In yet another awkwardly rational response to government intervention in deciding what’s “fair”, the blowback from minimum wage demanding fast food workers has struck again. Wendy’s plans to install self-ordering kiosks in 1,000 of its stores – 16% of its locations nationwide.
The AFL-CIO is dismissing dozens of staff members as part of a restructuring amid continuing declines in union membership and fresh political threats to labor rights.
L.A. County’s manufacturing sector has suffered massive job losses over the last decade, but a new report points to worse news — those positions have been replaced by jobs that pay less than half as much.
Some of the diseases of poverty are individual, but some of them thrive in congregation (gang violence is the obvious example), and the only treatment for these is dilution. A 2000 Brookings study of Jack Kemp’s famous Moving to Opportunity program found “striking” evidence that poor families who moved out of poor communities with help from the Department of Housing and Urban Development earned more, enjoyed better health, and saw their children do better in school than did families who stayed behind.
But perhaps the simplest step that could be taken immediately to advance the fight for $50 and reduce the skills gap is protecting the entry-level jobs that largely train the American workforce. In practice this means not pursuing minimum wage increases that destroy these opportunities. While only a small part of the workforce earns the minimum wage at a given time, a giant slice of it got its start at this level. Thousands of CEOs, including Jeff Bezos, Lloyd Blankfein, Warren Buffett, Michael Dell and even Barack Obama, began their careers at entry-level wage jobs.
On Feb. 8, the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council (SBE) released its annual ranking of the 50 states “according to 55 policy measures, including a wide array of tax, regulatory, and government spending measures.” The findings were not surprising — Nevada, Texas, South Dakota, Wyoming and Florida were at the top, while Vermont, Minnesota, New York, New Jersey and California were at the bottom. What is troublesome is that year after year the business-unfriendly states do so little to improve their rankings. As the author of the study, Raymond J. Keating, chief economist of the SBE Council, noted: “Too many elected officials choose to ignore the basic economic realities of how government affects entrepreneurship, business, and investment.”
A study found that the California State University system had 11,614 full-time faculty in 1973, and 12,019 in 2008. During that same time period, administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183, ending up with more administrators than faculty. I would guess that things were not really all that lean in 1973 either. It has only gotten worse since 2008.
Employers added 227,000 jobs in January, the best gain since September, the Labor Department said Friday. That was significantly higher than last year’s average monthly gain of 187,000 jobs. . . the jobless rate—or the share of Americans in the labor force who are unemployed—rose to 4.8% from 4.7% a month earlier. More Americans came off the sidelines and actively looked for work. That helped to raise the count of unemployed but it could be a sign of increased optimism about the prospect of finding jobs.
New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Houston and Dallas are home to half of new business startups—and Americans are increasingly unwilling to move to such hotspots for the jobs they are spawning. At no time in recent history has entrepreneurship been so heavily concentrated in a handful of big cities, according to a bipartisan team of economic policy advisers at the Washington research and policy shop.
California union membership grew with the state job market, up 65,000, or 2.6 percent, in a year. Nationally, it’s a different story: Unions had 14.6 million members in 2016, down 237,000, or a dip of 1.6 percent.
“The total number of union members fell for both private- and public-sector workers last year, the first overall decline in four years, the Labor Department said Thursday. New policies from the Trump administration threaten to put more downward pressure on organized labor’s last stronghold, government employees, but might help stem membership losses among manufacturing and construction workers. Only 10.7% of workers were union members last year, down from 11.1% in 2015, and from more than 20% in the early 1980s. It is unclear whether any of Republican President Donald Trump’s policies could reverse this decadeslong slide in private-sector union membership, especially when unions were unable to gain traction with a union-friendly Democrat in the White House.”
How L.A. Unified’s headache was relieved is an eye-opening exercise in creative political accounting. . . The district simply recategorized a number of previous expenditures as qualifying for the LCFF grants, enabling it to declare it “will enable the district’s estimated ending balance to revert back to pre-CDE decision levels.” . . . Nothing changed, in other words, except some computer codes. And L.A. Unified still has an immense achievement gap.
“U.S. economic output decelerated in the final three months of 2016 to a 1.9% growth rate, returning after a brief spurt to the stubbornly lackluster pace that has prevailed through most of the current expansion and which President Donald Trump has pledged to double. Growth of gross domestic product, a broad measure of the goods and services produced across the economy, exceeded the pace of growth in a slow first half of 2016, but marked a slowdown from the third quarter’s seasonally and inflation adjusted 3.5% growth rate. More broadly, it was in line with the 2% growth rates that have made this the slowest economic expansion in post World War II history.”
The vote came after UC President Janet Napolitano called for the annual tuition increase of $282 and a bump in fees by $54 for the 2017-18 school year.
Details on the proposal are scant, but the ordinance would likely be modeled on a similar plan that was approved by Portland’s City Council last November.