Leaders of America’s largest companies expressed strengthening confidence in plans to ramp up capital investment and ultimately productivity over the next six months, contingent on Congress’s ability to pass tax reform.
Chief executives’ plans for capital investment rose to their highest level since the second quarter of 2011, according to the Business Roundtable’s fourth-quarter survey of CEOs.
A group of prominent lawyers representing teachers and students from poor performing schools sued California on Tuesday, arguing that the state has done nothing about a high number of schoolchildren who do not know how to read.
The advocacy law firm, Public Counsel, filed the lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court to demand the California Department of Education address its “literacy crisis.” The state has not followed suggestions from its own report on the problem five years ago, the lawsuit said
Most Americans don’t need a college degree to get a job. Many do need to spend a lot of time on their feet and get some post-employment training if they want to keep it, according to a new Labor Department report detailing occupational requirements for American workers in 2017.
Aerospace employment in Los Angeles County dropped by 3,000 jobs, or about 6 percent, to 51,000 between 2014 and 2016, according to a report released Monday from the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.
Most of the job losses were in aircraft manufacturing, which fell by 2,200, due in part to the closing of Boeing Co.’s Long Beach plant which built the C-17 Globemaster III cargo plane. That resulted in about 400 layoffs at the end of 2015, according to news stories.
The aerospace job losses were partially offset by a gain of 500 jobs in aircraft parts, engines and guided missiles, as well as space vehicles, due to the expansion of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. in Hawthorne.
Last year was a very good one for the state’s economy. The 3.3 percent gain in economic output in 2016 was more than double that of the nation as a whole and one of the highest of any state.
However, California stumbled during the first half of 2017. California’s increase was an anemic six tenths of one percent in the first quarter compared to the same period of 2016, and 2.1 percent in the second quarter, well below the national rate and ranking 35th in the nation.
The U.S. economy is headed into the final stretch of 2017 powered by one of sturdiest periods of growth in its nine-year expansion, a vigor that is helping drive stock-market indexes to new highs.
With the growth of artificial intelligence (AI), many are worried that we may all be put out of work, replaced by robots. We can stop worrying. We’ll run out of jobs when we run out of goods and services we desire. Which will be never.
Facing a significant revenue shortfall this year, BuzzFeed is laying off about 100 employees and reorganizing its advertising sales and business operations as it moves away from relying purely on native advertising. BuzzFeed plans to reduce its U.S. staff by 8%, with all the cuts coming from the business and sales side of the organization, the company said Wednesday. Some editorial staffers and business-side employees in the U.K. will also be let go. BuzzFeed employs about 1,700 people world-wide.
Building on our January 2017 report on automation, McKinsey Global Institute’s latest report, Jobs lost, jobs gained: Workforce transitions in a time of automation (PDF–5MB), assesses the number and types of jobs that might be created under different scenarios through 2030 and compares that to the jobs that could be lost to automation. The results reveal a rich mosaic of potential shifts in occupations in the years ahead, with important implications for workforce skills and wages. Our key finding is that while there may be enough work to maintain full employment to 2030 under most scenarios, the transitions will be very challenging—matching or even exceeding the scale of shifts out of agriculture and manufacturing we have seen in the past.
California’s highest court decided unanimously Monday that farmers may have a labor contract imposed on them if negotiations with a union fail to produce an agreement. The state Supreme Court, overturning a lower court ruling, upheld a 2002 law that permits the state to order farmers and unions to reach binding contracts. The Legislature passed the law after determining that farmers were refusing to negotiate with unionized workers. The law allows either side to ask for a neutral mediator and for that mediator to impose a contract covering wages and working conditions.
Plenty of jobs still exist in the US economy, but plenty have been lost. And the jobs that have vanished were good jobs, middle-class ones—the kind that helped families buy houses, cars, and college educations for their children. Many of the jobs were available to immigrants and workers without college degrees, and allowed them to work toward the American dream.
The workplace trend toward self-service and automation has indeed made some occupations obsolete. Customers have been accustomed to bagging their own groceries for at least a decade. Restaurant chains such as McDonald’s and Panera Bread are now rolling out kiosks that allow customers to place their own orders. And the automated delivery devices targeted by Mr. Yee will render some delivery jobs obsolete.
More than ever, the government requires Americans to get permission to earn a living. In the 1950s one in 20 workers needed a license to work; now about one in four do. The rules hurt the working poor in particular, but everyone suffers in states with the most licensing requirements, as a new and comprehensive report by the Institute for Justice (IJ) illustrates
California posted strong job gains in October, as the Golden State’s economic engine pushed the unemployment rate down to 4.9% from 5.1% a month earlier.
In all, the state added 31,700 net new jobs last month, according to data released Friday by the Employment Development Department.
The report marked the first time since March that employers added jobs in consecutive months, boosting confidence in an economy that has slowed somewhat from last year.
Another prominent education research and advocacy organization that disapproves of California’s approach to school accountability has ranked California’s new system at the bottom nationwide in a report released Tuesday.
The low score by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute reflects a core disagreement over how best to identify and work with schools needing help. California education leaders are unapologetic about the route they’ve chosen, and they say the Fordham analysis contains a key error.
Like Bellwether Education Partners, which harshly criticized the state’s approach in an August analysis, Washington, D.C.- and Ohio-based Fordham gives high grades to states that will rank schools with an A-F letter grade or a similar method that’s understandable at a glance. States will use rankings to select the lowest-performing schools, as required by the federal Every Student Succeeds Act.