Labor productivity, or the amount of goods and services employees produce per hour worked, fell at a 0.6% annual rate in the first quarter, the Labor Department said Tuesday. The drop, while less steep than initially estimated, extended a troubling slowdown that has hindered the economy’s ability to lift Americans’ living standards.
Close to 500 company leaders-from family-owned small businesses to world-recognized brands-are on Capitol Hill as part of the NAM’s 2016 Manufacturing Summit. We are making one request of policymakers: Unleash our power to compete and win globally, with a focus on three key legislative issues: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a fully functioning Export-Import (Ex-Im) Bank Board and comprehensive business tax reform.
Nonfarm payrolls rose by a seasonally adjusted 38,000 in May, the weakest performance since September 2010, the Labor Department said Friday . . . Revisions showed employers added a combined 59,000 fewer jobs in April and March than previously estimated. Together, May’s weak job growth and the revisions bring the average monthly job gains in the past three months to 116,000, a sharp slowdown from the average 219,000 growth over the prior 12 months. . . The decline in the unemployment rate was driven by 458,000 people leaving the workforce. The labor-force participation rate fell to 62.6% in May, down 0.2 percentage point from April.
Promoted as a law to help women break the glass ceiling, Assembly Bill 1676 could open up employers to civil lawsuits for asking job applicants what they made at their former place of employment. The bill would also require an employer to provide job candidates with the pay scale for a particular position. The new rules would not apply to government employees.
An Alameda Superior Court judge has ordered the CallSocket call center housed in the historic Tribune Tower at 409 13th St. in downtown Oakland to shut down by the end of the month. As the Business Times reported yesterday, that building and two others have been put on the market by a court-appointed receiver.
“It is predicted that by 2020 the industry will grow to be over $40 billion dollars. It also means a lot more competition,” Bannink (or “Super Joint” as he’s affectionately called by the Grasscity community) told me via email. “There are thousands of brands competing to try and do what we’re doing. Grasscity is extremely lucky to have a 16 year head start on building customers, users, and industry partners.”
The Thomson Reuters/PayNet Small Business Lending Index fell to 129.0, down from March’s downwardly revised 135.1 and marking the index’s seventh decline in the last 10 months. The PayNet index typically corresponds to U.S. gross domestic product growth one or two quarters ahead.
California ranked last among the 50 states in per capita manufacturing investments in 2015, attracting only 1.5 percent of investments made in the US, according to data analyzed and released this week by the California Manufacturers & Technology Association (CMTA).
The Reveal investigation found that more than 100,000 injured workers in California have encountered medical providers who are currently facing charges for fraud. The workers have undergone risky spinal surgeries spurred by millions in kickbacks and have endured tests and treatments by providers who’ve admitted to prescribing them for profit.
According to findings of a recent survey conducted by the Los Angeles County Business Federations (BizFed), employers named transportation as one of their top business concerns, second only to taxes and fees. Among 22 categories examined, transportation maintained its four-year upward trajectory on the list of top concerns, moving to the number two spot in 2016 from the number four spot in 2015. In 2013, transportation ranked as the number ten concern of employers.
Hundreds of thousands of jobs will be created in L.A. County over the next four years, most of them low-paying, according to a report released Wednesday by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.
Growth averaged 3% between 1980 and 2007. Since then it has averaged 1.2%. That suggests the economy’s underlying potential growth rate—what’s possible with the available work force and its productivity—has downshifted. That has left the economy 11% smaller than what the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office thought, before the recession, would be achievable by now.
Economic activity in the [12th] District grew at a moderate pace during the reporting period of early April through mid-May. Overall price inflation was modest, while wage pressures picked up. Sales of retail goods grew slightly, while activity in the consumer and business services sector expanded at a moderate pace. Demand for manufacturing products was largely flat. Activity in the agriculture sector expanded somewhat. Residential and commercial real estate market activity continued to expand at a robust pace. Lending activity grew moderately.
“This analysis surveys the economic landscape emerging from the Great Recession and compares it to previous recovery periods. It identifies differences in the strength and geography of county-level growth in employment and business establishments — two key markers of economic dynamism — and uncovers three significant transformations in the economy. The first and most unambiguously troubling is a collapse in the number of new firms in the economy. The second is the increasing geographic concentration of recovery-era businesses and jobs into a smaller number of more populous counties. The third is the shift in the counties driving the nation’s economic recoveries from smaller to larger ones. Together, the findings capture an economy veering towards a less broadly dynamic, less entrepreneurial, and more geographically concentrated equilibrium — more reliant than ever on a few high-performing geographies abundant in talent and capital to carry national rates of growth.”
In a freewheeling talk before shareholders Tuesday, Musk said he and his Tesla team will completely rethink the factory process, hoping to bring “factors of 10 or even 100 times” in improvements in efficiency to the manner in which “you build the machines that build the machine.”