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“Los Angeles County has added more than 475,000 jobs since the depths of the Great Recession, and it’s expected to gain another 334,200 jobs by 2020, according to a report released Thursday. But most of those jobs will be low-paying positions, the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. reported at the seventh annual Southern California Economic Summit . . . “We have 90,000 fewer manufacturing jobs than we did in 2007 and those were jobs that paid around $52,000 a year back then,” Cooper said. “We’ve added 90,000 additional food service jobs since 2007, but those are jobs that have an average annual wage of $20,000.””

Economic activity in the District continued to expand at a moderate pace during the reporting period of early October through mid-November. Overall price inflation was limited, while upward wage pressures increased further. Sales of retail goods continued to expand at a moderate pace, and growth in the consumer and business services sectors was solid. Manufacturing activity changed little on balance. Agricultural yields and sales grew further. Activity in the residential and commercial real estate sectors remained high. Lending activity expanded moderately.

Since manufacturing is the engine of economic growth, especially for the middle class, we thought we would see which states are having the sector’s best bouncebacks since the recession. Of the 32 states that average more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs overall, Michigan has attracted the largest percentage of growth with 32.49 percent since 2010. California was 24th of 32 states at 2.57 percent.

As the labor union-backed Fight for $15 begins yet another nationwide strike on November 29, I have a simple message for the protest organizers and the reporters covering them: I told you so.

The Labor Department rule doubles the salary level at which hourly workers must be paid extra for overtime pay, applying the requirement to anyone making up to $47,476 annually. U.S. District Court Judge Amos L. Mazzant III sided with Nevada and 20 other states in their bid to halt the rule, and he incorporated a similar legal challenge from a coalition of business groups including the Chamber of Commerce into his ruling.

Occupational licenses are “one of the most substantial barriers to opportunity in America today,” a new study by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) found. According to WILL’s estimates, licensing laws raise prices for consumers by $1.93 billion each year and results in roughly 31,000 fewer jobs. Over the past two decades, the number of license holders has jumped by 34 percent in Wisconsin. Meanwhile, the number of occupational licensing categories has soared by 84 percent.

The union has denounced the administration’s proposed wage increase of 12 percent over four years as inadequate because it fails to address what it contends are gender pay inequities in the state workforce. It also objects to the administration’s proposal that employees pay more for their health benefits.

Anyone living in California who’s paying attention knows what venture capitalist Thiel meant. While a handful of Silicon Valley social media entrepreneurs have amassed almost indescribable wealth, and fundamentally transformed how humanity communicates, investment in boring things like roads, bridges, tunnels, ports, aqueducts, reservoirs and railroads – the list is endless – has stagnated. Especially in California. Flying cars? Forget about it. Go tweet.

A report from the U.S. Census Bureau says millennials are leaving Los Angeles at one of the highest rates in the country, LA Weekly reports. The analysis found that residents between the ages of 18 and 35 decreased by 7.4 percent over the last 10 years, a decrease of 780,000 people, making it the third-worst city for millennial population loss.

A new report from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a Kansas City, Mo., nonprofit, tracks the number, survival and density of small businesses (those with fewer than 50 employees) across the U.S. While small companies are making it past their fifth year at a near-record rate, business ownership and firm growth remain historically low, possible reflections of declining dynamism across the U.S. economy.

First Solar Inc. intends to lay off more than one-quarter of its staff and to restructure operations to focus on newer solar modules, which will lead to at least $500 million in charges and push the company into the red this year.

Just as we’ve started to get a handle on the ways online sharing platforms such as Uber and Airbnb are changing the nature of work in the U.S., it appears growth on the platforms may be slowing.

Job gains from opening establishments as a percentage of overall private-sector employment dropped to 1% in the first quarter of 2016, the lowest level recorded since the Labor Department began the data series in 1992, and half what it was at its peak.

While commentators tend to focus on the unemployment rate—which is moderate at 4.9 percent—the employment-population ratio is arguably more informative. After long spells out of a job, people may become discouraged and give up looking for work altogether. A large group of working-age, able-bodied individuals outside the labor force is a sign of major weakness in the economy.

Nonfarm payrolls rose by a seasonally adjusted 161,000 in October from the prior month, following September’s upwardly revised gain of 191,000, the Labor Department said Friday. . . The unemployment rate, derived from a separate survey of American households, ticked down to 4.9% last month from 5% in September because the labor force shrank. The labor-force participation rate edged lower, to 62.8% in October from 62.9% the prior month, but remained elevated from its October 2015 level of 62.5% .