California’s unemployment rate remained at 4.2 percent in August. The state Employment Development Department says Friday the rate has held steady for five months. The department says California adds 44,800 nonfarm payroll jobs in August, for a total gain of more than 3 million jobs since economic expansion began in February 2010.
A new human-machine frontier within existing tasks: Companies expect a significant shift on the frontier between humans and machines when it comes to existing work tasks between 2018 and 2022. In 2018, an average of 71% of total task hours across the 12 industries covered in the report are performed by humans, compared to 29% […]
The employment report for August was good — not great — but there were some strange numbers that President Trump should have someone keep an eye on. The puzzling figures have to do with seasonal adjustments — those yawn-inducing details that go into every government economic report. Bottom line: The Labor Department made major changes […]
The California Chamber of Commerce did even better than usual in sidetracking the liberal measures that it placed on its notorious “job killer” list. Over the last two decades, ever since the annual list was first published, the chamber and allied business groups have rung up about a 90 percent kill ratio. But in 2018, […]
U.S. labor force participation by people in their prime working years fell substantially during the Great Recession, and it remains depressed despite some recovery since 2015. This appears to reflect longer-term developments, rather than lingering effects from the recession. One key factor is labor market polarization—manifested in the gradual disappearance of manual jobs—which helps predict […]
A new report about literacy came to an unsettling conclusion about students in Sacramento County schools: about three out of every five third-graders do not read at their grade level. The analysis also found that efforts to close the gap between high-performing schools and low-performing schools are falling short. April Javist, executive director of the […]
U.S. small business optimism surged to a record in August as the tax cuts and deregulation efforts of President Donald Trump and the Republican-led Congress led to more sales, hiring and investment, according to a survey by the National Federation of Independent Business. The NFIB Small Business Optimism Index jumped to 108.8 last month, the […]
Job openings rose from 6.82 million in June, the government said Tuesday. About 5.68 million people were hired and 5.53 million lost their jobs in July. Such a high level of what economists call “churn” is common in the huge U.S. economy. The share of people who left jobs on their own, known as the […]
This report advances the discussion of high local minimum wages by using both event study and synthetic control methods, and by expanding our analysis to the effects in six cities that were early movers: Chicago, District of Columbia, Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose and Seattle. At the end of 2016 (the last year in our […]
Every election, politicians talk about the need for more job training programs. What they don’t tell voters is that the government already spends billions on job training. Most of it is wasted. Every election, politicians talk about the need for more job training programs. What they don’t tell voters is that the government already spends […]
Historically, liberals advocated helping the middle class achieve greater independence, notably by owning houses and starting companies. But the tech oligarchy — the people who run the five most capitalized firms on Wall Street — have a far less egalitarian vision. Greg Fehrenstein, who interviewed 147 digital company founders, says most believe that “an increasingly […]
The 2016-18 legislative session, which ended last week, provided more proof of the symbiotic relationship between California’s labor unions and the Legislature’s Democratic majority. While they didn’t get everything they wanted from the Legislature, unions – particularly those representing state and local government workers – won far more skirmishes than they lost. The record was […]
The current employment boom should be a moment of opportunity for Job Corps: Companies report 6.7 million jobs unfilled because of the shortage of skilled workers, even as millions of inner-city and rural youths languish in poverty or dead-end jobs. Superficially, the system seems successful. Centers report that, on average, 87 percent of graduates at […]
Three customers sat on Bottle & Barlow’s patio Wednesday afternoon, sipping cocktails and soaking up the last bits of summer sun. That was a crowd compared to the scene inside, where owner Anthony Giannotti was the only person left to cut hair. Giannotti’s entire seven-person staff of independent contractors quit rather be reclassified as employees, […]
Small business plans to create new jobs and job openings hit a 45-year high in August, but owners still struggled to fill their open positions, according to NFIB’s monthly jobs report, released today. After posting significant gains in filling open positions in July, it slowed slightly in August, perhaps due to fewer qualified applicants. Hiring […]