For nearly fifty years, the Labor Education and Research Center (LERC) at the University of Oregon has been connecting workers and their unions together with students, faculty, and policymakers to address the most critical issues facing working-class Oregonians.

The UO Labor Center continues to be a critical source of applied research, hands-on training, and technical assistance for policy-makers, unions, and community advocates in Oregon and beyond.

The UO Labor Center remains the only program in Oregon’s higher education system that examines work and the economy with a focus on the needs, interests, and priorities of workers and working-class communities.

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  Public Pensions and Private Equity Risks
  Private equity firm Instar Asset Management has received hundreds of millions of dollars of investment capital from public pensions in the US and Canada. LERC Research Faculty Michael Angulo examines Instar’s track record, highlighting poor performance, a labor dispute, and a boycott at its Windmill Farms in Washington State—raising concerns about the implications for public pension investors….
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  Farmworker Overtime
  In 2022, the Oregon state legislature passed HB 4002 which mandates overtime pay for farmworkers. In this policy brief, LERC Research Associate Mary Follo assesses the primary research cited by Oregon growers in opposition to the legislation. She finds a number of methodological problems with this research that cast doubt on their conclusions….
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  Child Care Workforce in Crisis
  This report documents how home-based child care providers and their families pay the price for both poor wages and working conditions in the rest of the economy, and for our stingy public child care programs. Families can’t afford the true cost of care and our severely underfunded public child care programs are too small and weak to make up the difference….