Workforce & Labor

On a warm evening in late June, people flocked to alfresco tables set up along San Rafael's main drag to sip sauvignon blanc and eat wood-oven pizza for Dining Under the Lights, an event to welcome Marin County residents back to one of their favorite pastimes.

About a mile away, Crisalia Calderon was hunkered down in her apartment facing a sleepless night as she grappled with the early symptoms of COVID-19.

California lawmakers said Wednesday that there is growing evidence of possible widespread fraud in the state’s unemployment benefits system, and the agency in charge confirmed it is investigating whether people have filed dozens of bogus claims during the COVID-19 pandemic.

For workers fortunate enough to have been working remotely during the pandemic amid historic layoffs, thoughts about a return to the workplace are not just centered around plexiglass dividers, sanitizer dispensers, and separated workstations.

With stimulus talks with Congress at an impasse, President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders on Saturday to provide temporary relief to Americans who are suffering from the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

Excessive exposure to high temperatures in the workplace is a cause of heat stress, anxiety, and fatigue in industrial workers.

Elected officials, union leaders, industry representatives and environmentalists are expressing concern about the hundreds of workers set to lose their jobs at California's fourth-largest refinery in the coming months.

With federal unemployment benefits of $600 per week set to expire today and nearly 1 million claims backlogged at California’s unemployment department, millions of Californians are teetering on the edge of a financial cliff — and increasingly desperate for answers from elected officials.

Amid a testy oversight hearing Thursday afternoon, Employment Development Department head Sharon Hilliard said California could take as long as 20 weeks to process any additional federal employment benefits once they come.

That’s because of what Hilliard calls an “antiquated” system for processing these claims, one that hasn’t yet been modernized.

Missing checks. Marathon waits on hold. Mysterious financial penalties docked from payments that promise a lifeline amid extreme uncertainty. Welcome to the world of California unemployment benefits in the age of coronavirus.

Today, Governor Gavin Newsom announced a series of actions to better serve workers that have experienced job loss during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the formation of an Employment Development Department (EDD) strike team, and a renewed focus on processing unpaid claims.

In Google’s case, extra cautious: Roughly 200,000 full-time and contract Googlers won’t be returning to the office until July 2021, the company said this week. Google is as data-driven as they come; I’d bet the search giant didn’t just rely on its gut to make this decision.

There is a high labor turnover rate in the construction industry, which negatively impacts the productivity and performance of construction businesses.

We develop a search model of informal labor markets with worker and firm heterogeneity, intra-firm bargaining with imperfect substitutability across types of workers, and a comprehensive set of labor regulations, including minimum wage.

This paper offers for the first time a global picture of gender discrimination by the law as it affects women's economic opportunity and charts the evolution of legal inequalities over five decades.

In the course of four recent years the unemployment level in the Russian Federation is on the decline. However, application of alternative criteria for the estimation of underutilized labor resources demonstrate somewhat different dynamics.

As of 2019, the global gender employment gap measured in terms of labor force participation was 29.67%. This gap has shrunk significantly over time, but intentional efforts to continue this trend are needed across the world, as evidenced by the United Nations inclusion of women's economic empowerment as a 2030 Sustainable Development Goal.

The long-term care (LTC) sector will soon face a shortage of care workers. The consequences are potentially dramatic, urging the need to design policies aiming at reducing the turnover rate of LTC workers.

The “flatten the curve” graphic has recently become a common tool to visualize the extent to which pandemic suppression and mitigation measures could potentially reduce and delay the number of daily infections due to a pandemic.

The research objective is to analyze the fulfillment of labor social security as a form of legal protection for workers in the formal and informal sectors as well as barriers and their solutions.

Construction workforce shortage is a well-documented issue facing the built environment. Rapid rise in the number of projects, and the shortage of skilled workers are primary drivers of construction workforce shortages.

This discussion paper focuses on longer-term trends affecting employment in more than 1,000 local and regional labor markets across Europe at a time when automation adoption is gathering pace.

There are the main specialties of crisis conditions in economy, which have to be taken into consideration while developing policy in enterprise's staff sphere. Actuality and novelty of the problem are in extension of the existing crisis, while studying its consequences we just need to analyze and summarize them by encompassing both theory and practice.

Technological advances raise productivity and growth, but are also likely to reshape labor markets. We examine the impact of automation on aggregate labor force participation rates and individuals’ attachment to the workforce in advanced economies.

We use traditional and non-traditional data to measure the collapse and partial recovery of the U.S. labor market from March to early July, contrast this downturn to previous recessions, and provide preliminary evidence on the effects of the policy response.

Official labor market statistics for the United States are collected once a month and published
with a three week delay. In normal times, this procedure results in timely and useful statistics.
But these are not normal times.

Unemployment insurance, the California program that supports workers who lose their jobs due to layoffs, has been dysfunctional during the last two recessions. It’s time to fix it.

As California reopens, every business will need to create a safer, low-risk environment. If you own or manage a business, follow the guidance below to protect your workers and customers.

Hotel and travel businesses will have to rehire by seniority. Oakland is the latest city to pass a “right to recall” ordinance, following San Francisco and Los Angeles.

However, non-standard work is also associated with insecurity and income instability, which can negatively effect mental health and increase gaps within society.

Purpose. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the immediate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the hospitality workforce in situ between mid-April and June 2020.

There is plenty of evidence to support that women leaders are needed in the health and pharmaceutical sectors, although most of the leadership positions in global health are predominantly occupied by men.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced governments across the world to impose lockdowns to prevent virus transmissions. This resulted in the shutdown of all economic activity and accordingly the production at manufacturing plants across most sectors was halted. While there is an urgency to resume production, there is an even greater need to ensure the safety of the workforce at the plant site.

After a bit of last-minute legislative maneuvering, the list of propositions that California voters will be asked to weigh in on has been — more or less — finalized.

A Podcast to Help You Understand What’s Going on

Every week, Dr. Jones sits down to share her insights and perspective on the chaotic world around us on her podcast, Getting Through It, co-hosted with community resilience expert John Bwarie. The duo were co-creators of The Great Shake-Out and worked to create sweeping policy changes in seismic safety in the City of Los Angeles and dozens of other communities across California.

In some senses, Rockridge Little School has not changed since COVID-19 engulfed the Bay Area. Wooden blocks and cubbies still line the shelves. Small jackets still hang from the coat racks. Scraps of butcher paper from an unfinished art project lie scattered across the tables.

Studios keep plotting a return to filming in states including California, New York, Georgia and Illinois as they hash out details of on-set COVID-19 protocols with the guilds.

The coronavirus pandemic sent overall workers’ compensation claims plummeting as California workplaces shut down and fewer employees were injured on the job.

California lawmakers are returning to work Monday for a furious five-week sprint that will include contentious debates about police brutality, unemployment benefits, hospital mergers and a moratorium on evictions during the coronavirus pandemic.

With state and federal worker assistance set to expire at the end of July, Gov. Gavin Newsom discussed efforts to extend protections for essential workers, but stopped short of further executive orders to lock in those measures.

With a series of temporary protections that helped Californians get through the first few months of the pandemic set to expire soon, Gov. Gavin Newsom hinted he will today extend some programs in another flex of executive power.

California lawmakers are returning to work Monday for a furious five-week sprint that will include contentious debates about police brutality, unemployment benefits, hospital mergers and a moratorium on evictions during the coronavirus pandemic.

Google will allow most employees to work from home through June 2021 as coronavirus infections surge, keeping one of the biggest workforces in tech and the Bay Area away from the office.

One major section of the HEALS Act proposes a drop in enhanced unemployment benefits from the current $600 per week to a new $200 weekly boost, on top of state-administered aid, until the end of September.

A plan proposed Monday by Senate Republicans, the HEALS Act, would lower the unemployment insurance (UI) weekly benefit supplement from $600 per week to $200 per week for the next two months, before capping payments at 70 percent of a worker’s prior income. A new analysis by Century Foundation researchers finds that, if enacted, the proposal would have devastating consequences for American families, businesses, and the economy.

Currently Senate Republicans are offering a proposal to reduce this weekly $600 supplement to closer to $200. This is better than allowing the $600 benefit to go all the way to zero, but this would still lead to GDP that was lower by 2.5% a year from now, and, would lead to 3.4 million fewer jobs created over the next year.