, the Advisory Committee published their recommendations.

In their report, the Committee concluded that there is a fundamental need for employers to have legal responsibility for the working conditions of domestic workers and that the Legislature should remove the household domestic services exclusion from Cal OSHA.

Further, the SB 321 Advisory Committee also recommended that the Department of Industrial Relations expand the existing statewide domestic worker and employer education and outreach program that was established in 2019 under the newsome Administration to include occupational health and safety outreach and education to promote prevention and compliance in partnership with Cal OSHA.

Given the unique nature of the industry, the barriers to rights enforcement, and the lack of information experienced by workers and employers, the SB 321 Advisory Committee emphasized the important role that community based organizations play in the success of advancing and maintaining a safe workplace, as it has been demonstrated in the domestic worker and employer education and outreach program, which SabA will speak about next. Thank you so much for your time and consideration.

Great thank you for being here. Appreciate all your work.

Thank you chair Durazo and Committee Members. My name is Saba Waheed and I am the Research Director at the UCLA Labor center and have conducted numerous studies on the domestic work industry. Today, I will present findings from the labor center's evaluation of the domestic workers and Employers education and outreach program, DWAP.

Our evaluation is based on the following focus groups and interviews with 61 participants, including employers and workers, organizational staff and the DIr analysis of organizational progress reports, 637 DLC wage claims and 900 worker and employer evaluations, plus data from a workplace survey and an employer mapping project.

Our approach was to measure the impact on two levels, one, the number of workers and employers reached and trained, consultations and wage claims filed and two, the qualitative impact of the program on workers and employers, on the organizations, and on the industry overall. DWAP launched in June 2020 with a preliminary budget of $1.0 million a year to do this work.

After a six month planning stage, the implementation period was 27 months, including making adaptions due to Covid-19 the pilot program has been extended for one year and is set to end in June 2024. So first the impact on workers. During the 27 month period, the program reached 165,000 domestic and residential care facility workers across the state with information about their rights. Organizations hosted nearly 400 know your rights trainings for over 10,600 in workers.

They created 60 know your rights materials such as pocket guides, booklets, record keeping tools, sample contracts, posters, and legal fact sheets that were available in English, Tagalog, Spanish, Chinese, Nepali, and Vietnamese. Workers described how they now understood wage setting and calculations, developed negotiation skills, were able to set contract terms, and felt more confident informing employers about labor laws.

In the evaluation surveys, half of workers said that they would educate other workers, with a third feeling ready to take action with employers and a fifth willing to follow up with an organizer to talk more about their situation at work. Another key component of the program was the one to one consultations. Organizers ran 804 sessions with workers to identify labor law violations and steps to address them.

Most workers committed to some type of action, including attending a training, filing a wage claim, or speaking directly to their own employer, other workers, or a legal partner. Workers noticed how the consultations were empowering and allowed them to advocate for themselves. We also saw the strength of the collaboration with the DIR. DWAP included domestic worker labor rights trainings for 200 employees of the labor Commissioner's office and 50 labor attorneys in the field.

Working together, DIR and community partners were able to support workers in reclaiming lost wages. The partners were able to recover around $275,000 through both formal and informal pathways. While the DIR wage claim data showed 175,000 in wage recuperation, but the demand is great. Through the consultations, DWAP partners identified almost $8 million in lost wages. Turning to employers, the outreach reached nearly 45,000 employers and 22 trainings of 1100 participants. Employers found the trainings useful in clarifying the employer obligations and the value of formal written work agreements.

Some were also motivated to talk with other employers. We need to do more. What we've learned from the evaluation is that ensuring labor rights is a two pronged approach, prevention through worker and employer education on the front end and enforcement through worker advocacy, consultations, and wage claims on the back. And this type of work takes time. As one worker said, the pilot program was a seed and we need to continue to let it grow.

Many workers also noted that the program should include health and safety protections and education. And to change practices the program needs to further its work with employers.

The DWAP program has given us a model and a foundation for addressing wages and violations, and we can apply this to the health and safety and we can apply this to health and safety using the three tiers of impact education to prevent violations, promotion of worker leadership, and leveraging capacity through the government community collaboration thank you for the opportunity to share these findings.

Thank you very much. Just with regards, Mr. Allen. Well, you already mentioned this, but if there's anything else you want to add with regards to alternative Fund sources, anything different about this particular.

This proposal related to health and safety is different in a couple of key respects from the last item, which was more of a broad labor law and labor standards outreach, it's likely that the labor and Workforce Development Fund, the Paga Fund, would continue to be a likely fit for this proposal itself.

Whether this proposal also fits under a viable use of the workers compensation insurance premium surcharge, I think is an additional question that our office would want to look more closely into council and potentially interactions with the Administration to determine the viability of that funding source. But happy to answer any more specific questions. I obviously apologize for going into such detail at the Subcommitee hearing.

If you could either Ms. Wahid or Ms. Alvarenga, just take a couple of minutes to talk about the relationship with employers that have developed over these last few years and the work that you've been doing with them, which I think led to this part of the Fund, would be to assist employers, as I understand it, if you could talk about that a little bit.

Yes. When Governor Newsom signed SB 321 and the Advisory Committee was set, the coalition, there were employers that were equally appointed to that Committee. But in addition, the coalition did 600 listening sessions with workers and employers really delving deeply into the health and safety issue.

And we found that employers generally were supportive, really saw the interconnection between the safety of the worker and the safety of the employer in order to keep the home, the household, the home workplace safe, and identified that they wanted to do so, but also needed some support if possible, because so many elders or people with disabilities utilize their funds to actually pay for care.

And so together we decided that that would be a really good, it's a recommendation that comes out of the Advisory Committee, but also through the listening sessions that employers would need a hoyer lift PPE other support to keep the home workplace safe for themselves and for the worker. And so there's that. And additionally, working with hand in hand.

The employers network that have been partners along the way, and other stakeholders that have been partners along the way to make sure that we're addressing this need in a holistic way, really with the umbrella of care and the overall, we have such a care crisis, the dignity of the person receiving care along with the dignity of the worker.

That's great. I think all the recommendations were really good, but particularly that one, because I think there was a lot of discussion in the last several years about how do you have a home that's also a workplace, and how do the employers, the owners of the home workplace, how do they react to this relationship? And felt uncomfortable. But I think what the Advisory Committee recommended that's being proposed here in the budget really addresses that. This was not about, I caught you violating the law here.

That's not what's intended. What's intended is how do we make this safe for everybody? How do we make the relationship with the employer stronger so you could address what issues, because actually, we don't want the consequences we're looking for. Is it to be done in a healthy and safe way for everybody? So I really appreciate that part of what the Advisory Committee came up with.

Thank you, Senator.

Thank you, colleague. Any question? Well, concern.

The concerns I have are the whole domestic worker, especially as it relates to single family homes. Somebody hires somebody, come in every couple of weeks to help clean or clean the house or stuff. If you add complications to that, that job just goes away. If it's too hard for people, too hard for employers, or if it's unsafe for employee, that relationship has so far been so it's not a super formal relationship, and it's easily severed.

And if it becomes where some inspector is going to come to, somebody's house and knock on their door, they're not going to do that anymore. They're just not going to have that job. That job becomes unavailable. And a lot of times those jobs, the people that want to do those jobs have the least ability to go apply for a job at a more formal employer.

And I think that's what they were thinking about when they, they excluded them from the work requirements because not having jobs, I think, is a really bad outcome. But it sounds like what you're trying to do is just educate everybody. And educating everybody, some of it's common sense and some of it's just normal treatment. We could probably use that around this building sometimes, but if you treat people well, then that works.

But if we really start to complicate a simple relationship like that, I fear the end result is it just won't exist. And so I don't want that sector because you said there's how many hundreds of thousands of workers I know. My daughter also worked as a nanny for a family, and they took extremely good care of her and she took extremely good care of their kids. But if we complicated their lives, she wouldn't have that job and she doesn't have that job now anyway.

That's just my concern about trying to bring over regulation into just mom and pop's house because it's going to ruin that relationship. That's all.

Do you want to respond to that?

Respond? Yeah. Thank you, Senator, for your comments. I think that's why the recommendations that the coalition, these recommendations are really based on the findings of the Advisory Committee. That really took a whole year to grapple to really specifically look at this industry and really think through what would health and safety look like in the homework setting. And the guidelines do discuss not only primarily prevention, compliance, and other ways to mediate the issues. I think none of us want to go into anybody's home, really.

It's actually about preventing injuries and illness from happening. And at the end of the day, it's really about us finally recognizing that domestic work and the people that do. Domestic work should be respected for the work that they do, and that work should have equal rights as any other worker does. So thank you.

Thank you very much. I just want to remind us that there is already a formal workplace relationship there because household employers do have to abide by minimum wage and all of the other labor laws. It's this piece that's missing. Right. So just, if you want to add to that.

Yeah, I just wanted to add in an employer research we did a couple of years ago, throughout the state, what we found is that employers tended to ask through their networks around how to set things like wages and figuring out the terms of the working conditions, or often researched it themselves. And so I think, like she was saying on the front end, we need to do the education.

But also in the evaluation, it was clear that when employers came in and said, we know these things, I know how to set the wages, they then understood that they didn't necessarily know how to do overtime, or they didn't necessarily know about time off or other kind of terms, and also what it means to have a contract with the worker.

So even simple, like, we're talking about simple, basic things in terms of what that relationship should include, that can set the terms, that can prevent some of the violations later on. So we're not necessarily talking about policing the home, but in changing the mind of how you're thinking about yourself in that relationship to that worker that comes into your home. And a lot of that structure is missing right now.

So when you start bringing a contract and then having agreements around what the terms of work are, it changes that relationship and the perception of the employer themselves. And we definitely saw that through the DWAP program and in some of the feedback we got from employers.

Good. Okay.

Just by way of it, thank you. I think that's true. And I think it's important to remind employers, just because somebody works in your home doesn't mean you are not an employer, doesn't mean that you don't have a set of very explicit obligations to include respecting that employee in the ways that we assume will take place in other settings. And so this process, this education process, thoroughly necessary and I'd say thoroughly positive. So appreciate the work you're doing.

Thank you. Thank you both. Thank you all three. (Spanish.) So thank you all very much. Really appreciate all of your work.

Gracias Senator.

And okay, we move on now to.

Issue six, which is improving California's current SDI paid family leave programs during transition to EDD Next. Mr. Alamo, Ms. Wichette, did I pronounce it right? No. Will she not be here? Wichit.

Yeah.

Lisette Rodriguez Pena, Juliana Franco, Miss Director Nancy Farias and Melissa Stone.

The other folks online yeah.

Okay. All right. So we have three online. Mr. Alamo?

Yes. Chas Alamo with the Ledge Analyst Office. Issue six in the agenda is an informational item with questions for the Administration related to the sort of interaction of the implementation of SB 951, which made changes to the state's DI PFL program and financing, and how those changes roll into the department's new IT project. It and policy project. Edd next. So happy to take any questions, but that's just a bit of a set up for the panel.

Thank you.

Ms. Wichett?

Yes? Can you hear me?

Yes.

Okay, great. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Catherine Wichit, and I'm a senior Staff Attorney at Legal Aid at Work. Our organization is dedicated to advancing the rights of workers with Low wages, especially people from immigrant and Low income and historically marginalized communities. And my program specifically focuses on families and what we can do to make sure that workers can access the paid leave that they need to take care of their family and to take care of their health.

And as a part of that, we run a work and family helpline where every year we hear from over a thousand working families. And through this helpline, we provide legal advice. But we also stay grounded in the community, and we hear from them what the obstacles are that they're facing in accessing the paid leave that they need so that they don't have to face those impossible choices of either leaving a family Member alone and without care or losing their job and their income.

Since the start of our helpline, we've heard from workers who've wanted to take leave to bond with a new child or to receive their own medical care but couldn't because they couldn't afford it. And based on those experiences, we, in a broad coalition of organizations with Senator Durazo and leadership, passed SB 951 with the support of many others, which, starting in 2025, is going to ensure that lower- and middle-income workers can get 90% of their income while they're on leave.

So what this means is that workers who previously chose to continue working through their own health crises when they had new children because they couldn't afford a 40% pay cut will now be seeking to use paid family leave and state disability insurance to take time off from work, to provide care, to bond, and to heal.

And we anticipate that this will create an increase in the number of applications that are received from lower wage workers and people who are more likely to be those of color immigrants, people with limited education and those with limited English proficiency. And we've worked with partnership, in partnership with the EDD to increase access to these programs through collaborative efforts and our paid family leave advocates quarterly meetings.

And we really appreciate the work that the disability insurance branch has done and continues to do to increase access for those who face barriers to receiving benefits, including partnering on outreach, sharing data more transparently, and creating educational resources targeted at undocumented workers. However, we also believe that more needs to be done to ensure that applicants are able to receive their benefits and that they're able to receive them in a timely way. So that they can pay their rent and buy groceries.

Notably, workers are not able to apply for state disability insurance or paid family leave in advance, so any time that they spend waiting for benefits is time that they're spending without receiving any income. And what we've seen is that workers face barriers in getting through every step of the paid family leave and disability insurance application process. They have a hard time obtaining the forms as many people have to apply in paper, and they have to contact the EDD to request a paper form beforehand.

They're often unable to get the forms in the languages that they speak, as applications are only available in English and in Spanish. Once they receive them, they often have difficulty understanding the forms. And when they try to reach the EDD to get help in understanding what information it is that they need to provide, they face obstacles in getting through.

Once they apply, they face long wait times, often with little to no information from the EDD as far as updates, and they have a hard time reaching the EDD via phone or Internet to get more information on what steps it is that they need to take. Notably, depending on the month, only about 45% of callers ever make it through to contact somebody at the EDD.

And while the paid family leave program has language lines in seven different languages, for the disability insurance program, you can only call in a designated line in English or Spanish. And in response to the applications that workers send in, they often receive confusing or frightening requests for additional information, including verification of their Social Security number to be obtained from the Social Security Administration and also information that they've already provided.

We're fortunate that when we elevate these claims to the EDD's disability insurance branch, they're often able to help clear the claim and move it forward. But for every person who contacts us, we know that there are many, many others across the state who don't have that opportunity.

And as a result of these obstacles, while those with limited English proficiency who speak a language other than Spanish, make up 6% of the state's working age population, they only make up about one half of a percent of paid family leave and state disability insurance applicants. And in the fourth quarter of 2022, only about 70% of paid family leave claims, caregiver claims, and 75% of disability insurance claims were paid.

We think that making information more clear and readily available and in appropriate languages, creating ways for applicants to access timely information on their claims, stopping practices of requiring invasive or unnecessary information, and making it more possible for applicants to reach live support over the phone, would break down many of these barriers so that families can be there for one another without having to go into debt waiting for their benefits.

We appreciate the disability insurance branch's leadership, especially Melissa Stone, and the significant steps that they've initiated to review and improve their practices. And we're optimistic that certain steps that they plan to take, including incorporating community review into building EDD Next. Using an accessibility lens in developing EDD Next applications and providing text message updates to claimants, may help to address some of these challenges.

But we really wanted to highlight these barriers to make sure that these programs receive the support that they need so that workers, regardless of their income or their language, can get that wage replacement that they need when they're taking time off from work to care for a child, going through chemotherapy, to be there with a dying parent, to welcome a new child, or to recover from their own injury.

Thank you for taking this time, and I'll pass it to Lizette Rodriguez from the Watsonville Law Center who will speak a little more about the challenges that undocumented workers face in particular.

Thank you very much.

Ms. Pena Good afternoon. Thank you. My name is Lisa Rodriguez-Pena. I'm one of the attorneys and a Director at the Watsonville Law Center. I direct the Workers' Rights and Equity Project. The Watsonville Law center is a nonprofit in the Central coast that provides free legal aid to low-income immigration vulnerable families with the goal of improving access to the health, the housing, the employment, the economic stability, and immigration justice.

As part of my role at the Watsonville Law center and the legal Department of a major health provider in Santa Cruz County and Monterey County, Salud Para la Gente, I have been providing legal assistance and guidance to agricultural workers with disability insurance and pay family leave issues and concerns.

Based on my direct interaction with undocumented workers who qualify for disability insurance and pay family leave, I am here today to share with you some of the main concerns that undocumented workers have experienced when trying to access state disability and pay family benefits. As Katie mentioned, one of the main concerns is the long waits to receive information about the claims, the time of payment, and or actual payments.

Undocumented workers don't have a valid Social Security number for them to include on the application and declare under perjury that the number was issued by the Federal Government. Thus, this inability to directly provide a Social Security number prolongs their application process, as many do not hear back from EDD for months. And not adding a Social Security number on the application further delays payment since they have to provide additional information to prove their earnings and identity.

We have been working directly with EDD to address the issue and have been asking claimants to submit proof of wages, proof of address, proof of ID as part of their initial application to see if it will prevent the delay. However, many undocumented workers still get discouraged from applying since they don't have documents such as w2's pay stubs and documents that show you their physical or mailing address to include in their initial application since they're constantly moving due to being seasonal workers.

With that said, undocumented workers need more guidance on how to process their applications to ensure that they are sending the proper documentations when submitting their initial pay, family leave and state disability applications. This can prevent further delays in receiving earned benefits and encourage workers to apply. Also, the list of documents to prove their address needs to be extended.

It needs to include more documents that seasonal workers have since it's not common for seasonal farm workers living in rural communities to have documents such as the lease agreement or utility bills under their name since many of them just rent the room with other people. Another issue is, as Katie mentioned, the application accesses the online application versus paper application currently, undocumented workers that don't have a valid Social Security number cannot apply for disability insurance and pay family online.

They are required to request a paper application that cannot be downloaded from the EDD website. They have to wait to receive a paper application. Then after, if it's required, the Doctor has to certify the application and then they could mail the application. Many of them don't get a confirmation from when their application is received and or processed, leading to accumulation of debt as they don't have any wage replacement to pay the rent.

This forces workers to borrow money and at time disregard their health conditions to be able to return to work to provide the basic necessities for their family. For example, I had this mother who is an undocumented farm worker. She applied for state disability about six weeks before giving birth. She submitted a paper application.

She received no response from ED and this forced her to go back to work after having a c-section, two weeks after having a c section because they were at risk of becoming homeless. Another example is an undocumented woman who had a miscarriage returned to work immediately, causing her intensive bleeding because she thought that she couldn't be on medical leave after receiving an EDD notice saying that she needed to confirm ownership of a Social Security number that she uses for work purposes.

Many of these essential workers live paycheck to paycheck and don't have enough savings to cover months of rent delays on payment have caused workers to lose their homes and have experienced food insecurity. We understand that EDD Next may have an online application available for all, regardless of the claimants not having a valid Social Security number. However, the implementation may take some time and non-documented workers are in current need of more accessible application process to an issue.

Number three language access and barriers for immigrant workers for immigrant workers that speak other languages other than English and Spanish, the barriers above are heightened as they also have to overcome administrative barriers but also have to navigate a system in a foreign language. Many of the farm workers that we provide services speak indigenous languages such as mixteco bajo, mixteco alto, Zapoteco, making it impossible for them to understand the applications and the EDD notices. Since currently there's no other resources in those languages.

We look forward to continue collaborating with EDD to best address the practices and partnerships that can assist with accessibility and interpreters in the workers'preferred, language to avoid further delays in processing a payment, leading to a potential increase in the number of applicants with language barriers. Finally, one of the issues is fear and trust due to their immigration status. Many qualifying workers, especially pregnant women and new parents, do not apply for benefits because they fear immigration consequences.

The EDD website does indicate that immigration status does not prevent workers from applying, but gives no further details. That loosens the concerns, the constant concerns of immigration and that undocumented communities experience. When an undocumented worker receives a letter requesting verification of Social Security number or address from ED, they become terrified and they prefer not to proceed with the claim due to fear of being deported or thinking that their information will be shared with immigration officials.

If we're advocating for undocumented workers to have access to state disability and pay family leave, we need to be sensitive to their concerns and ensure that we have proper trainings in place and resources that address such mistrust with state agencies and immigration concerns. For example, at the moment, EDD uses ID Me to verify identity for applicants that submit an online application.

Such technology, if used when undocumented workers could apply for state benefits online, will discourage workers from applying due to fear of immigration consequence, data insecurity, and racial and gender biases, as also the US Department of Labor has reported. We appreciated that the steps that EDD disability insurance Branch has taken to collaborate with advocates and make improvements to make state disability and pay family leave more accessible to our workers.

EDD will require more resources to implement more trainings, procedures that address and share the concerns of low income and undocumented workers. Also, with the implementation of SB 951, we need to continue working together to further develop a culturally competent system that supports California farm workers families in taking pay, family leave, medical leave for bonding, caring pregnancy and other serious health conditions. I thank you for your time and I will pass it on to Juliana Franco.

Good afternoon and thank you for having us here today. My name is Juliana Franco. I'm a Staff Attorney at the Center for Work Life Law at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. I run the Center for Work Life Law's Daralus Initiative, a partnership with the Central Coast Alliance United for Sustainable Economy that supports farmworkers in accessing their workplace legal rights and income replacement during pregnancy and while breastfeeding.

Work Life Law and Daralus partner directly with community organizers and farmworkers to learn about the barriers they face in accessing SDI and PFL and to identify workable solutions. The Center for Work Life Law also runs an Advisory Committee of over two dozen California healthcare providers who advise us on the difficulties they face in supporting their patients to access SDI and PFL. The legislative history of SDI of the SDI program indicates that the role of healthcare providers in the SDI process is essentially to serve as gatekeepers.

For a worker to receive SDI, their healthcare provider must complete a portion of the application that communicates that in the healthcare provider's medical opinion, the worker cannot perform their regular or customary work. In other words, they are disabled for purposes of SDI. Over the years, dozens of healthcare providers have shared with us not only the barriers their patients face when applying, many of which you've already heard from my colleagues, but also the barriers they, as doctors face when certifying their patients with the EDD.

Last year, we began surveying healthcare providers across California to learn about their experiences. Approximately 90% of providers surveyed have reported that they find the physician practitioner form confusing and burdensome. Some confusion stems from the form design and the lack of clarity on how to effectively complete the form. We thank the EDD for receiving our feedback on the physician practitioner certification form and look forward to working with them to address these barriers as the EDD Next project progresses.

Healthcare providers also have very limited time, so streamlining the application process and providing clarity on parts of the certifications that may trigger the need for more follow up can alleviate the burden on clinics with limited resources as well as on EDD staff. This is an issue of equity, as the healthcare providers with the most limited resources are typically those serving Low income patients and families of color. Providers also regularly share with us.

Their concerns about the systemic delays in receiving benefits that you just heard about from my colleagues, Katie and Lizette.

Doctors serving farm workers, for example, express that even when they believe their patient should be on leave for the safety of their pregnancy, they worry about making that recommendation because it often means that their patient will have no source of income for several weeks, or in some cases, months, while the EDD goes back and forth with both the patient and the provider about the validity of the claim.

The reality is that the administrative delays and other barriers are affecting what healthcare providers recommend for the health of their patients. A Doctor's order should be informed by their medical judgment, not the risks posed by bureaucratic delays. They have also seen their patients face food insecurity and lost housing because of these delays. When patients do follow the advice and go on leaves.

And sadly, they also regularly see their pregnant patients continue to work contrary to their best medical advice, because the patient has no way of knowing when or if they will receive income replacement from a program that they've paid into for years. The system is not working as intended, and something must change. We look forward to working with the EDD to provide guidance to patients and to providers and to address these administrative barriers in preparation for the implementation of SB 951.

We also thank you here today for your support of the EDD and our efforts. Thank you.

Thank you so much. I think we move on to. Ms. Ferris, are you next?

I don't have any prepared remarks. I was here to answer questions, but I will just say that we agree 100% with what was said so far.

Okay. Ms. Stone?

I didn't have anything prepared, either. I'm just here to answer questions. Thank you.

But do you agree?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

We have a wonderful relationship with our advocates, and I appreciate the things that they brought forward today. They're definitely things that we're working on together with them, and we appreciate their support.

Okay.

Senator Newman, I also do not have the testimony of the advocates. Actually, very helpful. Nice to see both of you. This is a project which is obviously ongoing, and I know you're working hard on it. Thank you for being here.

Okay, well, I have some questions, and I appreciate all of the work that you are doing. It's pretty enormous what you have agreed to take on, and I know that you are working very hard. We've had conversations, and it can be pretty overwhelming, especially after going through the pandemic and what that meant with millions and millions of claims in the Department that you run.

Yeah, this is without a doubt, in my district, the issue that has far surpassed any other issue, not just during the pandemic with the unemployment, but now with SDI. So we get these calls, my staff get these calls, hundreds of calls every week. So just out of respect to them for their hard work, I'm going to mention some of the issues, even though I know they've been brought up by advocates.

But things like constituents aren't able to get through to the phone lines to connect with an EDD representative. They send a message through their portal inbox but don't hear back, unable to explain why their case went or their message went unattended for so long. Constituents, this is about applying online. Unable to apply online, they have to request an SDI application. EDD then mails it. The constituents don't receive their application through the mail until the second or third time a constituent request the application.

Unlike UI cases, SDI cases are not able to be expedited through the legislative portal. Many cases get stuck in the ID verification through EDD's legislative portal. The liaison assigned to SDI are not as helpful as liaisons assigned to UI cases. EDD's legislative office only able to give broad information regarding UI cases. They do not offer assistance for SDI cases or the paid family leave cases. So those are just some, and I think most of them probably overlap with what we've already heard.

But I normally don't do this, but it's something that's just pretty big in our office and for our staff. So, I guess we can go through some of those issues. But you know what the most common issues are. Do you want to respond to.

Would Nancy Ferris with EDD? I would just start by saying, and I know that we talk about this as it relates to UI, but EDD next is our modernization of the Department project. And we realized during the pandemic when UI was in the spotlight that DI was probably next because the previous project actually PFL was the first thing to be modernized.

And then we pivoted when the pandemic hit and we realized that UI needed to be modernized, especially in the event of a recession, that we needed to work on that. We are, however, working on PFL in particular simultaneously with UI. With PFL we are actually. So, it's part of EDD Next, part of the five-year project.

However, we are automate right now, PFL is a manual process, and so we are going to automate that over the next year, 18 months, exactly the timeline, I'm not quite sure, but it is going to be previous to the conclusion of EDD Next which still has three years, three and a half years out. And we are hopeful that the things that we do, the actions that we take in the meantime, will alleviate some of the concerns that people are having.

One of them is just people call the call center and they can't get through because they're just looking for the status of their claim as something as simple as that. And what we have done, for example, is just on Friday, a few days ago, we have implemented text messaging. So people are aware of. We received your claim. Here's where you are. Here's where you're at.

It's probably a little bit too soon to tell, but we are hopeful that that will alleviate, for example, some of the basic calls that we get so the staff that do answer the calls can actually work on cases that need to be worked on. That's just an example that I'll give you.

Okay, so a few others, some of these are connected. Some of them are a little bit different subject. How are you planning to prepare for and address a likely increase in applications due to SB 951?

One great question. So, I'm sure you're aware we have a revised process that happens in the spring and the fall where we can forecast what we believe will be the influx of claims. And we have a command center much like we have in the UI. We will work with finance. We're happy to work with staff, with LAO to make sure that our projections are what the expectations are.

I mean, we can base it on when there was an increase eight years ago or so, when the wage rate increased, then I think it was maybe about six or 7%, I believe. I mean, we can base it on something like that. And we have our whole command center that does that. So, we're happy to work with the consultants and LAO.

Does that mean more staffing that you're getting ready with more staff?

We would, yeah. So if we forecast that the workload increases, then we use the revise process to basically get more money to increase staff.

But are you doing that or you think you'll be ready to do that? I guess not till 2025.

The first opportunity that we'll have will be in the fall of this year. So we can start, and we've already started to look at that, obviously, because we've started the project, we are on target, on time with the project, so we can start that in the fall.

Okay. Can you describe how improvements to EDD Next will help reduce the wait time for the SDI and PFL claims?

Sure. Nancy, again with EDD. So, I think that the purpose of EDD Next is to obviously modernize it systems along with the policies. And so, with modernizing the system, things will be much more automated. I don't know if that's redundant or not, but things will be automated. So the goal is to have less people call the call center and less people have to contact EDD to get information. So that is the goal with both Ui Di PFL, with all of them through EDD.

Next part of what we're less people.

Will call because they'll do it because.

Everything will be online. Everything will be online. And understanding that not everyone can use an online system. People can also use their phone, of course, but understanding that not everyone has access to an online system, it frees up the people that would normally be answering the phone to answer. I don't want to say simple questions, but maybe simple questions to help, to free up.

They'll free up those people to actually help people that need it, rather than people just calling for, hey, did you get my application? Or where am I in my application? Or something like that. That will all be online. And the goal is, again, to have people call the Department less. I don't know if you have anything you want to add to that. Melissa?

Yeah, I'll just add as we're also working through EDD next and looking at modernizing our PFL system by bringing it into the claims processing system that we have now for DI, we will have automated claims, which means claims that come in that have all information intact and that verifies the system can pay the claim without that falling out to a person. So that's something we've had for, I believe, unemployment. I know we have it for disability as well.

And so that frees up capacity for us to process the claims that need manual adjudication. So that's one thing that we're doing in advance of it. The other thing, as Nancy referred to with EDD Next, we're looking at making our information more customer friendly. So, we've been doing a lot of work.

I believe the advocates spoke to it a bit about where we're working with customers, with the advocates to get information on our application, let's say, or our Doctor certification to see where we do have stop gaps, where the information that we're requesting isn't clear. And so, we're not getting what we need to process the claim. If we can word that question differently and help the customer to understand what they need to do, it helps us get the information that we need.

It eliminates the back and forth and helps us process claims. So all the things that we're doing, increasing language access, all those things combined together will help us improve our claims processing and reduce those timeframes that claimants need to wait to get their benefits.

And are there any changes that will take effect sooner than later?

So as I mentioned, the PFL, rolling the PFL into SDI. So automating that, that will take place in the next, I think, 18 months we've been working on that. We're going to go out to bid soon for a vendor on that.

As we work on UI as well, like the contact center, as far as callbacks, things like that. We are looking at the EDD next project in PFL, Di and Ui holistically. So, if something happens in UI, we're saying, does that make sense in know, so we can do it at the same time. So, it's not like, well, UI has this great call center, but Di still know nobody's answering the phone or whatever, or there's no callbacks.

So we are looking at things and we are doing those types of things before EDD next is fully implemented in the next three years.

And a couple of things that were brought up by several of the stakeholders who presented today have to do with language access. So could you respond to those concerns and examples that were given about language access?

Go ahead. Sure.

Yeah. So one of the things that we're doing in the coming year is the shared customer portal, and we're building six languages into that portal. Those are the most common languages in California. We also have trained every staff person across Edd in terms of a language line that we have access to or we can use for interpretation. And I don't know the number of. Do you know the number of languages available through there? I think it's over.

It's 150 languages.

150 languages. So as of right now, we've given our reps across the Department access to translation services in 150 different languages. As we continue to build EDD Next, we want to build more languages into our services, so have more availability in our phone lines to answer where they have a phone line they can call, or an interactive voice system that can understand them and respond to them in their own language, where they can get the information, they need. So, we are looking at that.

That is integrated in everything we're doing with EDD Next. But I do want to point out we're not waiting for that. We do have that translation service now, so we're working to use that now. Everyone's been trained. Get that up and going while we're building out our services and platforms to have those additional languages.

So the issue of immigration and undocumented immigrants, there were a number of issues that were brought up that's impacting them more than others or different issues. Could you respond to that as well?

Can I take.

Yeah.

So, we actually are working with our advocates right now on putting together a resource page for undocumented workers. So, EDD had worked with our different programs, unemployment, workforce services and disability and paid family leave, and put together a central resource page for undocumented workers. So, it's information specifically for them rather than them having to go sort through all of our program pages to find their information.

We've given that draft to our advocate community and asked them for feedback before we go live with it, just to make sure that we're saying things in a way that is inclusive of all of those customers and is not anything that would be off putting. We do have language in there specifically around protecting their immigration status. I do look forward to seeing the feedback from the advocates. If they have additional language that they'd suggest, we're happy to entertain that and see what works best.

We protect all worker information, regardless of whether it's personal information, health information, immigration status, and we do want our customers to feel comfortable with that. So however, we can continue to get that message out there, we're happy to work with them on that.

Okay. And you mentioned in terms of EDD Next will be fully implemented or pretty much within three years. But you said within 18 months some changes would be made. The issue of cutting down the time for the claim to be resolved or finalized. We're asking people to wait 18 months.

Okay.

So how do we address that immediate need?

So let me clarify on EDD Next. It's an iterative process, so it's not like you have to wait five years and then all of a sudden there's blah. It's not quite like that. We're a year and a half into the EDD Next project, so we've been accomplishing things, language, access, going step by step. So, it's not just one big bang, so to speak. And then your question was? I'm sorry.

Well, yeah. What could you do between, or what will be done between now and that three years? That's going to help address the time, the amount of time that it takes, because so many of the examples that were given is the length of time, especially as it impacts Low wage workers.

Right. So I think that automating. Well, we're working on the contact center I know that that is something where we'll have callbacks. I think we already have that in UI, and I think we're working on Di right now. The automating PFL is going to be huge, and as I think we do every it project, it gets rolled out in stages. That's how the state sort of does it.

So I anticipate that that while 18 months is the final PFL automated into Di, I anticipate that that will be rolled out into stages and so there will be some improvements made sooner than that. I can't think off the top of my head of anything else.

Yeah. One thing I'll add is that we have been going back and looking at some of the fraud filters that we put in place last year when we were encountering fraud. We really had to put stops in place quickly and realizing that that probably was not the most efficient collective across the claim.

We're now looking at how those things are integrated and how we can remove some of those barriers that that's created so that it's more in the background and less intrusive on the timeline for the customer getting their claim processed.

Okay. Language contact. Okay. I don't know if there was anything else that you heard that you want to respond to before we.

I don't think so. We have an ongoing conversation with our advocates. I know all three of them personally, so I really appreciate what they shared, and I think we agree on what needs to be worked on. It's just a matter of time and going through these iterative steps to get there. So nothing that they're saying, I think, is in opposition to where we're going or what we want to accomplish. It's just a matter of time and taking the steps to get there.

I'm sorry. One more was the legislative liaison. There were issues that we have had of not being able to get the response, and maybe it's a matter of, like, when the pandemic, we had a lot more labor. Legislative liaisons.

What can we do to improve that?

Yes.

That is part of it. It is my understanding, though, that I can certainly go back and check, but it's my understanding that the ledge liaison office is still available and working on Di cases for the Legislature. Anytime a Legislator calls with any issue, it is the ledge liaison's job to help. So if there is something that is missing there, then we can certainly go back and look at that. But we appreciate your staff, too.

I think it was a question of, we're only given very broad information and not specific. We need a specific ledge liaison to address and not just have broad information. In other words, really help the specific case, which I think is the way it was being done during the pandemic.

During UI.

With the UI.

Yeah. No. Taken. Well, I'll go back and look at.

Nothing. Okay. Thank you both. Thank you all very much. Appreciate your work. And finally, we have issue seven, safety net for all workers Act. Mr. Alamo and Ms. Felstein, California Immigrant worker, Immigrant Policy Center, both in person.

Chas Alamo with the LAO.

I'm sorry, Mr. Alamo. I just want to say something quickly before we begin. I know we would like to be more responsive and collaborative with the Administration as we move towards our final budget. I know that EDD has noted some problems, difficulties with establishing the program, but my hope is that we can continue to discuss the issues. And we have technical questions. They prepared technical questions for the department.

We'll send these questions shortly after this hearing so we can try to understand the specific challenges and constraints faced by the department. So again, we look forward to understanding this issue. What are the technical issues that are facing EDD with that? Thank you, Mr. Alamo.

Chaz Alamo with the Leg. Analyst Office. The Senate Budget Plan includes 237 million in the budget year and somewhat smaller amounts in the subsequent two years to begin an excluded workers program, which would provide a UI or unemployment insurance-like weekly benefit to workers who become unemployed but are not eligible for the state's existing UI program. The proposal would include a benefit amount of $300 a week, which differs from the state's sort of traditional UI program, where benefit amounts are determined by prior earnings.

So this is known as a flat benefit. I will be available for questions, of course, but we'll hand it off to my other panelists to go into more detail.

Thank you. Welcome.

Is it on now? There we go. Hi. Good afternoon, Chair and members of the committee. My name is Sasha Feldstein, and I'm the economic policy director at California Immigrant Policy Center. I want to start by bringing in the voices of workers who could not be here. Adriana lives in Riverside and worked as a server for an event company when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. All of her work was shut down overnight, and because she wasn't eligible for unemployment insurance, times that were already hard became even more difficult.

She struggled to pay for rent, bills, and groceries, and even now that some of the work is back, she's still struggling to catch up from months of no income and little relief. Carmen is a single mother of four citizen children. She worked for the same janitorial company for 20 years, cleaning offices right here in Sacramento, and was just laid off last month with no reason given and no safety net to rely on.

Despite the fact that her labor has helped contribute to the UI system, she can't access the benefits because of her immigration status. Mario has worked as a farm worker for over 30 years and lives in Madera. He was laid off late last year and has tried hard to find work again but the persistent rains and the resulting damage to crops have made it difficult.

Mario is the primary provider for his wife and has had to take out loans to pay for rent without knowing when he'll be able to pay them back. He says that he lives day to day and visits food banks and other charities for food. So despite years of growing and harvesting the food that feeds families across the country today, faced with unemployment, Mario doesn't have the resources to feed the family of his own.

These stories illustrate what happens when the state treats workers' labor as essential but not the workers themselves. They show the fallout of policy decisions to exclude workers from our unemployment benefits system due to their immigration status, and they warn us of what can happen if we don't prepare our state and economy now to respond to the next economic, public health, or environmental crisis. Over 1 million undocumented individuals work as employees in California and makeup over 6% of California's workforce.

But what happens to these Californians is not limited to them alone. 20% of all Californians under the age of 18 live with an undocumented loved one or undocumented themselves. What happens to these workers in times of crisis affects us all. Certain industries also rely more heavily on the labor of undocumented workers than others. These include agriculture, caregiving, hospitality, manufacturing, warehousing, and construction: all industries that are critical to California's economy and the future of work in our state.

And they're all industries that were hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. While we're facing new crises now, the impact is largely the same. Recent storms have flooded huge areas of farmland across counties, putting many farm workers out of work. Towns that were evacuated, like Planada and Pajaro, have significant undocumented populations who are left without homes or jobs and are excluded from UI. A recent study from UC Merced Community and Labor center found that 83% of households in Planada lost work, sustained property damage, or both.

Among the Planada households that lost work, 57% did not have a single worker in the household who was eligible for UI. While the state and philanthropy have sometimes offered small, limited one-time relief payments, they pale in comparison to what all other Californians receive in times of crisis to get by.

Climate change will only increase the frequency and intensity of disasters like these, which will increase the frequency of job loss and will continue to put undocumented workers and the industries they work in at risk of losing their livelihoods and their income. These workers and their employers are contributing to the existing UI system. Taxes on the labor of undocumented workers in California contribute over $300 million each year to UI.

So these workers and their employers, who are concentrated in some of the lowest-wage industries, are subsidizing the system even though they can't benefit from it. Due to federal restrictions, California cannot expand the existing UI infrastructure to include undocumented workers. However, California can create a separate state-excluded workers program to provide a similar benefit. Workers would be required to prove their identity, their residency in the state, and their work history to be eligible. This has already been done in other states.

Colorado and New York are noted examples. New York stood up and launched their excluded workers program in four months. At a time when unemployment among undocumented workers was over 50%. They fielded over 350,000 applications and distributed funds to over 130,000 individuals. In a survey of participants, two-thirds of respondents used the funds to pay back rent. Over a third used it to buy food, and 20% used it to apply for an ITIN to file their taxes and invest in their work.

A state investment in unemployment benefits for excluded workers is essential to protect our progress of ensuring a California for all. It would help prevent workers and their families from going into debt, losing their homes, and falling deeper into poverty when they lose their job. It would also help prevent the sort of desperation among job seekers that allows unscrupulous employers to commit wage theft and other labor violations.

And it's critical to stabilizing businesses and industries, especially small businesses impacted by job loss, by ensuring that workers are still here when businesses are able to rehire. Every dollar spent on UI produces a dollar and $0.61 in economic stimulus because the benefits go towards spending in local communities. As California reels from crises, it is unsustainable to continue to rely on philanthropic or one-time relief. Ending this exclusion from unemployment benefits is a necessary step towards ensuring economic resilience for the state and equal protection for all workers.

Thank you and happy to answer any questions.

Thank you so much. Really appreciate this. Mr. Senator? No? Okay, thank you. Mr. Alamo, if you've looked at other states, the policies and why they're working or not working, and how can we learn from that experience in other states?

Sure. Chaz Alamo with the LAO. Senator Durazo, in addition to other states, one of the key examples to look to is the Federal Government. Much of the impetus behind seeing the opportunity to expand the state's UI program is because the Federal Government took steps during the pandemic to do just that. By expanding UI, in that case, specifically to self-employed workers who aren't eligible for traditional UI.

In the wake of that policy change, several states during the pandemic enacted sort of one time or temporary programs specifically for undocumented workers, including California. California's program was relatively small. The Disaster Relief Assistance for Immigrants, DRAI, program reached a small number of undocumented workers in the state but was again set up relatively quickly. The two examples set forth, Sasha, being New York and Colorado, are probably the closest to look to. New York's program was the largest by far during the pandemic.

But it was one time in nature. Colorado's-

I'm sorry, one time?

It was a temporary program and didn't have the ongoing structure that the Senate's budget proposal here would entail. Colorado's program, on the contrary, is ongoing in nature, but it's much smaller. Colorado officials estimate that the fund, which is capped at $30 million a year, would be able to provide benefits to about 2500 unemployed undocumented workers in Colorado. That's a much smaller number than would presumably be eligible in California were this policy to go forward.

So it's a little difficult to take too many lessons from the program structure in Colorado because it would be different than what is being proposed in California. That said, Colorado has implemented the program or begun to implement the program rather quickly. So the state may be able to look to Colorado for guidance or lessons learned in implementation of a proposal like this.

The one additional, I think, piece of context with respect to the Colorado example that is helpful is that the program was set up as part of a broader compromise among workers and employers. On the one hand, designating a fund source and setting up a UI program for undocumented workers. At the same time, the State of Colorado committed to use federal pandemic relief funds to pay down more than half of the state's outstanding UI federal trust fund loan. So that action was taken together.

And it would seem at this point that that is not part of the sense plan here, that compromise, but it's important context going forward. Thinking about the Colorado example in particular.

Okay, sorry. On the New York one, that was a one-time, as far as one sort of check to everyone, or it was a limited amount of time, one time? When you say one time, I'm not sure what you mean here.

So both.

We had like a one $500 check, and that was that.

Yeah. So, first of all, it was a one-time program, meaning it was administered just for a year. Although I think New York has been in conversations about creating a permanent program. It was also a one-time payment equivalent to the average amount of unemployment benefits that other New York workers had received over the course of the height of the pandemic.

But it was one check.

It was one check. It was a flat rate payment.

Got it. Do you know how much money was?

So there were two tiers. Are you asking about the payments?

Yes. No. The amount the state put into it.

It was a $2.1 billion investment.

Billion?

Billion. Yes. Most of the vast majority of that funding did go to providing benefits to New Yorkers. The admin costs were less than 100 million.

Okay, I know we're talking here about the UI payments, but there are other benefits that are provided to workers regardless of their immigration status, right? We do have that in California. Can you say a little bit about that?

Sure. While there are other benefits programs that are available to undocumented workers regardless of status, the biggest example you can look at is, especially during the pandemic, if you take into account DRAI, the state program, and other benefits programs that undocumented workers were able to rely on. Still, the biggest gap in aid was with respect to unemployment insurance benefits. So that was the bulk of aid that people used to get by, as well as federal stimulus payments that undocumented workers were excluded from.

Okay. I think that's all the questions. I mean, it seems to me pretty obvious, as either both of you talked about, is the fact that these men and women, on their behalf, contributions are made, and they get nothing. And especially, I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, the industry that they most contribute to as a huge part of the industry is farm worker and agriculture.

And when we have things like the floods taking place in different parts of the state, these entire communities are being left out. Not only individuals who happen to work in agriculture; entire communities, entire families, if you want to talk about that a little bit more because we really need to understand this is not about allowing a few more men and women who work to have access to unemployment. This is really a much bigger issue for the economy, for those areas, and for those industries.

There must be more than just the; if there are more than a million workers, it's not just farm workers. So if either of you can talk about that, that'd be great.

Go ahead.

I'll take a moment maybe to talk specifically about the state's perspective and, in particular, the Legislature's perspective in thinking about revenues in the state's economy. Unemployment Insurance writ large, the entire program is one of the state's most effective countercyclical programs. Use goes up when the economy slows down.

I think maybe a helpful anecdote of this is that during the pandemic, sort of the height of the unemployment in the summer of 2020, between state and federal dollars, more than $5 billion a week was going out to Californians in the form of UI payments. All other federal and state assistance programs paled in comparison by sheer magnitude. So that's sort of the macro perspective.

The state and the legislature therefore have a keen interest in a UI program that can be sort of administratively responsive to changes in workload, a critique that our office has pointed out about the Department during the pandemic, but also in potentially expanding the group of people who are eligible to receive these benefits during recessions as a countercyclical step. So dropping down from that level, the global perspective, if you will, you mentioned agricultural workers and sort of regional crises, floods.

In this case, the opportunity to have a UI like program in these sort of regional clusters when something occurs might mean that those workers remain in that area for a time, and that could be important as the area recovers and the employers and the communities and the local governments in that area look to reestablish those patterns of work and patterns of livelihood.

Because if an opportunity is not available such as this, then many workers who are by nature more mobile will leave to seek work elsewhere, and restarting those economic engines may be difficult. So beyond simply the effects on a particular worker or his or her family, the state has an interest to consider when thinking about expanding UI to undocumented workers in particular, but also to other workers who are excluded from the state's traditional UI program.

Great. That's very helpful. Thank you.

Yeah.

Echoing LAO's comments on the importance of UI, both in stabilizing the economy and keeping workers in place, I also want to just mention, as we're thinking about disaster response and assistance, that setting something like this up could be the first step to creating a program that workers could rely on and would be instantly available when the next crisis hits, which would reduce time and administrative costs for setting up any sort of rapid response program or one-time payment program.

This would actually make sure that there's infrastructure in place to respond and so that the state can be more prepared to support communities.

Just to kind of reaffirm to Mr. Alamo's point, it really is important to recognize these workers as assets, as essential components of so many industries. And I think your point is well taken that that stability that would be assured by providing assistance in downturns puts California and all these industries in a much better place on the upturn. And to Ms. Feldstein's, original point, they do contribute, and we need to recognize that.

And we're going to someday figure out, kind of at the federal level, the immigration puzzle. But until then, I think California is doing the right thing and is truly well served by programs like this. And I have to give the chair a ton of credit for being an advocate in that regard. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you. Appreciate if you have any final words that you want to say that we didn't cover.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, both of you. It was very, very helpful. Okay. We're going to move on now. Thank you. You're going to move on. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Senator. We'll now move on to anyone wanting to provide public comment. As a reminder, today's participant number is 877-226-8216 and the access code is 6217161. We're going to limit testimony time from either 30 seconds to one minute maximum, if you can, based on how many people do a #MeToo.

In other words, give your name and organization and where you stand, support on what issue. That would be very helpful to our time here. Moderator, if you are ready to prompt individuals wanting to provide public comment and if you would let us know how many people are waiting in the queue.

Thank you, Madam Chair. For participants--

I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Moderator. I made a mistake. I need to ask for witnesses in this room and then we'll move to the phones. Okay. Please come forward. Por favor.

Thank you. My name is Jora Trang. You can hear me, right? I'm the Chief of Staff and Equity at Worksafe. I'm speaking specifically about SB 321, Household Domestic Worker Services Health and Safety Advisory Committee. We've been working in partnership with the California Domestic Workers Coalition to advance the rights of domestic workers, and we need to implement this to ensure that there's progress and work towards ensuring that domestic workers are protected. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Chair. Rita Medina with Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, CHIRLA. I just want to comment briefly on Items Five, Six, and Seven. It's a Thursday of immigrant labor rights. So on the first item, Number Five, we're in support as part of the coalition--the California Domestic Workers--of the implementation of SB 321 and specifically the funds to extend the currently existing Outreach and Education Program.

Many of our CHIRLA members are domestic workers, and we find it incredibly important to finish the work, get us to this goal of recognizing them as essential workers and including them under Cal/OSHA. The next piece I want to address, Item Six: we want to align our comments with all of the recommendations that advocates pointed out around DI and PFL and the systems changes that are needed in order for undocumented workers to better access these services.

And then finally, want to have a great support for Item Seven which is the efforts to expand the safety net efforts and unemployment insurance for undocumented workers. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Hey, Madam Chair. Mariko Yoshihara. I'm here on behalf of the California Coalition for Worker Power and the California Employment Lawyers Association. Want to express just gratitude for the great work of this Committee and our strong support for funding for the CWOP and the DWEOP program, as well as Safety Net for All.

With regards to the DWEOP program, we think it's really important to protect all the great progress that we've made for this essential industry and to take the next steps to ensure that all workers, including domestic workers, have a safe and healthy working environment, and for both CWOP and the DWEOP programs, these are proven, successful models in terms of effective strategic partnerships with our state agencies.

And it's imperative that we continue to use and build upon these infrastructures--especially now that we're recovering from the pandemic--to ensure that workers have the resources and the support that they need to be able to exercise their rights to have safe workplaces and to support their families. Thank you.

Thank you.

Hello. Luz Gallegos with TODEC Legal Center and also proud member of the Safety Net for All coalition, here in full support of Safety Net for All. For us, it's very personal. We see the struggle at the grassroots level with our members as they struggle to make ends meet. We have so many stories that are so powerful and that brings a passion within our hearts to be so vocal to the Governor.

One of the sayings that one of our members that she was going to be here but she couldn't, she got called into work, and she says, 'sin no trabajo, mi familia no come. If I don't work, my kids do not eat.' And she sent me her picture. She lost her husband two years ago due to COVID, a farm worker from the Coachella Valley. The struggle is real, and she asked me to tell the Governor, 'Si me quieres, Juan, tu saxones lo di dan.'

It's a saying, 'if you really care about us farm workers, your actions will tell it.' So we're asking and suplicandole algo vernador y gracious alsanado anosta pompanera. We need action now. Our community is suffering. We feel it in their hearts. We feel it in their stories, and for us, it's so personal that they need this type of benefit, and it's long overdue. If our workers are strong, our economy is stronger because immigrants are the backbone to our state's economy. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Thank you for coming. Todec is Riverside, right?

Yes.

Thank you.

*Buenas tardes y gracious la comite por san los lidres en esta campana en esta lucha. Soy y me llama Guillermina Castellanos con La Collectiva de Mujeres y Day Labor y mas parte de les street de community service.*

Hello. Good afternoon. First, I want to thank and appreciate the leadership of the Senator and this Committee, and my name is Guillermina Castellanos. I'm the Co-Director of La Collectiva de Mujeres, the Women's Collective, and the Day Labor Program of Dolores Street Community Services.

*Tenemos mas de 500 trabajadores de lugas.*

We have more than 500 domestic workers.

*Y DWEOP acido umbankulo muy importante, and La Vida de La Trabajado de Lugar para serce visible.*

And the Domestic Worker Education Outreach Program has been a key component to being able to empower domestic workers to develop their leadership.

*DWEOP trabaja lugar el robo de salario.*

Through the program of DWEOP, we have been able to stop wage theft from happening.

*Ya si una amenta muy importante y fundamental para de se royo de este industria que por muchas anos no se la visto.*

And has been fundamental for the development of this industry, which for so many years has been invisible.

*Yos asido trabajar los cinco anos y los estados unitos quinse y base este problemas muy grabes como al.*

I have been a domestic worker since I was five years old, and I have experienced really harsh conditions, including sexual assault.

*Asoyda cuando tenia quince anos y tengos 62 anos y no tiene salud y seguridad.*

This happened when I was 15 years old, and now I'm 62, and still we have no health and safety protection.

*Acion, muchas gracias por su poyo y la attencion paramos para trabajar toco se tambien y teneres por tu muchas gracias.*

Thank you for your dedication. We look forward to continuing to work with you and with employers as well and supporting employers as well in this industry.

Gracias por venir en persona.

Hi, everyone. My name is Megan Whelan. Thank you, Chair, and to the Committee for all of your work this afternoon and all of your leadership for our state. My name is Megan Whelan. I am with the California Domestic Workers Coalition. We are the leading voice for the more than 300,000 domestic workers in this state. I'm here also in full support of implementing the SB 321 Advisory Committee recommendations.

I was fortunate and honored to be able to serve on the SB 321 Advisory Committee and want to lift up that our state has taken important steps. In 2019, this Administration created the Education Outreach Program that we've seen, such successful achievements, and then in 2021, we were able to work a full year on health and safety issues, really understanding how to apply health and safety in the home workplace, and we cannot stop here.

We can't just let all of that progress go undone, and so we just ask for your support to continue that progress forward and to continue that progress for this essential industry. Thank you.

Thank you for coming.

Hi. Good afternoon. Thank you, Chair and Committee Members. My name is Maegan Ortiz. I'm the Executive Director of the Instituto de Educacion Popular del Sur de California. We work with, organize with, educate with, outreach to, and advocate with thousands of domestic workers and day laborers across the Greater Los Angeles Area, everywhere from the South Bay, San Fernando Valley, San Gabriel Valley, to the hills where all the mansions are: Hollywood Hills, Malibu Hills, Palisades Hills, and of course, Central Los Angeles.

I think it's really important that, yes, we support the recommendations of the SB 321 Committee to fund the expansion of health and safety protections to domestic household service workers, but I think it's really important that it's also include the expansion of the Domestic Worker Education and Outreach Program. DWEOP was the mother of CWOP that was spoken about today, and it really serves a unique industry that works in isolated working conditions.

So it really needs that very specific touch and attention. This is really about creating partnerships, not about being punitive. It's about being preventative, not punitive. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you for coming.

Good afternoon, ma'am. My name is Susan Buensuceso. I am a worker organizer of the Filipino Advocates for Justice, and we serve a community of Filipino caregivers who are mostly undocumented and have fear in their daily lives, and I thank you for the work that you do, and I guess the point that I want to stress is, with the pandemic, we learned to work from home. Therefore, we must recognize that people who work in our homes should be given the rights and education that they need. Thank you very much.

Thank you for coming.

Hi. Sasha Feldstein with California Immigrant Policy Center. I know you already heard me speak on Safety Net for All. We're also here in support of CWOP and DWEOP. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Hello. My name is Marquise Gold, and I am here on behalf of Hand in Hand, an organization that I feel very deeply connected to. We represent families who employ nannies and other domestic workers to support their household and people with disabilities.

And for myself, I am also a nanny agency owner, and there is not a single family that I have come across who does not support this bill and who does not want to look after the people who they trust to look after the most important people in their life. So thank you for your support, and it's been a pleasure. Thank you.

Thank you for making the trip.

Good afternoon, Senator. Kimberly Alvarenga, again on behalf of the California Domestic Workers Coalition. We are also wanting to support the Safety Net for All as many of our members are impacted by this issue, and we have been in solidarity with this work for a number of years, so very much in support and also for the CWOP program as well. Thank you.

Good. Okay. Anybody else here in person in the room? Seeing none, thank you all for those who came in person. Moderator, now we are ready to prompt the individuals waiting to provide public comment, and if you would tell us the total number of people waiting to testify.

All right. As Madam Chair indicated, if you would like to make public comment at this time, please press one followed by zero. One followed by the zero. An operator will give you your line number and place you back in the queue. Looks like we have-

With the Pomona Economic Opportunity Center, also part of the Safety Net For All Coalition. And I'm calling to urge you to please keep pushing so that SB 227 makes it to our final state budget. Thank you.

And we will go to line 40. You are open.

My name is Bertha from the Clean Carwash Worker Center. I'm from the L.A. area. I'm a part of the Safety Net For all Coalition, in support. Thank you.

Line 42, please go ahead.

Good afternoon, Chair and Committee Members. I'm Amarantha Silva from Marin County, Member of Parent Voices California, representing our 10 chapters across the state here as a part of the Safety Network Coalition and a strong support of the item number seven, the Safety Net for All Workers Act. Thank you.

Thank you.

You are open, line 43.

Good afternoon, Chair and Members, Anna Alvarado, on behalf of the California Edge Coalition, respectfully urging the Committee to reject the trigger cut to the California Youth Leadership Corps program, reject the delay for the Women in construction unit, and support the Safety Net for All Workers Act. We'd also like to uplift the importance of the Youth Job Corps program, which is intended to create and expand youth employment opportunities that provide valuable job skills and career pathways for opportunity youth.

The Governor is proposing 78 million ongoing to permanently support that program. Both the youth Leadership Corps and the youth job programs are essential to provide workforce opportunities for underserved youth, particularly young people of color and immigrant youth, especially those who have been disconnected from our education and workforce systems. Thank you so much.

Thank you for calling.

Line 35, please go ahead.

Buenas tardes senador y membros del comite. Quiero comentar adicional en Espanol por los trabajadores campacinos sin documentaros que no estan aqui con nosotros. Mi nombre Vanessa Teran, Directora De Politica ay nombre de la organization, Comunitaria Mixteco/Indigena en la costa central de California. Y para la sequera de todos los trabajadores que estan. Pasado De Coquentaros Ivana importante parallel personas De lesando paravalantamesa. Gracias.

Gracias.

Line 45, please go ahead.

Good afternoon. Nicole Wordelman, on behalf of The Children's Partnership, greatly appreciative and in support of the Senate Safety Net for All Workers proposal. Full Legislature and Administration to adopt it. Thank you.

Thank you.