California is one of only three states that requires employers to pay daily overtime after eight hours of work and weekly overtime after 40 hours of work. Even the other two states that impose daily overtime requirements allow the employer and employee to essentially waive the daily eight-hour overtime requirement through a written agreement.
L.A. County needs 500,000 affordable homes and the State of California needs 1,500,000. L.A.’s vacancy rate is the lowest in the nation and 45,000 County residents experience homelessness nightly. The Governor’s plan would allow housing units that match a community’s zoning to be built if they include a certain percentage of affordable housing and ask for no changes that a city department would otherwise need to approve. This proposal mirrors standard land use and development procedure in most cities and states in America. From New York City to urban areas throughout the nation, the Governor’s proposal is the norm. We are an outlier and the Governor’s proposal would fix that.
The refusal of lawmakers to obey their own laws, which they foist upon the rest of the public, is a chief sign of corruption. The repeated exemptions from CEQA for politically connected interests – particularly when it comes to the building that houses most legislators or a new stadium for their hometown basketball team – are evidence of both the inequity of the law and the decadence and hypocrisy of the Legislature. If CEQA cannot be abolished altogether, it should at least be substantially reformed to prevent lawsuit abuses and focus narrowly on legitimate environmental concerns while leaving people free to develop their property without undue hassle and expense.
In a decision that could delay or complicate Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to build two huge tunnels in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a Superior Court judge ruled Friday that a comprehensive management plan for the estuary is no longer valid.
According to the Air Resources Board, less than 20 percent went to projects within our six-county region, even though we account for 48 percent of the state’s population.
If global warming is an existential threat to humankind, this hostility to a huge, promising source of clean energy is inexplicable. As the Union of Concerned Scientists says, “Effectively addressing global warming requires a rapid transformation of the ways in which we produce and consume energy.” That transformation will be far more difficult without nuclear power.
When California’s “cap-and-trade” auction of carbon emission allowances imploded a month ago, it clobbered ambitious plans by Capitol politicians to spend many billions of dollars.
Pork barrel politics is colliding head on with starry-eyed green policymaking in California, and the result isn’t pretty. The fact that this latest quarterly auction generated such dismal revenues is only the beginning of the state’s cap-and-trade problems.
The state’s new budget, which is awaiting Brown’s signature after the Legislature’s approval Wednesday, includes nothing for the vehicle subsidies or other efforts to make heavy-duty trucks more environmentally friendly. Meantime, the clean-car programs are pushing people to waiting lists.
The linchpin of California’s climate change agenda, a program known as cap and trade, has become mired in legal, financial and political troubles that threaten to derail the state’s plans to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
When many lower-income Americans are feeling isolated by the deadening uniformity of things, by the emptiness of many jobs, by the media, they still yearn for physical social networks. They are not doing this by going to government-run community service centers. They are not always doing this by utilizing the endless array of well-intentioned not-for-profit outreach programs. They are doing this on their own, organically across the country, in McDonald’s.
Reviving the manufacturing sector won’t be easy—but, these advocates argue, it’s crucial. Manufacturing is one of the best generators of wealth for an economy, requiring processes, materials and work skills that create employment and profits at each step in an assembly. Countries that don’t make anything eventually start to lose their edge in research and product development.
Promoted as a law to help women break the glass ceiling, Assembly Bill 1676 could open up employers to civil lawsuits for asking job applicants what they made at their former place of employment. The bill would also require an employer to provide job candidates with the pay scale for a particular position. The new rules would not apply to government employees.
“It is predicted that by 2020 the industry will grow to be over $40 billion dollars. It also means a lot more competition,” Bannink (or “Super Joint” as he’s affectionately called by the Grasscity community) told me via email. “There are thousands of brands competing to try and do what we’re doing. Grasscity is extremely lucky to have a 16 year head start on building customers, users, and industry partners.”
The Reveal investigation found that more than 100,000 injured workers in California have encountered medical providers who are currently facing charges for fraud. The workers have undergone risky spinal surgeries spurred by millions in kickbacks and have endured tests and treatments by providers who’ve admitted to prescribing them for profit.