The Days of Awe
We are currently in the Days of Awe, the 10 day period between Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. It is a time of repentance, prayer, and charity. It directs us to a form of charity or good deeds relevant to our employment world today. In repentance, prayer […]
Virginia Hamilton and the Next Era of Job Training
Virginia Hamilton started in the workforce field in 1978, at the Stockton EDD office, as an Employment Program Representative (job placement staff). Over the past 36 years, she has held a variety of positions at EDD, at the California Workforce Association, and at the U.S. Department of Labor. Since 2012, she has served as the […]
Ward Cleaver’s Job World (Los Angeles 1957)
(A longer version of this posting will be appearing in the journal of the California State Library, which houses the collected papers of Mr. Bernick). Over the past few months, I have been researching the job world in 1950s California for an essay in our California State Library journal. As part of the research, I […]
What Explains the Decline in Entrepreneurship in California
The decision last week by Tesla Motors to locate its battery factory in Nevada attracted the most media attention among economics stories, and generated a new wave of articles about California’s economic competitiveness. But our real concern should be not Tesla (California government did everything possible) but the decline in entrepreneurship in California as elsewhere, […]
What California Job Specialists Can Learn Today From Joan Rivers
(Editor’s Note: The following piece by Michael Bernick appeared in Fox and Hounds Daily on September 18, 2013. We are re-posting in memory of Ms. Rivers who passed away yesterday.) California’s job specialists (and all of us) can learn much from studying the career and current employments of Joan Rivers—as demonstrated recently on the set […]
Labor Day 2014: 3 Truths and a Lie
As we come to Labor Day 2014, it is time to consider where we have come since last year’s Labor Day and where we might be going. Here are three truths and a lie about the job market in California. Truth 1- California is in the midst of one of its longest employment expansions since […]
The Energy and Creativity of the Internet Job Placement Sites
This summer, Congress enacted the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) which governs the $3 billion or so spent each year by the federal government on job training. Secretary of Labor, Thomas Perez, announced that the Act would bring U.S. job training in the 21st century. I started in the public workforce system in 1979 […]
The Last Days of Heavy Manufacturing in California
In 1993, novelist and California native Joan Didion traveled to the City of Lakewood in Southern California to report on its changing employment and culture. Her essay, “Trouble in Lakewood”, published 21 years ago this week, detailed a declining economy and troubled culture. Lakewood was the largest of California’s suburbs built in the immediate post […]
Turning Japanese: How Japan’s Breakdown in Employment Is Resembling Ours
Over the past four years, we have written frequently about major shifts in the structure of employment in California: the breakdown in full time employment and rise of alternative forms of contingent, project-based and part time employment. Precarious Japan, a new book from Duke University Press, examines how a surprisingly similar shift is impacting the […]
California’s Employment Legacy: A Call to Readers
Mr. Gary Kurutz, the longtime Director of the Special Collections Branch of the California State Library, Mr. Michael Dolguskhin, State Library archivist, and I are researching employment in California in the 1950s and 1960s. We’d like to ask your participation: hearing from you of your recollections of employment of family, friends and neighbors during these […]