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The job market in Southern California could look very different by 2021 and beyond. Here’s where the jobs will and  won’t be.

The Center for a Competitive Workforce has produced a report analyzing 20 middle-skills occupations for which community colleges offer degree and certificate programs. The occupations are employed by six key industries with a competitive advantage in the greater Los Angeles region. Read highlights of the report below, or download the full report PDF.

The country shed 33,000 jobs in September, the first loss in seven years, the Labor Department said Friday, ending the longest stretch of job growth on record.

But that decline was skewed down by Hurricane Harvey, which hit Texas in late August, and Irma, which hit Florida in early September. The storms came just before businesses filled out monthly surveys of payrolls, which are submitted to the government and used to tabulate hiring. Many businesses reported reduced payrolls during the survey week of Sept. 12. Employment in the restaurant industry, in particular, took a big hit, falling 105,000 in September from the month before, after averaging growth of 29,000 during the prior six months.

Following Ford’s announcement that it would shift more resources to electric cars, the United Auto Workers has begun talks with the automaker about the potential impact of more electric-car production on jobs.

. . . In a presentation to investors earlier this week, Ford CEO Jim Hackett said electric cars will reduce “hours to build” by 30 percent compared to internal-combustion models. If a car takes less time to build, the carmaker won’t need as many workers. Settles said he has met one-on-one with Hackett to discuss the issue.

The more important data point is that with essentially no gains in 2017, fewer than half of California’s children are meeting English standards and fewer than 38 percent in math.

That should be seen as a major crisis, but when one looks at the numbers for black and Latino kids, and those classified as poor or “English learners,” they even more shameful.

While three-quarters of Asian students and two-thirds of whites hit the competency mark in English, fewer than a third of black students and just over a third of Latinos did. For poor kids, it was 35.5 percent and for English learners, a minuscule 12.1 percent.

The scores on mathematics were even worse, just 37.6 percent overall, 19 percent for blacks and 25.2 percent for Latinos. The best spin state schools Supt. Tom Torlakson could muster was

The best spin state schools Supt. Tom Torlakson could muster was a weak “I’m pleased we retained our gains,” followed by a rationalization that “these tests are far more rigorous and realistic than the previous paper and pencil tests.”

The low achievement of disadvantaged children is obviously important for their individual futures, but what makes it critical to the state as a whole is that they are about 60 percent of the state’s K-12 students.

When California rolled out new standardized tests, experts said scores would improve when students got used to them. But three tests in, rather than showing strides from familiarity, their scores have stagnated in English and math.

About 3.2 million students in third through eighth grade and 11th grade took the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress in the spring. The tests are aligned to the Common Core standards, and demand mastery — which means they’re harder than California’s old standardized tests.

This year, 49% of students passed the English exam, compared with 48% in 2016. In math, 38% of students met or exceeded the state’s standard, compared with 37% last year. Fifth-graders’ scores dropped slightly in English.

As the next generation of robots arrive in the workplace, will they enable workers or replace them? According to MIT’s Daron Acemoglu, one of the most frequently cited economists in the world, this distinction is the difference between technology that raises workers’ wages versus tech that merely reduces overall employment and wage growth.

Daron Acemoglu is a professor of economics at MIT, a frequent contributor to Foreign Policy Magazine, and co-author of Why Nations Fail. He joins me today to discuss his research and what technological innovation means for the future of work.

New research suggests programs aimed at helping low-income U.S. children, such as Head Start early childhood education and Medicaid health coverage, may have benefits not only for participating children but for their children as well. A recent working paper found the 1980s expansion of Medicaid programs to cover more low-income pregnant women led, years later, to their children giving birth to healthier babies. Another working paper found childhood access to Head Start led to better long-term outcomes in the next generation, including higher high-school graduation rates and reduced criminal behavior.

Many are concerned about the state of the American job market, convinced that improving employment indicators mask pervasive hardship. In particular, some are concerned about the increase in the number of prime-age men who are neither working nor looking for work—men who are out of the labor force, or inactive. While this upward trend is routinely taken as a sign of the economy’s weakness, other interpretations are possible.

Scott Winship considers why inactivity in the labor force among prime-age men—those between the ages of 25 and 54—has grown so steadily for so long. The study examines trends in a number of labor market indicators to assess the extent to which rising inactivity rates reflect a worsening of the job market (lower demand) or reduced job-seeking (lower supply). It takes a detailed look at four different types of prime-age inactive men: the disabled, the retired, those who want a job, and those who do not.

Policymakers should focus on helping the unemployed and inactive men who want jobs and on reforming disability programs to promote independence. The unemployment rate provides a reliable indicator of changes in the labor market’s strength, even if it understates the level of involuntary joblessness. The Bureau of Labor Statistics should consider adopting a new “U5b” rate that includes inactive people who want a job along with those counted by the existing unemployment rate, in order to institutionalize a broader measure of joblessness and increase faith in our jobless statistics.

Brian Sabean, executive vice president of the San Francisco Giants baseball team, says California’s high taxes make it more difficult for his team to compete with teams in other states. During a discussion of the Giants’ lackluster season and the likelihood of shaking up the roster next year, Mr. Sabean told San Francisco Chronicle sports columnist Bruce Jenkins: “Let’s face it, how many free agents are going to come here? They’re not. For two reasons: the ballpark and the California taxes. That’s just a fact.”

The reported cuts would dwarf the 600 layoffs the firm reported last year to California authorities, and would eliminate some 5,000 employees — 10 percent of its workforce, the report said.

“The cuts at the company, which has about 50,000 workers, are likely to affect workers in the U.S. and abroad, including managers,” Bloomberg reported, based on unnamed sources.

The average cost of health coverage offered by employers pushed toward $19,000 for a family plan this year, while the share of firms providing insurance to workers continued to edge lower, according to a major survey.

Annual premiums rose 3% to $18,764 for an employer plan in 2017, from $18,142 last year, the same rate of increase as in 2016, according to an annual poll of employers performed by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation along with the Health Research & Educational Trust, a nonprofit affiliated with the American Hospital Association.

Leaders of the U.S.’s largest companies plan to ramp up hiring in the coming months, as management teams eye regulatory rollbacks and the possibility of a tax overhaul.

The Business Roundtable CEO Economic Outlook’s employment measure, which gauges chief executives’ hiring plans, rose to 80.2 in the third quarter of 2017, the highest reading in more than six years.

. . . More the half of the CEOs questioned in the second-quarter survey said they would scrap current plans for hiring and investment if Congress doesn’t change the tax code, but, during the third-quarter survey announcement, Mr. Bolten wouldn’t give specific tax rates the Business Roundtable would want to see in a bill.

California Democrats have finally found a cause that’s worth suspending their environmental passions. The United Automobile Workers are struggling for a presence in Tesla’s Fremont plant, and organized labor has called in a political favor.

Since 2010 California has offered a $2,500 rebate to encourage consumers to buy electric vehicles. But last week, at unions’ behest, Democrats introduced an amendment to cap-and-trade spending legislation that would require participating manufacturers to get a sign-off from the state labor secretary verifying that they are “fair and responsible in their treatment of workers.”

Charles Schwab is emblematic. Since announcing its relocation strategy in early 2013, the company has shrunk its San Francisco headquarters to fewer than 1,300 people, a 45% decrease. Its 47-acre campus south of Denver is now Schwab’s largest office, employing almost 4,000 people. An expanded office in Austin, Texas, will be completed next year, and construction is under way on a new location near Dallas.

. . . While the finance industry has been relocating entry-level jobs since the late 1980s, today’s moves are claiming higher-paid jobs in human resources, compliance and asset management, chipping away at New York City’s middle class, said Kathryn Wylde, president and chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit that represents the city’s business leadership.