“Employees would begin making contributions toward their retiree health benefits at a rate of 1.2 percent of their salary on July 1, 2018. That contribution would increase to 2.3 percent the following year. Brown’s initial offer called for a raise of just under 12 percent spaced over four years that would be offset by retiree health contributions totaling 3.5 percent by 2019.”
“In the last five years, online shopping has produced tens of thousands of new warehouse jobs in California, many of them in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. The bulk of them paid blue collar people decent wages to do menial tasks – putting things in boxes and sending them out to the world. But automated machines and software have been taking up more and more space in the region’s warehouses, and taking over jobs that were once done by humans. Today, fewer jobs are being added, though some of them pay more.”
CalPERS has consistently undercollected from government workers and employers, instead counting on overly optimistic investment forecasts to help fund retirees’ pensions.
“Los Angeles County has added more than 475,000 jobs since the depths of the Great Recession, and it’s expected to gain another 334,200 jobs by 2020, according to a report released Thursday. But most of those jobs will be low-paying positions, the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. reported at the seventh annual Southern California Economic Summit . . . “We have 90,000 fewer manufacturing jobs than we did in 2007 and those were jobs that paid around $52,000 a year back then,” Cooper said. “We’ve added 90,000 additional food service jobs since 2007, but those are jobs that have an average annual wage of $20,000.””
As the labor union-backed Fight for $15 begins yet another nationwide strike on November 29, I have a simple message for the protest organizers and the reporters covering them: I told you so.
Menlo Park, California-based Lucid Motors will build an electric vehicle manufacturing facility in Casa Grande and has plans to build its luxury electric vehicles for first sale in 2018. . . “While all the markets wanted an automotive OEM facility, Arizona was the state that made us feel as if it were a partner in the process,” said Brian Barron, director of manufacturing for Lucid Motors, formerly Atieva. “We were impressed that Gov. Ducey made a trip to California to meet our team and was so accessible when we were in Arizona. This was one of the key deciding factors in choosing Casa Grande.”
According to a 2014 study by U.S. Common Sense, a fiscal watchdog group founded by Stanford graduates, this policy decision has left San Francisco with by far the highest unfunded liabilities on a per-person basis of any California local government of significant size.
California’s pension funds continue to face a fusillade of bad news, including new reports showing that retirement benefits consume 20 percent of Los Angeles’ general-fund budget. Put another way, one out of every five dollars the city spends goes to a retired city worker, a percentage that has quadrupled in the past 14 years. That’s an astounding number that is crowding out other public services. Things are even more troubling in San Jose, where pensions and retiree health care now consume nearly 28 percent of the budget.
The Labor Department rule doubles the salary level at which hourly workers must be paid extra for overtime pay, applying the requirement to anyone making up to $47,476 annually. U.S. District Court Judge Amos L. Mazzant III sided with Nevada and 20 other states in their bid to halt the rule, and he incorporated a similar legal challenge from a coalition of business groups including the Chamber of Commerce into his ruling.
The union has denounced the administration’s proposed wage increase of 12 percent over four years as inadequate because it fails to address what it contends are gender pay inequities in the state workforce. It also objects to the administration’s proposal that employees pay more for their health benefits.
CalPERS is preparing more pension rate hikes, and they could cost government agencies billions of dollars.
What is happening in Dallas is an extreme example of what’s happening in many other places around the country. Elected officials promised workers solid pensions years ago, on the basis of wishful thinking rather than realistic expectations. Dallas’s troubles have become more urgent because its plan rules let some retirees take big withdrawals.
The California State Teachers Retirement System board, for example, was told that in 1971 there were were six active workers in the system for every retiree. Today CalSTRS only has 1.5 active workers for every retiree, similar to the CalPERS ratio.
Pension Tracker (http:pensiontracker.org), a Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) project, estimates total United States public pension debt (a.k.a. unfunded liabilities) in June 2015 at $5.599 trillion, a 16 percent increase over 2014. . . California now has the second highest Market Pension Debt per household at $92,478, a 19.4 percent rise over 2014.
The laborers have been working without a contract for four years, union officials say. That’s why they have been asking for back pay in their negotiations with UCLA. They have asked for 20.39% in retroactive back pay and annual wage increases of 17.39%, 5% and 4%.