News

Mar’s ordinance requires businesses to pay employees for four hours if an employee is either on-call or sent home early, and mandates businesses to offer extra hours to part-time workers before hiring new employees. Chiu’s legislation calls on formula retail stores to post employees’ schedules 14 days in advance, give workers extra pay for changing a schedule at the last minute, and allow the same access to requests for time off and particular work schedules to part-time workers that they do for full-time employees.

But UC officials say the system also needs the money to help rescue its pension fund – neglected for two decades and facing $7.2 billion in unfunded liabilities – and to cover the growing cost of retiree health benefits.

For large businesses operating in multiple states, Proposition 65 is a regulatory headache. But for local, family-owned businesses like mine, the law can mean bankruptcy. Ultimately, a well-intentioned public health initiative has been perverted into a trial lawyer’s dream and an entrepreneur’s worst nightmare.

The biennial survey, conducted by the Oregon Department of Consumer and Business Services, found that California’s workers’ compensation costs, $3.48 per $100 of payroll on average, are 188 percent of the national median among the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

All that has changed, according to a far-reaching package of data from the state controller. Taxpayers are now on the hook for billions of dollars more to cover the future retirements of public workers, with the bill widely varying depending on where they live.

A strike during the past two days by 18,000 nurses at Kaiser Permanente facilities in northern and central California, including three major Sacramento-area hospitals, was the latest salvo by a powerful union that says it is intent on improving the lot of nurses nationwide.

Although the state’s political stage is still filled with bickering over whether the California comeback is real, another economic snapshot has reinforced some optimism: California has advanced two slots to No. 37 on the Forbes ” Best States for Business and Careers” list.

California is among 21 states where tax revenue in the second quarter of 2014 surpassed (after adjusting for inflation) what it was before revenue collapsed during the recession, the Pew report found. California received $34.9 billion in tax revenue from April through June of this year, 5.5 percent higher than its pre-recession high of $31.3 billion in the third quarter of 2006. That is more than triple the U.S. average of 1.6 percent.

Following voter approval of a state rainy day fund, Standard and Poor’s raised California’s credit to an A+ stable rating on Wednesday, the state’s fourth upgrade by a credit ratings agency in the past two years. The rating was raised from A.

Corporate executives who haven’t considered investing in California for a long time suddenly have new reasons to do so.

Chiang added public pension systems to his already large fiscal database. One chart reveals that their “unfunded liabilities” – the gap between assets and liabilities for current and future pensions – exploded from $6.3 billion in 2003 to $198.2 billion in 2013.

Local-government employers contributions to defined-benefit retirement systems have nearly tripled in the last 11 years, according to the most recent data published by the California State Controller’s Office, while employee contributions have nearly doubled.

In California’s continuing effort to attract new and expanding businesses, the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz) has launched a new web page titled “Breaking Through Barriers to Doing Business “that praises those streamlining permitting in the state.”

The Golden State sets the gold standard for innovation and access to capital, and its economy is turning around. But “golden” could also describe the state’s costs of living and doing business.

In a major victory for California labor unions, Gov. Jerry Brown announced Sunday that he has signed legislation that will hold businesses liable when subcontractors violate wage, workplace safety or workers’ compensation rules.