Earlier this month, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG) hosted a lunch for its business members  with San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee. Like all SVLG events, the room was packed, a combination of old line financial services and accounting firms, along with newer alternate energy and technology firms. The gathering was meant to cover a [...]

This essay first appeared earlier this week in Zocalo Public Square. California Used To Embody Stable, Middle-Class Living. It Was a Brief Interlude. The photo below was taken at the Lockheed Aircraft Company Christmas Party in Burbank in 1950. The smiling Lockheed workers are receiving awards in honor of their fifth anniversaries at the company, [...]

In January of this year, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) announced that it had chosen the City of Richmond as the site for its second campus.  It was a tremendous success for the City, which won over twenty competitors in the region, after a year- long competition. The LBNL is projected to include more [...]

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has released its 10 year employment  projections, covering the years 2010-2020. These projections show us, once again, that despite the focus on “knowledge economy” occupations, these “knowledge economy” occupations with a few exceptions (notably  Registered nurses) are not projected among the main job generators. As with previous BLS [...]

In early January, this “California Employment” column departed from its job focus  to detail an  important and brave action in San Francisco. Advocates against domestic violence  stood up against the attempt by newly elected Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi and an Old Boys Network of  former San Francisco politicians to  sweep under the rug a domestic violence [...]

Considerable attention has been given over the past few years in California to the increase in Unemployment Insurance (UI) recipients, and the corresponding insolvency of the UI fund. In the December 2011 survey week, the number of UI recipients stood at 536,442, up very slightly from the previous month and down from 599,221 in December [...]

In George Eliot’s 1874 novel Middlemarch, the young doctor Tertius Lydgate establishes his practice in the fictional Midlands town of Middlemarch. Though he lives far away from London, the center of medical research, he seeks to use his local efforts to contribute to the stock of medical knowledge. “He did not simply aim at a [...]

Increasing over the past few months, as the unemployment rate has declined nationally and in California, question has arisen: How much of the drop in the unemployment rate is due to a growth in jobs, and how much is due to workers leaving the labor force. The short answer is that there are elements of [...]

It’s a Fox and Hounds first principle that whenever you’re discouraged about California’s economic future, you just need to speak with one of the hundreds of thousands of California entrepreneurs. This is especially true of our state’s entrepreneurs in their twenties and thirties. These younger entrepreneurs span all sectors, and are particularly prominent in our [...]

Over the past decade in California, we in the workforce community have been engaged in an ongoing debate regarding the impacts of globalization on California employment. Which manufacturing jobs are being “outsourced” to other countries, and which service jobs; and how is this outsourcing changing in California over time? Which manufacturing and service jobs are [...]