Magical Thinking and the BART Strike
Magical thinking pervades our California state and local government. Policymakers often believe an event will occur because they want it to occur. So it has been on the BART strike. From the start of negotiations in the spring of 2013, local officials have claimed that the two sides could reach agreement, without paralyzing the region, […]
Who Best Knows Our California Job Markets
Wherever you go in California, there are two entities that best understand the local labor market. One is the private sector staffing firms. The other is the local Workforce Investment Board. (WIB). Ms. Martha Amram, a Milken Institute Fellow and CEO of the energy management firm WattzOn, discovered this. She recently met with Sacramento WIB […]
Our Autism Job Club Pivots
In the workforce field, as in other fields, most start-ups will need to pivot several times to survive. So it is with our Bay Area Autism Job Club. The Autism Job Club is a project of AASCEND (Autism, Asperger Syndrome Coalition for Education, Networking and Development), the volunteer Bay Area group for adults on the […]
California Job Search: Doing Everything Right, But…
In these times of job scarcity, a job seeker in California can do everything right and still be unable to find a job. So too, a local Workforce Investment Board (WIB) can do everything right in a job placement or replacement program, and not be able to place participants. These truths come through in two […]
Labor Day 2013: How We Reached the Tipping Point Against Full Time Hiring
(This is a longer version of an essay that originally appeared in Zocalo Public Square). Labor Day 2013 brings a landscape of job scarcity that is now well-documented: more and more applicants per job opening, more and more part time jobs and lower wage jobs, fewer and fewer full time jobs with benefits, fewer and […]
A Walk Into California’s Employment Future
Walk with me for a moment into California’s employment future, following a path I took on a recent afternoon. We start at my law firm, Sedgwick LLP, headquartered at 333 Bush, on Bush near Montgomery in the center of San Francisco’s financial district. We walk down Montgomery Street to Market, passing the high rises that […]
California Employment: “Mr. Ed”
Popular culture can teach us much about jobs and employment. Novels, movies and even television shows yield insights into how people approach employment at a certain time, their hopes and worries, conscious and subconscious. Which brings us to Mr. Ed, the television show centered on a talking horse that aired between January 1961 through February […]
An Explosion in Part-Time Employment
Earlier this month, our former California finance director, Mike Genest, drew my attention to a striking feature of the national job numbers, largely ignored by the media. This feature is the sharp spike over the past month in part-time employment. When the national job numbers for June 2013 were released earlier this month, the focus […]
The Rapidly Evolving Internet-Based Job Training in California
Just as other education websites on the internet are rapidly evolving, there is rapid evolution in job training websites. In her position as director of the NOVA Workforce Investment Board in Silicon Valley, Ms. Kris Stadelman sees this evolution up close. She is contacted regularly by firms, selling new variations of internet-based job placement assistance […]
A River Runs Through It: On Helping Those Closest to Us in Job Search
Near the end of A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean’s novella of a family in Montana in the early part of the twentieth century, the author’s father, reflects on his adult son Paul, who has failed to live up to his promise. “It is those we live with and love and we should know […]