Visa issued a statement Tuesday acknowledging “a variety” of job cuts, but offered no details on the size and scope. Several Visa employees and former employees tell the San Francisco Business Times that Visa recently cut 800 to 1,500 jobs, with the company’s former headquarters campus in Foster City especially hard hit.
It’s often said that the U.S. has recovered more strongly from the last recession than most other developed nations. Data on jobs, though, suggest that’s not quite true. . . As of June, the G-7 as a whole had recovered almost completely, while the U.S. was only 60 percent back from its lowest point . . .
“More than a fifth of American men — about 20 million people — between 20 and 65 had no paid work last year. Seven million men between 25 and 55 are no longer even looking for work, twice as many black men as white. There are 20 million men with felony records who are not in jail, with dim prospects of employment, and more of these are black men. Half the men not in the labor force report they are in bad physical or mental health. Men account for only 42 percent of college graduates, handicapping them in a job market that rewards higher levels of education. “
California’s unrelenting economy refused to slow in September, amassing another 30,000 new jobs even as more people seeking work opted into the labor market, according to state data released Friday. . . “We are adding jobs at the two extremes, in higher paying industries and lower industries. Where we aren’t seeing stronger growth is in the middle,” Vitner said.
Weekly applications for unemployment benefits were unchanged at a seasonally adjusted 246,000, the Labor Department said Thursday. The four-week average, a less volatile measure, fell 3,500 to 249,250.
Employment outside of farms grew by 156,000 jobs in September, the Labor Department said Friday. That was the smallest gain since May, though it was a level that, if sustained, would deliver enough jobs to keep up with a growing population.
Initial jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs, increased by 3,000 to a seasonally adjusted 254,000 in the week ended Sept. 24, the Labor Department said Thursday.
Employers statewide added a robust 63,100 jobs during the month, the Employment Development Department reported Friday, although the unemployment rate was unchanged at 5.5 percent. The job gains for August were a sharp contrast with a fairly weak showing of 18,600 the month before.
Along with up-skilling workers, we should lower the regulatory barriers to entrepreneurship. It’s a sad fact that America tends to regulate the entrepreneurship of the poor much more stringently than it does that of the rich. You can begin an Internet company in Silicon Valley with little regulatory oversight; you need more than ten permits to open a grocery store in the Bronx.
Part of the reason unemployment declined may be that for the first time in years, the state labor force shrank last month. About 9,000 Californians dropped out of the job market in May.
The number of people hired in April fell to 5.1 million, down from 5.3 million in March and 5.5 million in February. That works out to a hiring rate of 3.5%, the slowest pace since August of 2014. While the hiring rate has improved since the worst periods of 2009 and 2010, employers have yet to return to hiring at the pace they did a decade ago.
Nonfarm payrolls rose by a seasonally adjusted 38,000 in May, the weakest performance since September 2010, the Labor Department said Friday . . . Revisions showed employers added a combined 59,000 fewer jobs in April and March than previously estimated. Together, May’s weak job growth and the revisions bring the average monthly job gains in the past three months to 116,000, a sharp slowdown from the average 219,000 growth over the prior 12 months. . . The decline in the unemployment rate was driven by 458,000 people leaving the workforce. The labor-force participation rate fell to 62.6% in May, down 0.2 percentage point from April.
Seven metro areas had an unemployment rate of 10% or higher in April . . . Five of those seven areas are in California. El Centro, Calif., led all metro areas in the U.S. with a 20.1% jobless rate in April. It was followed by Yuma, Ariz.; Merced, Calif.; Ocean City, N.J.; Visalia-Porterville, Calif.; Bakersfield, Calif.; and Hanford-Corcoran, Calif.
Hundreds of thousands of jobs will be created in L.A. County over the next four years, most of them low-paying, according to a report released Wednesday by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.
All over the country, employers say they see a disturbing downside of tighter labor markets as they try to rebuild from the worst recession since the Depression: They are struggling to find workers who can pass a pre-employment drug test. . . But data suggest employers’ difficulties also reflect an increase in the use of drugs, especially marijuana — employers’ main gripe — and also heroin and other opioid drugs much in the news.