With each day, it seems, another accident illustrates the cost of deferred maintenance on public works, while offering a frustrating reminder to this cash-strained municipality of the daunting task it faces in dealing with the estimated $8.1 billion it would take to do the necessary repairs. The city’s total annual budget is about $26 billion.
The largest manufacturing workforce in the country is based in the Los Angeles, Long Beach and Santa Ana metropolitan area, according to government figures..
California is seen as fertile ground for a new labor movement. The state is home to the largest number of union members in the nation – some 2.4 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Union organizers have used the state to test new recruiting strategies; but success has been limited. . . Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education, says there are more organizing campaigns here than anywhere else in the country.
It’s not just pro-business Texas anymore, or Utah or Nevada or Arizona. Now even New York, a state sometimes ranked as a worse place to do business than even California, is going after Golden State businesses and jobs.
Averaging California’s economy masks some deep-seated problems – including the nation’s highest poverty rate – that shouldn’t be ignored in the political rush to proclaim a “comeback.”
Construction in California is a $152-billion industry, one in which so-called gray employment has surged 400% since 1972. The upswing has been especially pronounced since the most recent recession because only two-thirds of the formal construction jobs that disappeared have since returned.
In July 2014, among metropolitan areas for which estimates are available, Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, California, had the highest employment in manufacturing (510,900). In contrast, Fairbanks, Alaska, Laredo, Texas, and Punta Gorda, Florida, each had 700 workers employed in manufacturing.
California would be particularly affected because much of the state does not meet the current, weaker standard for ozone that has been in place since 2008. . . “We’re going to need to have zero or near-zero emissions across the entire economy, from transportation to businesses, to residences and personal products,” said Sam Atwood, a spokesman for the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which includes Los Angeles and Orange counties.
A decade ago, nearly 4,000 apparel-making sites operated in Los Angeles County, according to government figures. Fewer than 2,200 remain. Employment has plunged from 90,200 in 1990 to 46,000 last year.
Drone manufacturer Ashima Devices announced Tuesday that it will move its headquarters from Pasadena, Calif., to Reno, Nev., and is expected to bring about 400 jobs with it.
California’s beer industry provides a nation-leading 242,000 jobs, according to a new study released by the Beer Institute, the Washington, D.C.-based national trade association.
The number of people making new jobless claims across the country dropped slightly by 1,000 to 298,000 from the previous week’s revised number, according to a weekly report from the U.S. Department of Labor. California scored the largest drop in new claims.
Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced across the economy, grew at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.2% in the second quarter after accounting for inflation, the Commerce Department said.
Californians already pay the nation’s second highest gas tax at 68 cents a gallon — and now it will go up again in January to pay for a first-in-the-nation climate change law.
Part of the attraction is the substantial tax reforms that occurred over the last 15 years in Canada. First among these is the dramatic reduction in the corporate tax rate, from 43 percent in 2000 to 26 percent today. The U.S. currently has a corporate tax rate of 39 percent, but lawmakers are reluctant to do what Canada did, i.e. lower the tax rate, for fear of losing tax revenue.