We live in volatile economic times, with global markets reacting moment by moment to the latest bits of data and the utterances of central bankers and politicians — even the tweets from the White House. California’s economy is much too big — the fifth largest in the world, we are constantly reminded — to avoid […]
As reported by ABC’s local Los Angeles affiliate, the main grievances of the nurses union were that LA County had violated a law requiring minimum nurse to patient ratios and failed to retain nurses. The inadequate staffing leading to these grievances might be attributed to a shortage of nurses, but apparently that is a controversial […]
The sprawling Fremont campus where Tesla makes its cars will take the brunt of the company layoffs, Tesla said in public notices filed with the state of California. The electric carmaker will terminate more than a thousand positions from its workforce in Northern California, as part of an announced round of layoffs affecting more than […]
The 2019 report, prepared by Beacon Economics, shows that creative industries throughout the state support 2.6 million jobs, $227.8 billion in labor income and $604.9 billion in annual economic output. One million of those jobs represent workers directly employed in creative industries and the other 1.6 million are jobs indirectly generated by those sectors. When […]
Gig worker or employee? California will wrestle with that question this year with efforts under way in Sacramento to either codify or limit a groundbreaking state Supreme Court decision issued in April. The ruling, in a suit brought by delivery drivers at Dynamex, made it harder for businesses to classify workers as independent contractors. It […]
The SWAG Program has a funding stream that has been missing. There are 39,000 small manufacturers in California who have 20 or less employees and employers don’t have the resources or the time to invest in an apprenticeship program. But investments by the California Community Colleges and its Strong Workforce Program, as well as other […]
Much like the hunt for a place to live in the Bay Area, the search for child care is getting harder as prices rise. Over the past four years, the median cost of childcare in the nine-county Bay Area increased 40 percent, according to research from Oakland’s Insight Center for Community Economic Development. In San […]
For the first time in 15 years, the number of would-be freshmen applying to the University of California has dropped, the first sign that a national trend of declining college enrollment could be hitting the West Coast. Applications for the coming school year dipped by 3% to 176,530, according to preliminary UC data released Tuesday. […]
New and soon-to-be parents working for Los Angeles businesses would be guaranteed up to 18 weeks of paid leave — at as much as 100% of their usual wages — under a new proposal at City Hall. City Councilwoman Nury Martinez and Councilman David Ryu, who introduced the plan Tuesday, argued that it would support […]
California farmers, anchors of a $50 billion industry that represents 13 percent of the nation’s agricultural value and a critical source of its produce and milk, are facing an unprecedented squeeze on their livelihoods that could have repercussions in households from coast to coast. Beyond a decade-in-the-making labor shortage, spurred in part by a lack […]
CBO estimates that the five-week shutdown delayed approximately $18 billion in federal discretionary spending for compensation and purchases of goods and services and suspended some federal services. As a result of reduced economic activity, CBO estimates, real (that is, inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) in the fourth quarter of 2018 was reduced by $3 billion […]
Until recently, most white-collar, service-sector and professional jobs were shielded from automation by humans’ cognitive monopoly. Computers couldn’t think, so jobs that required any type of thinking—nuclear physics professor, florist and everything in between—required a human. But a form of artificial intelligence called “machine learning” has given computers skills like reading, writing, speaking and recognizing […]
Many political reporters have spent the last six weeks cataloging alleged harms to the economy from the partial government shutdown ended last week. Meanwhile outside of government, America’s small companies were ramping up their historic effort to employ new workers. That’s according to the latest National Federation of Independent Business employment survey, due out later […]
When I was CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, I chose Round Rock, Texas, over San Jose, Calif., for Cypress’s second wafer-fabrication plant, and I chose to locate our third plant in Bloomington, Minn. Other CEOs made similar decisions. Silicon Valley barely has any silicon left; there are now zero state-of-the-art wafer-fabrication plants here. We had to […]
Compensation for American workers grew more slowly in the fourth quarter than the third. The employment-cost index, a measure of wages and benefits for civilian workers, rose a seasonally adjusted 0.7% from October through December, the Labor Department said Thursday. The gain was slightly short of expectations of economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal […]