In less than three months, Pasadena’s minimum wage will climb to $12 an hour for those with 25 or fewer employees, and $13.25 for those with 26 or more. Those are higher than California’s current state minimum wage, which is also climbing and will hit $15 by 2022. In some respects, automation like Flippy is […]
The friction around the best path forward after high school is popping up around the country as anxious students and families try to figure out how to pay for four years of college. At the same time, business groups and state governments make the case for a free or much cheaper vocational education. The conversation […]
CalPERS sponsored legislation resulting in more generous city police and firefighter pensions, SB 400 in 1999, a well-known issue in the debate about whether growing pension costs are “unsustainable.” But CalPERS also backed legislation, AB 616 in 2001, giving most local government employees the option of bargaining for generous pensions once limited to police and […]
The civilian labor-force-participation rate peaked in the 1990s, and has been falling steadily ever since. There are many factors that have been driving this lower, including demographics. The gender differential is noteworthy: For men, labor-force participation began moving steadily lower right after World War II around 1948; for women, it peaks around 1999, started drifting […]
Average hourly earnings for all private-sector employees last month grew at a 2.9% annual rate of increase, the most since 2009. That has fueled hopes for workers. It has also spooked some investors with fears of higher inflation and interest rates, which have convulsed financial markets. But wage gains thus far have been very uneven, […]
The CalPERS board voted to change the period for recouping future investment losses from 30 years to 20 years. The bottom line is that it will require the state government and thousands of local government agencies and school districts to ramp up their mandatory contributions to the huge trust fund. . . . Officials fear […]
The situation for unions is dire in 2018. The National Labor Relations Board, fragile even under Obama, is so unfriendly now that unions are pulling cases from it. The Supreme Court’s decision in Janus is due soon, and state governments are pushing private sector right-to-work bills. Americans are going to have to be convinced to […]
When it hears Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31, the Supreme Court will decide whether public-sector unionism violates the First Amendment rights of workers who refuse to join unions. The case will be one of America’s most consequential for government labor–management relations. If the Court rules for the plaintiffs, […]
The Supreme Court on Monday will hear the landmark First Amendment case Janus v. Afscme that challenges whether public employees can be compelled to subsidize union advocacy. As Thomas Jefferson once wrote, requiring “a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical”—and unconstitutional. Janus gives […]
Across California, the cost of retirement benefits for public employees remains untamed. The total cost to state and local governments as well as schools and colleges has more than tripled since 2003—and projections indicate the burden in coming years will continue to grow. Payments for public employee pensions and retiree health care benefits are putting […]
Weak productivity growth has been a head-scratcher for economists in recent years, but a new study argues the tide is poised to turn, and the next wave will be driven by digitization. The diffusion of new technologies into everyday use holds promise for bringing back the kinds of annual 2% productivity growth seen in the […]
From January 2017 to January 2018, real average hourly earnings increased 0.8 percent, seasonally adjusted. The increase in real average hourly earnings combined with a 0.3-percent decrease in the average workweek resulted in a 0.4-percent increase in real average weekly earnings over the 12-month period.
In 2017, California’s economy grew at an estimated rate of 2.5 percent, faster than the nation as a whole, which grew at 2.4 percent. While impressive, California’s economy continued to slow down from the 3.3 percent year-over year growth achieved in 2016, and from the over 4 percent year-over-year percentage growth seen in 2014 and […]
California cities struggling with recent hikes in their pension fees will see another one in 2021 because of a decision CalPERS made on Tuesday to speed up the rate of their debt payments. The change will save cities money over time, but it could squeeze local government budgets over the next few years because it […]
America’s biggest companies are about to tell the world for the first time how compensation for their chief executives compares with what they pay their rank-and-file workers. The disclosure, a requirement of the postcrisis Dodd-Frank law, is causing trepidation among top executives and corporate boards, and for good reason: The pay ratio, which is calculated […]