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Silicon Valley tech companies have good reason to be concerned about President Donald Trump’s plans to review the H-1B visa program, which has been crucial in providing them access to foreign labor. It wouldn’t be such a big deal, though, if they didn’t put their offices in such expensive places.

The valley’s biggest employers each host thousands of workers under the H-1B program, designed to help employers hire skilled overseas labor when qualified Americans are not available. At Facebook Inc. alone, more than 15 percent of employees hold such visas. Yet the tech industry doesn’t have a skills shortage so much as a shortage of employees who can afford to live within commuting distance of their jobs. . . . no matter how high employee wages go, the limited housing supply leaves the region unaffordable for a large number of workers.

The labor market continued to tighten, and wage pressures picked up further. Contacts reported record-high demand, as well as wage increases, for engineers with experience in cloud computing. Contacts also noted that technology and non-technology sectors are increasingly competing for workers with the same advanced skills. In the financial services sector, wages for unskilled entry-level positions increased markedly. Labor shortages in the construction industry persisted, driving up wages for skilled workers. Demand for labor in the agriculture industry continued to outpace supply, putting upward pressure on wages. One contact noted that growers continue to automate production where possible. Contacts in the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry reported relocating workers and operations to lower-cost locales outside of the District.

The fates of the less-educated and those who graduate from universities diverge in dire ways. Middle-aged white Americans without four-year degrees are at increasing risk of dying, a well-documented trend driven not only by drug use but also by alcoholism, suicide, and slowing progress against heart disease and cancer. Outcomes may worsen further as millennials—Johnson’s generation—grow older.

Since October, about 89,000 workers in general merchandise stores have lost their jobs, which is more than the number of people employed in the entire US coal industry, The New York Times reported. . . The retail industry, which employs about one out of every 10 American workers, typically pays low wages but provides employment to people in every age bracket, as well as those who are low-skilled and need flexible scheduling options.

So when these workers lose their jobs, they can have a hard time finding other employment.

The profound reordering of New York’s shopping scene reflects a broad restructuring in the American retail industry.

E-commerce players, led by the industry giant Amazon, have made it so easy and fast for people to shop online that traditional retailers, shackled by fading real estate and a culture of selling in stores, are struggling to compete. This shift has been building gradually for years. But economists, retail workers and real estate investors say it appears that it has sped up in recent months.

Between 2010 and 2014, e-commerce grew by an average of $30 billion annually. Over the past three years, average annual growth has increased to $40 billion.

Broome chastised the state for not doing enough to keep jobs in California and said the economic council was committed to a “new beginning to make jobs a priority.” He said the state “lacks compassion” when it comes to widespread job losses. Council officials cited Texas, Arizona, Minnesota, Washington and Alabama as having more sophisticated statewide economic development programs.

According to a new report from the University of Southern California and the Los Angeles Business Council, exorbitant housing costs in Los Angeles, the second most populous city in the US, are inhibiting employers from attracting “high-performers,” or top talent, to their companies.

“Tech companies in San Francisco and San Mateo counties lost 700 jobs from January to February and tech employment has dropped by 3,200 jobs since hitting a peak last August,” the New York Times observed, citing chief San Francisco economist Ted Egan. “Venture capital has peaked and has been going down steadily since 2015,” said Egan. “A lot of the employment in our tech sector is in companies that are not profitable. If they can’t secure new venture funding, some of them run out of cash. If we see a real downturn in the tech sector we could be in a situation where the U.S. economy is doing better than San Francisco’s.”

The economies of Southern California’s metropolitan areas grew late last year at their slowest pace since 2010, a series of government indexes show.

Housing costs are deterring top-talent from entering the Los Angeles job market, and leading to higher costs in recruiting and retaining employees, according to a new survey released today by Raphael Bostic, a USC Price School of Public Policy Professor and the newly appointed head of the Atlanta Federal Reserve. Bostic led a team of USC researchers in surveying major L.A. employers accounting for nearly 200,000 jobs in key sectors including utilities, healthcare, education, government, engineering and finance. The resulting report, The Affordable Housing Crisis in Los Angeles: An Employer Perspective, released in partnership with the Los Angeles Business Council, focuses on how the high cost of housing in the region has affected employers and puts forth key recommendations.

The U.S. has long held itself out as a nation driven by entrepreneurs and small businesses. Presidents and politicians still invoke that image, and for generations, it was largely accurate. Today, the U.S. has become something different: a nation of employees working for large companies, often very large ones, Theo Francis writes. Huge companies dominate American economic life well beyond employment. They ring up a disproportionate share of sales for goods and services, both to consumers and to other businesses.

Employers slowed their pace of hiring in March, but beneath the surface the labor market continued to improve and tighten, leaving the Federal Reserve on course to keep raising short-term interest rates and workers with prospects of better paydays. Nonfarm payrolls rose by a seasonally adjusted 98,000 in March from the previous month, the Labor Department said Friday, a slowdown from the prior two months. Still, the unemployment rate dropped two-tenths of a percentage point to 4.5% as the number of employed workers grew more quickly than the labor force, pushing the measure to the lowest level since May 2007.

One of the most obnoxious trends in the nation, and one that is particularly acute in California, is the continued push to enshrine public employees as a special, privileged

Private nonfarm business sector multifactor productivity decreased at a 0.2-percent annual rate in 2016, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
reported today. This 2016 decline reflected a 1.7-percent increase in output and a 1.9-percent increase in the combined inputs of capital and labor. Capital services grew by 2.4 percent and labor input–which is the combined effect of hours worked and labor composition–grew by 1.6 percent. This was the first decline in multifactor productivity growth since 2009. 

The researchers said they were surprised to see very little employment increase in other occupations to offset the job losses in manufacturing. That increase could still happen, they said, but for now there are large numbers of people out of work, with no clear path forward — especially blue-collar men without college degrees.