News

The insurance industry has provided over 210,00 jobs in 2010 and provided a payroll that totaled $14.9 billion, just in California!

Manufacturers consume a lot of energy, particularly natural gas. Increased domestic production of natural gas has lowered its price, and a new study by IHS estimates industrial production will increase by 3.5 percent by the end of this decade as a result of the shale energy revolution.

Kinkisharyo International Inc., the No. 1 supplier of low-floor light rail vehicles in North America, is moving its U.S. headquarters from Massachusetts to El Segundo, bringing about 25 jobs to the South Bay city and another 250 positions to the Palmdale area, where it will manufacture rail cars for the county Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

The world’s biggest and most dynamic economy derives its strength and resilience from its geographic diversity. Economically, at least, America is not a single country. It is a collection of seven nations and three quasi-independent city-states, each with its own tastes, proclivities, resources and problems. These nations compete with one another–the Great Lakes loses factories to the Southeast, and talent flees the brutal winters and high taxes of the city-state New York for gentler climes–but, more important, they develop synergies, albeit unintentionally. Wealth generated in the humid South or icy northern plains benefits the rest of the country; energy flows from the Dakotas and the Third Coast of Texas and Louisiana; and even as people leave the Northeast, the brightest American children continue to migrate to this great education mecca, as well as those of other nations.

California saw a 2.4 percent month-to-month decline in job vacancies advertised online in August while Sacramento listings held fairly steady, according to the latest statistics released by the Conference Board.

Amazon.com Inc. is pushing ahead with a San Francisco expansion that will grow its footprint in the city to nearly 150,000 square feet.

The firm found that most chief information officers in the Bay Area plan to hire IT staff in the fourth quarter. About 13 percent of CIOs expect to increase the size of their IT staff, up 1 percent from the third quarter. And 66 percent of the officers surveyed plan to hire to fill vacant IT jobs — that figure is up 5 percent from the third quarter.

SB 54 (Senator Loni Hancock) is just such a bill.  It purports to be about safety but in fact could increase risks, displace highly skilled workers with excellent safety records, and remove the flexibility of employers to hire the best available workers.  SB 54 would establish arbitrary training requirements that would force refinery and chemical facilities to choose a large percentage of their workers from the membership of a single union, and to pay those workers government mandated wages.

As California marks the Labor Day holiday, there’s a slow-motion debate over the strength of its recovery from the worst recession since the Great Depression and thus its prospects for improving employment.

United Farm Workers and its government allies are working hard to destroy jobs.

Fast-food workers want raises, but the bigger challenge is to help them advance into better jobs.

When I started following the research on child well-being about two decades ago, the focus was almost always girls’ problems—their low self-esteem, lax ambitions, eating disorders, and, most alarming, high rates of teen pregnancy. Now, though, with teen births down more than 50 percent from their 1991 peak and girls dominating classrooms and graduation ceremonies, boys and men are increasingly the ones under examination. Their high school grades and college attendance rates have remained stalled for decades. Among poor and working-class boys, the chances of climbing out of the low-end labor market—and of becoming reliable husbands and fathers—are looking worse and worse.

A report by the California Budget Project says the addition of 750,00 jobs over the past three years has still left much of the state in double-digit unemployment.

For the fourth consecutive summer, teen employment has stayed anchored around record lows, prompting experts to fear that a generation of youth is likely to be economically stunted with lower earnings and opportunities in years ahead.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday unanimously approved plans by the Walt Disney Co. to build a high-tech film and television production studio complex on sprawling ranch land in the Santa Clarita Valley.