Labor Day is the unofficial end of summer and the start of fall sports — and also a time to appreciate the hard work of those around you. With roots in the labor union movement that established the eight-hour workday, the holiday began in 1894 as a celebration of the American jobholder. 

Ahead of Labor Day, KCRW takes stock of the local landscape for workers.

Rent is too damn high, and it’s a tough job market

These are uncertain times for working people. In Los Angeles, housing costs still outpace wages, and 7.8% of people working full-time in LA County are in poverty, according to a report by the Public Policy Institute of California.

All over the state, it’s a little more difficult to find a job right now. The unemployment rate rose slightly to 5.5% in July, according to the latest jobs report. That’s still considered a healthy level, but it is the highest in the country. California consistently has one of the highest jobless rates.

Layoffs in the tech industry are part of the reason. Also, in Los Angeles, jobs in film and TV production have not bounced back from their peak in 2022. And in January, more than 11,000 people lost employment during the Palisades and Eaton Fires, according to a UCLA report. 

The industries adding jobs in California include health care and private education.

The way we work keeps changing

White-collar workers who were allowed to do their jobs remotely or had a hybrid schedule during the COVID pandemic haven’t all returned to the office. Nationally, staff came on-site an average of 3.2 days a week, only slightly up from last year.

There’s also a lot of speculation about how artificial intelligence will or could change people’s jobs. This year about 10,000 positions have been replaced by AI nationally, according to a report by Challenger, Gray & Christmas. So far, job loss to artificial intelligence is more of a fear than a reality for most workers, though it’s happened for folks in tech.

California is a leader in the labor union movement

Union participation has held steady for the past 20 years in the Golden State, according to a new report by UCLA and UC Berkeley, despite a national decline since the 1980s. 

Researchers found that in 2024, 1 in 6 workers in California was represented by a union. California ranks eighth in the country for the percent of workers who are in a union, behind Hawaii and New York.

The San Bernardino-Riverside metro area has one of the highest levels of union density in the state, due to the number of union warehouse and transportation workers, says Tobias Higbie, a UCLA labor historian and director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, a co-publisher of the report. 

Higbie says the demographics of the labor movement reflects the state’s diversity. 

“The big growing unions are baristas and home care workers and public sector workers,” he says. “So a lot of young people, people of color, [and] women are coming into the labor movement and transforming those workplaces.”

The report also highlights the role state labor policy has played in shaping worker protections across several industries. In recent years, worker groups successfully lobbied the state legislature to raise wages for fast food workers, warehouse workers pushed for standards around indoor heat, and the legislature gave agriculture workers new collective bargaining rights.