The handwritten sign on the front window of the shuttered Blue Fig Cafe last month bade a sad farewell to the days when San Francisco could support an old-fashioned coffee house. The problem that led the eight-year-old Valencia Street cafe to shut down wasn’t a lack of coffee drinkers in the trendy Mission district. Nor […]
Californians may have just voted overwhelmingly for more of the same—boosting Democratic majorities in both chambers of the Legislature and replacing one Democratic governor with another for the first time since the 1880’s—but many are still eager for major changes to state policy. And a majority are downright pessimistic about California’s future. Those results, which […]
The global economic outlook is shifting, which could lead to new turbulence in markets and Washington in 2019. The past year was marked by strong U.S. economic growth, supported by a burst of fiscal stimulus from federal tax cuts and spending increases. That, in turn, underpinned profit growth and the Federal Reserve’s decision to dial […]
Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, D-San Diego, will introduce legislation to add to state law a stricter “ABC test” for defining employees. The test, adopted unanimously by the California Supreme Court this spring, threw nearly three decades of legal precedent up in the air and generated intense pushback from the business community. The bill would strengthen […]
U.S. employers slowed their hiring in November, but wage growth matched the highest rate in nearly a decade and unemployment held at its lowest level in nearly half a century, signs of a strong economy that could be losing some momentum at the end of a banner year. Nonfarm payrolls increased a seasonally adjusted 155,000 […]
With a state as big, as populous, and as complex as California, quickly summarizing how its economy or state budget works is impossible. Instead, Cal Facts is a visual guide—using a variety of different charts—to the state’s economy, revenues, and major program trends.
Ultimately the gig economy, even as it uses the latest technology, represents something of a devolution of labor. Although widely associated as “progressive,” the arbiters of the gig economy are, perhaps unconsciously, recreating the conditions that led to the impoverishment of the peasants and mechanics — replaced by slaves — at the end of the […]
From New York to California, the nation’s agricultural workers are aging. They are also in short supply, as fewer immigrants are arriving to replace those who retire, and younger generations are finding less physically taxing work. In a 2017 survey of farmers by the California Farm Bureau Federation, 55 percent reported labor shortages, and the […]
Now automation affects the US workforce is largely a question of which jobs and activities can be most easily automated. At a macro level, change will take time to occur. It’s not likely that a million truck drivers will be thrown out of work in the next few years, because the technologies to automate these […]
A labor force participation rate that is at or above its long-run trend is consistent with a labor market at or above full employment. In 2018, the estimated rate is at its trend of 62.8%, suggesting that the labor market is at full employment. Studying the population’s demographic makeup and labor trends for different groups […]
Nine out of every 10 Silicon Valley jobs pays less now than when Netflix first launched in 1997, despite one of the nation’s strongest economic booms and a historically low unemployment rate that outpaces the national average. While tech workers have thrived, employees in the middle of Silicon Valley’s income ladder have been hit hardest […]
A May 2017 survey collected information about workers who were in four alternative employment arrangements—people employed as independent contractors, on-call workers, temporary help agency workers, and workers provided by contract firms. These data were collected in a special supplemental survey to the Current Population Survey, the monthly household survey that provides information on employment and […]
Labor force participation among U.S. men and women ages 25 to 54 has been declining for nearly 20 years, a stark contrast with rising participation in Canada over this period. Three-fourths of the difference between the two countries can be explained by the growing gap in labor force attachment of women. A key factor is […]
The US manufacturing industry continues to gain momentum. Job openings have been growing at double-digit rates since mid-2017, and are nearing the historical peak recorded in 2001.1 In this dynamic manufacturing environment, Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute launched their fourth skills gap study, to reevaluate their prior projections and move the conversation forward on today’s […]
California’s unemployment rate held at the record low of 4.1 percent in October. The state Employment Development Department says Friday that employers added 36,400 jobs last month. A year earlier, California’s unemployment rate was 4.5 percent. The rate hit the record low in September after spending months just a notch higher at 4.2 percent.