Organized labor won an important victory Tuesday when the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to increase the minimum wage to $15, but it now faces a more daunting political challenge: convincing other local governments to join the movement.
The bill, passed by the Senate on a party-line vote, is clearly aimed at discouraging other local governments from adopting COIN. Those voting for SB 331 are, therefore, voting for more secrecy in how countless billions of dollars in salaries, fringe benefits and pensions are committed.
The bill actually aims to keep the public in the dark about public-employee negotiations, ensuring taxpayers never learn the costs of collective bargaining agreements until they’re done deals.
But the approach can add a layer of complexity to home sales and refinance applications. Interest rates also tend to be higher than for mortgages and home equity loans, from 6.75 to 8.35 percent in the Home Energy Renovation Opportunity, or HERO, program that Elk Grove has authorized.
As usual, purported consumer activists are blaming collusion among putatively monopolistic oil companies. The real culprit is anti-carbon regulation promoted by a cartel of green activists and liberal politicians that is aimed at raising energy costs to discourage consumption. Sticker shock at the pump, like water rationing and high electric rates, is the price Californians must pay for their environmental virtue.
The recent spate of worker misclassification lawsuits against on-demand service companies appears to have claimed its first victim, with home-cleaning company Homejoy announcing Friday that it planned to close.
The state Senate approved a resolution on Thursday praising Pope Francis’ encyclical on climate change and calling on politicians to heed its call for better stewardship of the environment.
“This kind of unregulated, unlimited power is concerning,” [Assemblyman Roger] Hernandez told the committeee. “We are the ones who make the law…. This is giving them a blank check … a complete transfer of power.”
The Labor Department issued new guidance Wednesday intended to help companies answer that increasingly fraught question. The issue has taken on greater urgency with the growth of sharing-economy firms such as Uber and TaskRabbit, which increasingly rely on independent workers, often for short-term projects.
Since 2006, U.S. households have received more than $18 billion in federal income tax credits for weatherizing their homes, installing solar panels, buying hybrid and electric vehicles, and other “clean energy” investments. We use tax return data to examine the socioeconomic characteristics of program recipients. We find that these tax expenditures have gone predominantly to higher-income Americans. The bottom three income quintiles have received about 10% of all credits, while the top quintile has received about 60%. The most extreme is the program aimed at electric vehicles, where we find that the top income quintile has received about 90% of all credits.
Some state workers fired from their jobs could apply for another state position and not disclose their termination, under the terms of a bill that is now in the California state Senate.
In this report, the Institute for Applied Economics of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation (LAEDC) conducts a regional dependency study of the refinery industry, evaluating the ripple effect of a potential reduction of supply of refined petroleum products and byproducts in California.
The finance department opposes this year’s minimum wage bill because it would boost the state payroll by an estimated $1.2 billion once the wage reaches $13 in 2017. Finance officials also think the economic impact of a $13 minimum wage likely would be negative because it would slow the growth of employment.
California refineries support 2.4 million jobs that depend on the petroleum-based products they produce but increasing regulatory demands are jeopardizing their ability to continue operations in the state, according to a report released this week.
Gasoline sold in California costs more than in the rest of the U.S. — sometimes dramatically so. That’s because the Golden State’s market is isolated from outside fuel suppliers that might moderate prices. The fuel market here is an economic island, and occasionally circumstances combine to make California’s gasoline even pricier than on the actual island of Hawaii.