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Little mention is made of the federal government’s major role in the lives of Californians, from the $47.5 billion in federal contracts awarded to state businesses and other recipients in federal fiscal year 2015, or the nearly $96 billion in federal funds in the current state budget, representing more than one-third of the budget total.. . . A report last year by the New York Office of the Comptroller concluded that California received 99 cents in federal spending for every dollar it paid in federal taxes during the 2013 federal fiscal year, one of 11 states that received less federal money than they paid in taxes. California, though, has outsized involvement in some federal programs. For example, the state has embraced the federal Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, opting to expand Medi-Cal to cover more than 3.5 million new participants.

Employers in California can’t keep their workers on call during short rest breaks and must give up any control over how they spend that time, the state Supreme Court said Thursday in a case that pitted labor activists against business groups.

Defenders of California’s status-quo claim to be proud of California’s economic growth and worry about what Trump will do to that growth. If you are so impolite as to mention that this has been California’s slowest recovery in 70 years, as the following chart shows, you will be told that slow growth is good. . . That’s nonsense. Slow growth is anti-poor and anti-minority. Here’s a simple way to analyze economic policy: Ask how the policy changes the probability of a young person finding a job. If the policy increases their chances, it’s good policy. If it decreases the probability, it’s bad policy.

California again scored just behind Massachusetts, which gained ground by churning out more science and engineering graduates and producing jobs in those industries even though it had less technology company density than in 2015, according to the data compiled by Bloomberg.

There’s nothing “secular” about our low rate of growth, goes the argument: It’s just the result of the never-ending accretion of ever more costly and time-consuming regulations, all of which could, in theory, be overturned at a stroke. These regulations go largely unnoticed by coastal elites because we’re mostly in the business of producing and manipulating words—as politicians, lawyers, bureaucrats, academics, consultants, pundits and so on. But regulations (and those who profit from them) are the bane of anyone who produces or delivers things: jet engines, burgers, pool supplies, you name it.

California employers added 13,600 jobs in November, nudging the state unemployment rate down to 5.3%, according to data released Friday morning.

Panasonic Corp. is introducing convenience-store checkout machines that can scan and bag items on their own, joining Amazon.com Inc. in the push for more retail automation.

A recent analysis by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that union membership as a percentage of the entire labor force declined in 24 states in 2015 compared to the year before, while some 34 states and the District of Columbia were down from where they were a decade earlier. . . Union membership in California fell by .6 percent over the last 10 years, falling to 15.9 percent in 2015 from 16.5 percent in 2005.

Amazon is building stores without cashiers and checkout lines. . . In Seattle, where Amazon is building its first cashier-less store, raising the minimum wage just $1.53 to $11 has already decreased the share of workers with jobs by 1.2 percent. By the time Seattle hits $15 in 2021, many more job positions will have been priced out. Raising minimum wages accelerates the elimination of low-wage work through automation and raises the barrier to entry for new companies that don’t have advanced capabilities.

The innovation slump is a key reason the American standards of living have stagnated since 2000. Indeed, absent a turnaround, that stagnation is likely to continue, deepening the malaise that has left the middle class so dissatisfied. . . Regulations have raised the bar for commercializing new ideas while directing a growing share of innovative effort toward goals with benefits, such as cleaner air, that don’t translate into gross domestic product. Meanwhile, a trend toward industry concentration may have made it harder for upstart innovators to gain a toehold.

Given a choice among about 20 issues, nearly nine in ten voters believe that Sacramento officials are not spending enough time on fixing roads, highways and bridges in California. Eight in ten voters believe state leaders should be working harder to encourage economic development to attract new businesses to California, and about three quarters of voters want to see more attention paid to addressing high housing costs

“In the last five years, online shopping has produced tens of thousands of new warehouse jobs in California, many of them in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. The bulk of them paid blue collar people decent wages to do menial tasks – putting things in boxes and sending them out to the world. But automated machines and software have been taking up more and more space in the region’s warehouses, and taking over jobs that were once done by humans. Today, fewer jobs are being added, though some of them pay more.”

The study notes that the 313,700 workers who were employed in 2015 fell 23.7 percent, or nearly 98,000, below the number who were employed at the industry’s peak in 2006.

U.S. employers hired at a steady clip in November while the unemployment rate fell to the lowest level in nine years, signs of enduring labor-market growth that will likely leave Federal Reserve officials on track to raise interest rates later this month.

As the largest sector within the nation’s clean energy economy, energy efficiency accounts for about three out of every four American clean energy jobs. In total, these technologies support almost 1.9 million jobs across the country, and 889,050 of these workers spend the majority of their time supporting the energy efficiency portion of their business.2 Employers across the roughly 165,000 establishments that conduct energy efficiency work are optimistic about business growth, projecting a collective 13 percent employment growth rate over 2016—or an additional 245,000 jobs.