After years of lagging behind Arkansas, West Virginia and several other states, California is expanding computer science in public schools across the state and training teachers to teach it.
In 1970, both cities boasted powerful industry clusters, similar concentrations of manufacturing firms, and highly educated and technically oriented workforces employed by innovative companies (Amgen in L.A., Genentech in the Bay Area). Prior to the 1990s, Los Angeles actually produced more patents than the Bay Area.
Forecasters have sharply lowered their expectations for job growth in the coming year after employers added just 38,000 jobs in May, according to The Wall Street Journal’s latest survey of academic, business and financial economists.
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.
Wednesday’s report on the monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) has intensified concerns among some economists that the U.S. economy is running out of people who want jobs and are qualified to fill existing openings.
In California, the forecast anticipates continued steady gains in employment through 2018 and a steady decrease in the unemployment rate over the next two years. California’s unemployment rate is expected to be insignificantly different from the U.S. rate at 5.1 percent by the end of the forecast period.
Labor productivity, or the amount of goods and services employees produce per hour worked, fell at a 0.6% annual rate in the first quarter, the Labor Department said Tuesday. The drop, while less steep than initially estimated, extended a troubling slowdown that has hindered the economy’s ability to lift Americans’ living standards.
Carbon emissions from cars in the Chinese city of Chengdu could be underestimated by more than half under conventional testing methods, according to the preliminary results of a study released on Wednesday.
Fifteen years after blackouts rolled through some California neighborhoods, utility customers are still feeling the effects of post-energy-crisis regulatory changes that pushed the risk of costly projects from utility investors to ratepayers.
The trade gap increased 5.3% from March to a seasonally adjusted $37.44 billion, the Commerce Department said Friday. Exports of goods and services rose 1.5% while imports climbed 2.1%.
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.
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 Thomson Reuters/PayNet Small Business Lending Index fell to 129.0, down from March’s downwardly revised 135.1 and marking the index’s seventh decline in the last 10 months. The PayNet index typically corresponds to U.S. gross domestic product growth one or two quarters ahead.
California natural gas prices spiked to a five-month high after state regulators approved rules to help gas utilities manage the amount of fuel flowing in pipelines due to the ongoing outage of the Aliso Canyon underground storage facility.