On Thursday, the independent Legislative Analyst’s Office reported that preliminary tax collections in December — a key month for quarterly tax payments — were almost $1.2 billion below predictions. . . Few will be surprised if Brown uses the lackluster revenue data to demand scaled back growth in future spending or cuts in current spending on some programs.
“What the report tries to get at is that the facts on the ground for a typical California family are really as bad as they’ve ever been in the state’s history,” said Ben Metcalf, director of the Department of Housing and Community Development.
One in four El Monte residents lives in poverty. Yet taxpayers pay a steep price to fund bonus pensions and other perks for city workers.
Employers in California can’t keep their workers on call during short rest breaks and must give up any control over how they spend that time, the state Supreme Court said Thursday in a case that pitted labor activists against business groups.
The average price of self-serve regular gasoline in the Los Angeles-Long Beach area was $2.719 a gallon as of Thursday, a 17-cent drop from a year earlier, the Auto Club said in its weekly fuel report.
The impacts will first be felt in the state budget, which already makes annual payments of $5.4 billion a year into the CalPERS fund. While local governments and schools won’t have to boost their pension contributions until 2018, the state budget will begin to feel the effects of the CalPERS decision in almost six months. . . Brown, who will unveil his new state budget in less than three weeks, believes the ratcheting down of CalPERS’ investment profits will force the state to pay an additional $2 billion above current pension mandates by the summer of 2024.
California employers added 13,600 jobs in November, nudging the state unemployment rate down to 5.3%, according to data released Friday morning.
California, by far the nation’s leader in use of solar, led the expansion and became the first state to install 1 gigawatt of solar power in a single quarter, according to the Solar Energy Industries Assn.
Californians are likely to pay more for gasoline, electricity, food and new homes — and to feel their lives jolted in myriad other ways — because their state broadly expanded its war on climate change this summer.
A San Jose solar company announced plans Wednesday to cut 2,500 jobs, including about 200 in California, as part of an effort to restructure operations and reduce expenses.
If all of these workers lost their jobs next year, it would be a huge blow to Southern California apparel manufacturing, which has steadily declined over the years, analysts said. This year, American Apparel laid off at least 500 workers as it cut production.
“In the last five years, online shopping has produced tens of thousands of new warehouse jobs in California, many of them in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. The bulk of them paid blue collar people decent wages to do menial tasks – putting things in boxes and sending them out to the world. But automated machines and software have been taking up more and more space in the region’s warehouses, and taking over jobs that were once done by humans. Today, fewer jobs are being added, though some of them pay more.”
Financial services and insurance company Transamerica said Thursday that it will close its office in Los Angeles, cutting about 315 jobs.
The Labor Department rule doubles the salary level at which hourly workers must be paid extra for overtime pay, applying the requirement to anyone making up to $47,476 annually. U.S. District Court Judge Amos L. Mazzant III sided with Nevada and 20 other states in their bid to halt the rule, and he incorporated a similar legal challenge from a coalition of business groups including the Chamber of Commerce into his ruling.
The laborers have been working without a contract for four years, union officials say. That’s why they have been asking for back pay in their negotiations with UCLA. They have asked for 20.39% in retroactive back pay and annual wage increases of 17.39%, 5% and 4%.