About Us
Caitlin Vega
Caitlin was born into the Labor Movement. Her dad was a member of the Laborers Union and instilled in her the belief that unions change lives. She went to union meetings and picket lines throughout her childhood.
Caitlin started working for labor as part of the “Union Summer” youth program in 1996 and was hired on to help train the next session. Next she worked as an organizer on a private homecare campaign. She went on to work at Teamsters Local 490 and SEIU Local 614, representing private and public sector workers in grievances and negotiations.
Prior to founding Union Made, she spent sixteen years at the California Labor Federation where she worked her way up to Legislative Director, overseeing a stellar lobbying team who passed cutting edge laws on workers’ rights, health and safety, health care affordability, foreclosure protection and more. She was principally responsible for advancing bills to strengthen core labor protections and for stopping business-backed rollbacks of such important rights as meal breaks and the 8-hour day.
Caitlin is a labor lawyer, specializing in legislative efforts to combat misclassification and the fissured workplace. Among her achievements, she helped to pass the landmark law AB 5 in 2019, codifying the “ABC test” of employment status. AB 5 has become a national model for labor law nationally and was recognized by all major 2020 Presidential candidates as a priority for federal labor law reform. She also worked on laws to impose joint liability on companies that use temporary and contract labor, expand whistleblower protection, and penalize companies that use immigration-related threats to deter workers from enforcing their rights.
Caitlin is also experienced in public sector labor law. She helped to negotiate, draft, pass, and implement a package of bills to address the impact of the Janus decision on unions and workers.
Caitlin worked her way through California State University, Hayward, majoring in Sociology and Latin American Studies. She attended UC Davis School of Law. She is a member of the Lawyers Coordinating Committee of the AFL-CIO and the Labor & Employment Section of the California State Bar. She was named an Influencer by the Sac Bee. Her chapter on working as a labor lobbyist was just published in A Practitioner’s Guide to Lobbying and Advocacy in California (Kendall-Hunt, 2019).
Sara Flocks
Sara started in this movement as an organizer and advocate. She worked for the United Farm Workers before joining the UC Berkeley Labor Center as a Labor-Policy Specialist. There she started the Labor Summer program to train hundreds of young people to work in the Labor Movement.
Sara founded and co-directed Young Workers United, a worker center in San Francisco, that organized retail and restaurant workers, fighting wage theft and winning millions of dollars in lost wages for workers. She worked on San Francisco’s minimum wage ordinance and ran the campaign to pass the landmark paid sick days law in 2006 that sparked a national movement for paid sick days and served as the model for California’s state law.
The experience crafting, passing and enforcing local worker protection laws sparked her interest in policy and led her to graduate school. There she studied corporate and public finance , budgets and negotiation to be more effective at strategic campaigns for workers’ rights.
Sara spent the last 11 years at the California Labor Federation as the Policy Coordinator. She specializes in health care, revenue and taxation, economic development and transportation policy. Over the past few years, she has worked extensively on the impact of technology and automation on workers. She led the effort to pass legislation to prohibit surprise medical bills and to require drug makers to justify price increases of prescription drugs, both of which were first in the nation and have since become national models.
President Pro Tempore Toni Atkins appointed Sara to serve as a Commissioner on the Health California for All Commission (HCFA), and she was a participant in the year-long California Health Care Initiative, a project of the national Convergence Center for Policy Resolution. She has been a featured speaker at numerous healthcare convenings and is one of the strongest advocates for healthcare cost containment and for a universal health care system.
Sara went to UC Berkeley and has a Masters’ Degree in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School. She is one of the authors of ““I Know What It’s Like to Struggle”: The Working Lives of Young Students in an Urban Community College” published in the Labor Studies Journal and her work is profiled in the book Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream by Janice Fine.