Michael S. Bernick

Who is Michael S. Bernick?

Michael S. Bernick served as Director of California’s labor department, the Employment Development Department from 1999 to 2004. He is a practitioner and theorist of job training and employment strategies. In a series of articles and books written during the 1980s and 1990s, drawing on his experience in community job training, he argues against the then-expanding social welfare system. He sets out alternative strategies of inner city entrepreneurship and market-based training and job ladders. In the 2000s, his practice and writing turned to worker retraining and reemployment strategies in response to the job losses accompanying globalization, technology, and the impacts of the Great Recession.

Bernick grew up in Los Angeles through Fairfax High School, and attended Harvard University, Oxford University and the University of California, Berkeley Law School.

After graduating from law school, he spent much of the next seven years as executive director of the San Francisco Renaissance Center, a community job training agency that operated a series of literacy and vocational training classes, an early welfare to work program, and five business ventures providing transitional employment.