The report follows a disappointing April, when the state lost jobs for the first time in several months. The May unemployment rate dropped from 4.8% in April, but it still hovers above the national rate of 4.3%. For the second month in a row, the state economy’s year-over-year growth was slower in May than the overall U.S. economy.
Around 100 truck drivers and warehouse workers serving the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports plan to launch a strike starting Monday — their 15th strike in the last four years.
The workers and Teamsters union Local 848 announced the labor action Thursday. The truck drivers have been pushing for years to become employees rather than independent contractors to improve pay and workplace protections.
The recession took a big bite out of California’s greenhouse gas emissions. But since then, the state has found ways to keep emissions from rising to pre-recession levels even as its economy grows. It helps that a significant portion of the recovery comes from the technology industry. Living and working in the state now uses less carbon than before, and emissions per gross domestic product and per person have been falling continuously.
Southern California has experienced a boost in trade and logistics employment in the last decade, but policy and labor challenges lie ahead, according to a new economic report.
Trade-related jobs increased nearly 10% from 2005 to 2015, more than double the overall regional employment increase of 4.2%, the report released Monday by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. found.
. . . The average trade industry worker still made more than $63,000 in 2015, about 14% higher than the average wage for other industries in the area.
The Democratic governor gave his usual rally cry in this coastal Chinese city, imploring the packed ballroom to help reinforce a global commitment to climate change. But a more specific theme also emerged, an undercurrent in his five-night trip that he’s echoed in several meetings with officials: Brown is looking to China for the future of California’s electric vehicles. The state aims to put 4 million to 5 million electric cars on roads by 2030, he said at the event, “and we aren’t going to get there until Chinese business people, Chinese government leaders make it a priority to develop batteries and electric cars. And we will too.”
The list, which ranks U.S. companies by total yearly revenue, includes 53 firms whose headquarters are in the Golden State — a total that’s second only to New York’s 54. (The list of 500 companies is compiled by looking at results reported by publicly traded firms, as well as from the privately traded ones that file financial statements with a government agency.)
Los Angeles County’s homeless population has soared 23% over last year despite increasing success in placing people in housing, according to the latest annual count released Wednesday.
But top economists now are pointing to another explanation. Women seem to be leaving the workforce for some of the same reasons men are: Middle-class jobs are in short supply and working at the bottom pays less than it used to. Single women without children drove most of the downturn in women’s workforce participation from 1999 through 2007, according to a study by Professor Robert Moffitt of Johns Hopkins University. Those women don’t have to care for a child and they aren’t counting on a partner to provide for them. They are, Moffitt said, “the same as a lot of men … even though it sounds a little strange to make that analogy.” They’re also staring down the same long odds as men who lost their footing in an economy in which low-skill jobs that pay well have all been shipped abroad or obliterated by technology.
Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle raised concerns Tuesday that Gov. Jerry Brown’s state budget plan relies on a faulty calculation of a spending limit imposed by voters in 1979.
. . . An April 28 opinion from the legislative counsel of California, released publicly Tuesday, said that certain appropriations that Brown’s budget looks to exclude from the spending limit “must be included” per the language that voters placed in the California Constitution.
The 3rd District Court of Appeal in Sacramento rejected that argument. The decision has caused new consternation at the chamber, which said in its appeal that the court risks “putting no limits on what money can be exacted and providing a road map for the evasion of Proposition 13’s limits” on increasing taxes.
While new-vehicle registrations fell 1.4% nationally in January through March, California dealers experienced a 0.7% increase in registrations, putting the state on the path for another year of sales exceeding 2 million vehicles.
In the same time frame, 4.8% of new vehicles registered in the Golden State were zero-emission vehicles and plug-in hybrids, the highest share ever recorded.
The state wants to slash greenhouse gas emissions so deeply in the coming years that oil refineries and other industries could face skyrocketing costs to comply with regulations, driving up gasoline prices until the system loses political support. If that happens, an effort touted as an international model for fighting global warming could collapse.
Developers are now adding homes, relative to population growth, at a far higher pace than in recent years. But it’s still below what experts believe would be enough to keep up with California’s growing population, which topped 39.5 million last year.
A measure that would allow local governments to force developers to include more low-income housing within their projects passed the Assembly Thursday.
Assemblyman Matthew Harper (R-Huntington Beach) argued that the bill would raise costs for developers and therefore reduce their ability to produce the broad housing stock the state needs to control prices.
In the span of a few decades, Los Angeles area construction went from an industry that was two-thirds white, and largely unionized, to one that is overwhelmingly Latino, mostly nonunion and heavily reliant on immigrants, according to a Los Angeles Times review of federal data.
At the same time, the job got less lucrative. American construction workers today make $5 an hour less than they did in the early 1970s, after adjusting for inflation.