The unemployment rate, drawn from a separate survey of households, fell a 10th of a point in April to 5.4%, the lowest level in almost seven years and closer to the Federal Reserve’s expectation of “full” employment, which it pegs between 5% and 5.2%. The decline in joblessness reflected positive developments: The labor force grew as more Americans entered the job market and found work.
California reported a decrease in new claims of 4,218. The state attributed the change to fewer layoffs in the service industry as well as in agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting.
U.S. companies hired in April at the slowest pace in nearly a year and a half, a private survey found, as the strong dollar dragged down overseas sales and energy companies cut back on spending in the face of lower oil prices.
U.S. worker productivity declined in the first three months of the year as labor costs jumped, reflecting a slowdown in growth.
Agriculture, which uses 34 times more water per worker than the average business, is most at risk. Cuts could also pinch the thriving technology and life-sciences sectors, which employ nearly 124,000 workers — who use 45 percent more water than average.
New, final number show the number of visitors to the county hit 44.2 million, up 4.8 percent from the previous year. Of those, foreign travelers accounted for 6.5 million visits, up 5.6 percent from 2013.
By a greater than 2-to-1 margin, however, Americans said they’re less worried about the income gap, per se, and more worried about how middle- or working-class Americans can get ahead financially, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.
We have a “two-tier economy,” says the California Business Roundtable, which represents many of the state’s largest employers. It points out that the Bay Area, with less than 20 percent of the state’s population, is accounting for 60 percent of new jobs since 2007.
U.S. labor costs accelerated in early 2015, a sign that the job market may be tightening and beginning to generate a long-awaited pickup in workers’ wages.
The WCRI, based in Cambridge, Mass., said that in 2013, the first year the reform took effect, the average medical payment per claim declined by 5 percent after steady increases over the preceding half-decade. The decline in California also contrasted with medical cost increases in other states, the study noted.
American eighth-graders demonstrated virtually the same dismal grasp of U.S. history, civics and geography in test results released Wednesday than they did four years ago, when the National Report Card assessments were last administered.
About four out of five students who entered high school in fall 2010 graduated last June — 80.8 percent, up from 80.4 percent for the previous class. But 11.6 percent of those destined for the class of 2014 dropped out, up from 11.4 percent for the previous year’s class.
The city of El Centro, Calif., has an unemployment rate of 19.9%, the highest of any U.S. metropolitan area and a level comparable to some of the most troubled European economies.
On Monday the Santa Ana-based for-profit shut down its remaining 28 schools, which no buyer would purchase amid the government’s regulatory ambush. The closure displaces 16,000 or so students—many mere months away from graduation—and 2,500 workers.
Instead of pushing in a reform direction, the CTA’s backers are trying to make it tougher to deal with inadequate teachers. SB 499 and AB 575, co-sponsored by Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, “would open teacher evaluations up to collective bargaining on not just the process, but the actual standards by which teachers are evaluated,” argued a coalition of education-reform groups opposing the bills. “Offering unions this power affords them the opportunity and incentive to water down teacher evaluations, including minimizing the percentage of their evaluations based on objective measures of student learning and academic growth.”