California’s business climate needs a major overhaul
The Sacramento Bee reported this weekend that "business groups" are starting to support tax increases as a partial solution to California’s historic budget shortfall. It is important to note that new tax proposals must come with a plan for true economic stimulus. Without it we’ll continue to lose companies like Opti-Solar who announced last week that they were laying off 105 employees, while its solar panel competitors thrive in Oregon, and APL who recently announced it is moving its shipping line headquarters from Oakland to Arizona to take advantage of lower operating costs. Can you imagine a shipping company moving to landlocked Arizona because the cost of doing business in California is too high? It’s true and now California has lost a company that operates 130 ships worldwide that had its headquarters in the Bay Area for longer than California has been a state.
Inauguration Day: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly
Tuesday morning, I woke up at 5:00 a.m. est (2:00 a.m. pst back at home in
Los Angeles) and made the trek to Capitol Hill along with hundreds of
thousands of faithful Obama supporters, political junkies, and first-time
voters. In the dark of an early D.C. morning, I, along with a herd of folks
wearing all of the winter clothing their closets have to offer, jammed into
lines in the streets and tunnels of our nation’s Capitol. The maze of lines
throughout the city that led to the “exclusive” purple, blue, orange,
silver, and polka dot entrances all led to one thing – a mess!
After being
turned away, thousands of hopeful attendees resorted to watching the speech
from local bars or missing the ceremony entirely as they wandered the
streets of D.C. I spent four hours in the 3rd Street tunnel where our group
was resorted to such a cabin fever that children starting inscribing “Free
the Purple Ticket People” on the smut-covered walls. When we finally emerged
from our cave twenty minutes before the ceremony was scheduled to start, we
were told that the gates were closed since folks had cut the line by
knocking down barricades. After some persistence and patience, I found a
way in and spent my afternoon on the Capitol lawn, just a few hundred yards
from our new President.
The Fiction of Business’ ‘Secret Ballot’ Argument
It’s still early in 2009, but my award for the most disingenuous p.r. campaign of the year goes to the national, business-backed effort to fight the labor-backed Employee Free Choice Act. The campaign has a deceptively simple message: preserve the “secret ballot” in union elections.
I’m for all secret ballots. Ideally, union elections would be conducted via secret ballots just like an election for governor or mayor; voters would make their decisions freely and fairly and no one knows how they voted. The problem is this: we don’t have anything like secret ballots in union elections. And the business leaders of the effort to discredit EFCA know this.
The truth about union elections is much more complicated. There are two ways that workplaces go union. The first, now favored by labor, is “card check.” In these cases, workers sign cards saying they want to join a union. When workers have a majority, employers agree to recognize the union. Oftentimes, card check recognition comes after months or even years of pressure and/or negotiations between the union, workers and employers. There can be hard feelings, but the process also can be a cooperative one. Security guards in Los Angeles office buildings were recently organized this way.
California’s Financial History: “Broke, Busted and Disgusted.”
As we await California’s impending financial collapse, you might think that booms and busts are new here. They’re not. In fact, California (and U.S.) history is chock full of booms and busts, going all the way back to the early days of our statehood. Since 1854, the whole of the U.S. has encountered no fewer than 32 cycles of expansions and contractions, averaging some 17 months of contraction and 38 months of expansion, as tracked by the NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research). From 1945-2007, the NBER has identified 11 separate recessions; averaging 10 months in duration (peak to trough).
The Gold Rush, starting in 1849, saw many ships simply abandoned in Yerba Buena harbor – what would soon be San Francisco – as everybody on board lit out for the gold fields, leaving nobody to sail the ships back to from whence they came. Some of the ships were filled in right in place, becoming buildings or foundations of buildings – every now and then, we hear of construction sites uncovering parts of long forgotten, old buried ships – San Francisco has a lot of filled land that was water back in the 1850’s. The Gold Rush itself went from boom to bust very quickly, leaving ravaged, barren countryside at the diggings and, it is often repeated, that significantly more people made serious money selling equipment to the gold digging Forty-Niners than by actually digging gold.