Over the past few years, a main storyline in California employment has been the shift from full-time employment with expectations of stability to employment that is contingent (for limited period or project-based), or independent-contracting, or part-time (particularly part-time without benefits), or a combination of these elements. Part-time employment growth has been the easiest to track, […]

This week, the Board of Governors of the California Community Colleges will be asked to approve more than $16 million in California Apprenticeship Initiative (CAI) projects to expand apprenticeship presence and enrollment in California. The CAI is part of the broader California investment in expanding apprenticeships, the largest state investment in the nation. It is […]

(This short essay first appeared in Zocalo Public Square under the title of “How We Saved the Middle Class in the 1980s”. It draws on a current archiving project with the California State Library on job training/anti-poverty efforts in our state during the 1970s and 1980s.) It’s easy to think that, in the world of […]

(This is a slightly expanded version of an essay of mine that appeared the past Sunday in the San Francisco Chronicle “Insight” section. I asked our publisher Mr. Fox to include today, and he agreed. This mid-twentieth century period in California politics, though relatively little-known by recent generations, continues to have great relevance for our […]

The California economy careens into 2016. November state employment numbers will be released this Friday, and should follow the job gain trends of the past few years. In the most recent job numbers through October 2015,  California had gained over 2.1 million payroll jobs since February 2010, 463,000 payroll jobs in the year from October […]

This Thursday, December 10, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) is hosting a forum on the “Future of Work”. It is widely promoting this forum as an all-day session bringing together business leaders, academics, workers and advocates to identify the “remarkable technological, economic and cultural changes” of recent years and their “profound impact throughout the […]

Two events from last week are of note for our California workforce community and more general California public affairs community: the latest monthly job numbers, and the passing away of the P.F. Sloan a Southern California songwriter whose songs included the 1965 hit “Eve of Destruction”. Let’s briefly explain, including their loose connection. Last Friday’s […]

Paul Hippolitus, the director of the UC Berkeley Disabled Students’ Program , recalls that when he entered the disability employment field in 1971, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated 33% of adults with disabilities worked either full or part time. In September 2015 that estimated rate was down to 20%. “After 44 years of laws, education […]

Last Thursday we had the annual Arc Angel Breakfast at Clint Reilly’s Merchants Exchange building in downtown San Francisco. Over 275 people from local businesses were in attendance, along with State Senator Mark Leno and San Francisco Supervisor Scott Wiener, long-time friends of The Arc San Francisco. As with other recent Arc breakfasts, this one […]

Since Uber announced its downtown Oakland headquarters last Wednesday, a good deal of handwringing has followed about gentrification and threats to “Oakland values” and “Oakland’s soul”. So it is worth saying a few things about how tech firms in the past few years have been impacting urban form and urban economies in California. At the […]