Guarantees that organized workers should be allowed to bargain for a subminimum wage appear to have scant legal justification, some experts said. They are not a universal feature of local wage ordinances, in California or other states. San Diego, the largest California city to raise its minimum wage in recent years before L.A., did not include such an exception.
The governor is in Europe saving the planet. The Legislature is on a monthlong vacation. And we motorists keep getting our cars beat up on California highways.
California refineries reaped an average of 49.3 cents on a gallon of gasoline from 1999 to 2014, according to the California Energy Commission. But this year, the average ballooned to 88.8 cents, triggered when refinery troubles in February disabled 7% of the state’s capacity at a time of low inventories.
Organized labor won an important victory Tuesday when the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to increase the minimum wage to $15, but it now faces a more daunting political challenge: convincing other local governments to join the movement.
The refinery that has historically produced about a fifth of Southern California’s gasoline has been crippled since a February explosion — and may stay that way for months to come.
The recent spate of worker misclassification lawsuits against on-demand service companies appears to have claimed its first victim, with home-cleaning company Homejoy announcing Friday that it planned to close.
The state Senate approved a resolution on Thursday praising Pope Francis’ encyclical on climate change and calling on politicians to heed its call for better stewardship of the environment.
“This kind of unregulated, unlimited power is concerning,” [Assemblyman Roger] Hernandez told the committeee. “We are the ones who make the law…. This is giving them a blank check … a complete transfer of power.”
Home sales are up. All-cash and investor purchases are down. And home prices are rising at a more sustainable pace than in the last few years.
The Labor Department issued new guidance Wednesday intended to help companies answer that increasingly fraught question. The issue has taken on greater urgency with the growth of sharing-economy firms such as Uber and TaskRabbit, which increasingly rely on independent workers, often for short-term projects.
The nation’s largest public pension fund said its investments returned just 2.4% for its fiscal year, ended June 30, far below its 7.5% investment target.
In his State of the City address in April, Mayor Eric Garcetti highlighted Turf Terminators, saying the hundreds of jobs that the company created were “some of the thousands of new, green jobs that have bloomed since I became mayor.”
For the first time in more than a decade, overall crime is up in Los Angeles through the first six months of the year, rising by about 12%, according to a Times analysis..
Gasoline sold in California costs more than in the rest of the U.S. — sometimes dramatically so. That’s because the Golden State’s market is isolated from outside fuel suppliers that might moderate prices. The fuel market here is an economic island, and occasionally circumstances combine to make California’s gasoline even pricier than on the actual island of Hawaii.
The Wall Street ratings agency Standard & Poor’s gave a vote of confidence to California’s finances on Thursday, upgrading its credit rating to its highest level in 14 years.