A new report shows a third of local governments in CalPERS will have police and firefighter employer rates next fiscal year that are at least 50 percent of pay, a level that a former CalPERS chief actuary believed a decade ago would be “unsustainable.” At the high end, the number of local governments with rates […]
Nine out of every 10 Silicon Valley jobs pays less now than when Netflix first launched in 1997, despite one of the nation’s strongest economic booms and a historically low unemployment rate that outpaces the national average. While tech workers have thrived, employees in the middle of Silicon Valley’s income ladder have been hit hardest […]
Unless you’ve been hibernating in the Himalayas, you must know of the recent surge in economic inequality. It’s not just that the rich are getting richer. The rest of us — say politicians, pundits and scholars — are stagnating. The top 1 percent have grabbed most income gains, while average Americans are stuck in the […]
In addition to his overall review of state finances, Taylor also issued a special report on K-12 schools and community colleges, which are dependent on the state budget, and it contained a not-so-rosy projection of their finances. Enrollment in both systems has been declining, thanks to interrelated demographic and economic factors, while their costs have […]
Four years after the state Legislature passed a bailout of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System that will nearly double annual direct contributions to the giant pension fund, a newly released internal report raises the prospect that the infusion of extra dollars may not protect CalSTRS from future disaster. The 2014 changes in funding required […]
Angelenos and the City of Los Angeles dodged a potentially fatal bullet on Tuesday, November 6, when 58% of the City’s voters said NO to Charter Amendment B, which, according a Los Angeles Times editorial, was “one of the most ill-conceived, half-baked measures to come out of City Hall in years, and that’s saying something.” […]
A California regulator said late Thursday that it was expanding a probe of PG&E Corp.’s P safety practices to explore the way the company is managed and run, including whether it should be broken up. “I will open a new phase examining the corporate governance, structure, and operation of PG&E, including in light of the […]
A May 2017 survey collected information about workers who were in four alternative employment arrangements—people employed as independent contractors, on-call workers, temporary help agency workers, and workers provided by contract firms. These data were collected in a special supplemental survey to the Current Population Survey, the monthly household survey that provides information on employment and […]
Supposedly civic-minded prohibitions on consumer conveniences always have unintended consequences. California’s single-use plastic bag ban, for instance, has led to a surge in E. coli infections, created a swarm of thicker plastics bags that are a greater environmental hazard than the outlawed single-use plastic bags, boosted shoplifting, and been the cause of countless broken eggs […]
Gavin Newson will not begin his governorship in January with a budget deficit, but nevertheless, Gov. Jerry Brown will leave him a stack of knotty managerial and policy issues that cannot be ignored. The two most obvious are Brown’s two pet public works projects, twin tunnels to carry water beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and […]
Even in a unionized environment, where work tasks are similar, hourly wages are identical, and tenure dictates promotions, female workers earn $0.89 on the male-worker dollar (weekly earnings). We use confidential administrative data on bus and train operators from the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) to show that the weekly earnings gap can be explained […]
There are few issues, if any, more important than income and poverty. The most successful political jurisdictions, where national or sub national, are characterized by rising incomes and falling rates of poverty. A large and growing middle-class is key to that. But measuring the size and trend of the middle-class is easier said than done. […]
Labor force participation among U.S. men and women ages 25 to 54 has been declining for nearly 20 years, a stark contrast with rising participation in Canada over this period. Three-fourths of the difference between the two countries can be explained by the growing gap in labor force attachment of women. A key factor is […]
The tide of medical-marijuana legalization making its way through American states is leading to a notable uptick in the birth of babies, according to a new paper published by the National Bureau for Economic Research. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 33 states and Washington, D.C., allow the once verboten drug to be […]
McKesson Corp. appears to be setting the stage to quietly shift its corporate headquarters to Dallas, where it operates a division headquarters. … “McKesson is a multinational company with more than 75,000 employees in the U.S., Canada and Europe.