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SolarCity has laid off more than 550 employees — about a quarter of its workforce — in Nevada, the company said today.

U.S. factories ended last year mired in their worst slump since 2009, highlighting the global forces set to weigh further on the manufacturing sector in the new year.

Before Monday, the U.S. economy appeared to have ended 2015 on solid, though unspectacular, footing. Many economists were estimating that the nation’s gross domestic product–or the sum of all goods and services produced–grew at an annual pace of roughly 2% in October through December. . . But those estimates are falling, due to weak readings Monday morning on the nation’s manufacturing and construction activity, two key drivers of economic growth.

Many of the areas with double-digit unemployment rates are in inland California, a working-class region hit hard by the foreclosure crisis.

The study from Beacon and Next 10, a California public policy research group, looked at annual census data going back to 1976. The numbers provide a state-by-state and national look at the number of business establishments that open or close in any given year, along with jobs tied to those companies.

California gained 30,500 jobs in December.

Buoyed by the roaring tech industry, unemployment in the Bay Area has dropped to pre-recession levels while parts of Southern California have bounced back more slowly.

Gerawan Farming, one of the largest growers of tree fruit and grapes in Fresno County, has alerted its employees and government officials that it is shutting down its table grape operations next year, affecting more than 2,500 workers.

Hiring has improved, stock markets have rallied and consumer confidence has rebounded. But U.S. corporations remain hesitant to deploy funds to new projects and equipment, or to upgrade facilities and technology. Instead, companies continue to shower shareholders with record levels of dividends and buybacks.

California has a powerful economy, with 14 million private-sector jobs. It also has burdens: welfare recipients (12.6 million), generously paid government employees (2.1 million) and people collecting government pensions (1.3 million). . . There are 114 clients drawing from the government for every 100 people chipping in by working outside the government and paying taxes. We’re calling this the Feedme Ratio. Six states have a number over 100.

The latest result from the bureau’s annual survey of state and local government employees confirms a long-standing trend – that California has a below-average number of people on its public payrolls but above-average costs.

This changed when a combination of keen Asian competition and Californian regulation gradually shifted the chip and computer manufacturers out of Silicon Valley, which has lost roughly 80,000 manufacturing jobs since 2000. The new Valley is predominately post-industrial. For example, only 30 of about 16,000 production workers for the iPod are based in the US.
As Silicon Valley became software valley, tech firms no longer needed large numbers of semi-skilled workers and the network of small subcontractors to keep the industrial machine going. Those services, if needed, could be performed in India, China, Utah, Texas or North Carolina. ‘The job creation has changed’, notes long-time San Jose economic development official Leslie Parks. ‘We used to be the whole food chain and create all sorts of middle-class jobs. Now, increasingly, we don’t design the future – we just think about it. . .

The employment patterns of immigrants differ from those of U.S.-born workers across industries and states. This interactive captures the variation by measuring the employment distribution ratio, which compares the likelihood that an immigrant worker is employed in each of 13 industries with that of an U.S.-born worker in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The sharing economy has been under continuous attack since it started to gain traction among consumers. And for one simple reason: it challenges the status quo, which regulators and bureaucrats do not like.

California employers added just 5,500 net new jobs in November, according to federal data — a significant slowdown from more robust monthly gains earlier in the year.