California saw a 2.4 percent month-to-month decline in job vacancies advertised online in August while Sacramento listings held fairly steady, according to the latest statistics released by the Conference Board.
Amazon.com Inc. is pushing ahead with a San Francisco expansion that will grow its footprint in the city to nearly 150,000 square feet.
If Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg wants to do an end run around the California Environmental Quality Act to expedite the proposed new arena in downtown Sacramento, why shouldn’t those changes apply statewide to similar urban projects?
The firm found that most chief information officers in the Bay Area plan to hire IT staff in the fourth quarter. About 13 percent of CIOs expect to increase the size of their IT staff, up 1 percent from the third quarter. And 66 percent of the officers surveyed plan to hire to fill vacant IT jobs — that figure is up 5 percent from the third quarter.
Existing companies, not research universities or entrepreneurship programs, are the most fertile source of startup businesses in most metropolitan areas. That’s a key takeaway from a new study conducted by the Kauffman Foundation, which also found that most areas with higher-than-average startup activity have been strong entrepreneurial centers for at least 20 years.
Germany’s agressive and reckless expansion of wind and solar power has come with a hefty pricetag for consumers, and the costs often fall disproportionately on the poor. Government advisors are calling for a completely new start.
SB 54 (Senator Loni Hancock) is just such a bill. It purports to be about safety but in fact could increase risks, displace highly skilled workers with excellent safety records, and remove the flexibility of employers to hire the best available workers. SB 54 would establish arbitrary training requirements that would force refinery and chemical facilities to choose a large percentage of their workers from the membership of a single union, and to pay those workers government mandated wages.
As lawmakers consider policies to improve the competitiveness of American businesses, they should not forget that individual income tax rates are just as important to business activity as the corporate rate. The various proposals to raise income taxes on high-income earners, either by increasing the top marginal rate, closing “loopholes,” limiting deductions, or implementing a minimum tax, would fall very heavily on America’s non-corporate businesses. Pass-through businesses are currently facing top marginal rates on average between 44.5 percent and 47.5 percent and as high as 51.8 percent in California. These pass-through businesses account for a large percentage of business income and employment in the United States. Raising taxes on them could curtail their hiring and other investment plans, putting more strain on an already struggling economy.
There’s a lot of talk about increasing infrastructure spending, but with local, state and federal agencies involved, it’s difficult to determine which projects would bring the biggest bang for the buck. Enter CG/LA Infrastructure. The Washington-based consulting firm in August ranked 100 projects that it says would most help the U.S. regain its competitiveness.
California imposed a huge retroactive income tax increase last year, but some 2,500 small business owners are learning that once is never enough for Sacramento. The state now wants to hit them with a retroactive levy going back to 2008, to the tune of $120 million or more.
As California marks the Labor Day holiday, there’s a slow-motion debate over the strength of its recovery from the worst recession since the Great Depression and thus its prospects for improving employment.
United Farm Workers and its government allies are working hard to destroy jobs.
Fast-food workers want raises, but the bigger challenge is to help them advance into better jobs.
When I started following the research on child well-being about two decades ago, the focus was almost always girls’ problems—their low self-esteem, lax ambitions, eating disorders, and, most alarming, high rates of teen pregnancy. Now, though, with teen births down more than 50 percent from their 1991 peak and girls dominating classrooms and graduation ceremonies, boys and men are increasingly the ones under examination. Their high school grades and college attendance rates have remained stalled for decades. Among poor and working-class boys, the chances of climbing out of the low-end labor market—and of becoming reliable husbands and fathers—are looking worse and worse.
A report by the California Budget Project says the addition of 750,00 jobs over the past three years has still left much of the state in double-digit unemployment.