California jobless filings for previous week also revised sharply
More than 2 million California residents have filed for unemployment in recent weeks, according to a grim report released Thursday that suggests one out of every nine workers in the state have recently lost their jobs.
“I have no job, no interviews, nothing so far,” said Red Damir, a Redwood City resident who was laid off recently when Ann’s Coffee Shop, a family-owned diner in Menlo Park, closed its doors. “The shutdown may be necessary, but it’s hurting me.”
Unemployment claims in the United States topped 6.6 million last week, marking the second straight week that jobless claims in the nation were well above 6 million, the U.S. Labor Department reported.
The report is a forbidding new reminder of how the coronavirus has infected broad swaths of the economy in the Bay Area, California, and nationwide.
“I normally would have been working 35 hours a week, but now I am working 12 hours a week, maybe less,” said Querta Miller, a San Jose resident who owns a housecleaning business. With coronavirus social distancing rules in place, many people are reluctant to have people come into the house for cleaning jobs, she said.
California unemployment claims totaled more than 925,000 during the week that ended on April 6, on top of the 1.06 million that filed claims in the state during the week of March 28, and the 186,000 that filed for jobless benefits the week of March 21.
The unemployment claim totals in California for the week of March 28 were revised significantly higher than the initial estimates.
All told, the latest updates suggest that 2.17 million California residents have filed for unemployment in the three most recent weeks surveyed by federal officials.
In just the two most recent weeks, about 1.98 million people in California have filed for jobless benefits, the Labor Department reported.
Jobless claims in the United States totaled 6.61 million during the week that ended on April 6, which added to the 6.87 million in unemployment claims that were filed in the week ending on March 28. The jobless claims for the week of March 28 were revised higher from the initial estimates.
For the first time in its 101-year history, the famed Pebble Beach Resort ceased operations completely, which caused numerous workers in the restaurant, resort area, retail, and caddy operations to lose their jobs.
“I looked around for three weeks without work,” said Spencer Carr, a Pebble Beach resident who was a caddy for five years at the golf course. “The whole resort is closed now, the first time since 1919.”
Carr eventually found work with Instacart, a high-tech retail delivery service whose business has bloomed amid the coronavirus economic devastation. With a wife, two children, and a third child on the way, Carr said he had little choice but to find a steady job.
“You can make $200 to $300 a day,” Carr said. “I pick up and deliver groceries for people who are too scared or are unable to leave their house right now because of the coronavirus. The demand, at least in my area, is through the roof.”
Michelle Gabriel, a Pleasanton resident, has operated a dog-walking business for 20 years. Before the rise of the coronavirus, Gabriel was booked through the end of summer with dog-walking assignments because of widespread summer vacation plans.
“When coronavirus hit, everything was shut down completely, people canceled their vacation plans,” Gabriel said. “Now I have absolutely nothing. A lot of people are afraid to travel. Job hunting is not going so well. It’s kind of scary.”
Fortunately, Gabriel’s husband works with the Alameda County Assessor’s Office, so that has helped offset the blow.
“We’re getting by,” Gabriel said. “But things are going to have to pick up soon.”
Similarly, MIller, the San Jose housecleaning company owner, said she has some money in savings. But Miller knows the savings account will steadily dwindle and eventually be depleted.
“It’s not a lot of money,” Miller said. “I might have enough for two more months.”
The ongoing surge in unemployment claims points to double-digit jobless rates for California this spring that will likely be the highest on record in the state.
A report released this week projected that unemployment would soar to 17 percent in the Bay Area, 18.8 percent in California, and 15.3 percent in Santa Clara County by May, according to an assessment by the Stockton-based Center for Business and Policy Research.
One of the key strategies in the war against the coronavirus is the ongoing sheltering in place and social distancing endeavors as a prelude to the restoration of the economy, said Patrick Kallerman, research director with the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.
An array of coronavirus-spawned shutdowns imposed by the state government and local agencies has hobbled the economy in California and around the country.
“Hopefully we can flatten or smash the curve of the virus, and then we can restart the economy,” Kallerman said. “This is painful for a large number of Californians and Americans, but hopefully we can get this over with.”
Bernie Sanders: ‘Of Course’ Cheap Illegal Workers Drive Down U.S. Wages….WHY DOES HE WANT AMNESTY AND WIDER OPEN BORDERS OTHER THAN TO BUY THE ILLEGALS’ VOTES???
Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
14 Jan 2020326
3:30
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) admits cheaper illegal alien workers drive down wages for America’s working and middle class but continues to support amnesty for illegal aliens, decriminalization of the United States-Mexico border, and throwing out President Trump’s “Buy American, Hire American” executive order.
Sanders navigated through the issue during an interview with the New York Times, attempting to explain his previous statements where he has admitted that opening the U.S. border is detrimental to the nation-state and has slammed the concept of hemispheric open borders.
During the exchange, Sanders says “of course” cheaper illegal alien workers hired by businesses at “$5 an hour” will “lower wages” for America’s working class, who are often looking for entry-level jobs.
“Yeah, if you’re being paid $5 — if you’re being paid $5 an hour, now of course it’s going to lower wages,” Sanders said. “Why would I hire at a higher wage?”
Later in the interview, though, Sanders backs away from immigration’s wage-suppression impact on Americans and focuses on a $15 minimum wage — suggesting that illegal aliens be legalized and paid the same wage as Americans.
“All I am saying is that if for whatever reason, I’m paying you $5 an hour, okay,” Sanders said. “You don’t think that’s going to lower the wages that she gets?”
Legal immigration levels, where 1.2 million mostly low-skilled legal immigrants and hundreds of thousands of foreign visa workers are admitted to the country annually, have driven the number of foreign born workers in the U.S. to its highest level since 1996. This is in addition to the hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens who enter the country every year.
Most immigrants to the U.S. immediately begin competing for blue-collar and white-collar jobs against millions of Americans who want full-time employment.
No Labor Shortage: 11M Americans Out of Work, But All Want Full-Time Jobs https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/01/10/no-labor-shortage-11m-americans-out-of-work-but-all-want-full-time-jobs/ …
No Labor Shortage: 11M Americans Out of Work but Want Full-Time Jobs
Extensive research by economists like George Borjas and analyst Steven Camarota reveals that the country’s current mass legal immigration system burdens U.S. taxpayers and America’s working and middle class while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth every year to major employers and newly arrived immigrants. Similarly, research has revealed how Americans’ wages are crushed by the country’s high immigration levels.
For every one percent increase in the immigrant portion of American workers’ occupations, their weekly wages are cut by about 0.5 percent, Camarota finds. This means the average native-born American worker today has his weekly wages reduced by perhaps 8.75 percent since 17.5 percent of the workforce is foreign born.
In a state like Florida, where immigrants make up about 25.4 percent of the labor force, American workers have their weekly wages reduced by about 12.5 percent. In California, where immigrants make up 34 percent of the labor force, American workers’ weekly wages are reduced by potentially 17 percent.
Likewise, every one-percent increase in the immigrant portion of low-skilled U.S. occupations reduces wages by about 0.8 percent. Should 15 percent of low-skilled jobs be held by foreign-born workers, it would reduce the wages of native-born American workers by perhaps 12 percent.
Report: California’s Middle-Class Wages Rise by 1 Percent in 40 Years
Middle-class wages in progressive California have risen by 1 percent in the last 40 years, says a study by the establishment California Budget and Policy Center.
“Earnings for California’s workers at the low end and middle of the wage scale have generally declined or stagnated for decades,” says the report, titled “California’s Workers Are Increasingly Locked Out of the State’s Prosperity.” The report continued:
In 2018, the median hourly earnings for workers ages 25 to 64 was $21.79, just 1% higher than in 1979, after adjusting for inflation ($21.50, in 2018 dollars) (Figure 1). Inflation-adjusted hourly earnings for low-wage workers, those at the 10th percentile, increased only slightly more, by 4%, from $10.71 in 1979 to $11.12 in 2018.
The report admits that the state’s progressive economy is delivering more to investors and less to wage-earners. “Since 2001, the share of state private-sector [annual new income] that has gone to worker compensation has fallen by 5.6 percentage points — from 52.9% to 47.3%.”
In 2016, California’s Gross Domestic Product was $2.6 trillion, so the 5.6 percent drop shifted $146 billion away from wages. That is roughly $3,625 per person in 2016.
The report notes that wages finally exceeded 1979 levels around 2017, and it splits the credit between the Democrats’ minimum-wage boosts and President Donald Trump’s go-go economy.
The 40 years of flat wages are partly hidden by a wave of new products and services. They include almost-free entertainment and information on the Internet, cheap imported coffee in supermarkets, and reliable, low-pollution autos in garages.
But the impact of California’s flat wages is made worse by California’s rising housing costs, the report says, even though it also ignores the rent-spiking impact of the establishment’s pro-immigration policies:
In just the last decade alone, the increase in the typical household’s rent far outpaced the rise in the typical full-time worker’s annual earnings, suggesting that working families and individuals are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. In fact, the basic cost of living in many parts of the state is more than many single individuals or families can expect to earn, even if all adults are working full-time.
…
Specifically, inflation-adjusted median household rent rose by 16% between 2006 and 2017, while inflation-adjusted median annual earnings for individuals working at least 35 hours per week and 50 weeks per year rose by just 2%, according to a Budget Center analysis of US Census Bureau, American Community Survey data.
Many workers are being paid little more today than workers were in 1979 even as worker productivity has risen. Fewer employees have access to retirement plans sponsored by their employers, leaving individual workers on their own to stretch limited dollars and resources to plan how they’ll spend their later years affording the high cost of living and health care in California. And as union representation has declined, most workers today cannot negotiate collectively for better working conditions, higher pay, and benefits, such as retirement and health care, like their parents and grandparents did. On top of all this, workers who take on contingent and independent work (often referred to as “gig work”), which in many cases appears to be motivated by the need to supplement their primary job or fill gaps in their employment, are rarely granted the same rights and legal protections as traditional employees.
The center’s report tries to blame the four-decade stretch of flat wages on the declining clout of unions. But unions’ decline was impacted by the bipartisan elites’ policy of mass-migration and imposed diversity.
In 2018, Breitbart reported how Progressives for Immigration Reform interviewed Blaine Taylor, a union carpenter, about the economic impact of migration:
TAYLOR: If I hired a framer to do a small addition [in 1988], his wage would have been $45 an hour. That was the minimum for a framing contractor, a good carpenter. For a helper, it was about $25 an hour, for a master who could run a complete job, it was about $45 an hour. That was the going wage for plumbers as well. His helpers typically got $25 an hour.
…
Now, the average wage in Los Angeles for construction workers is less than $11 an hour. They can’t go lower than the minimum wage. And much of that, if they’re not being paid by the hour at less than $11 an hour, they’re being paid per piece — per piece of plywood that’s installed, per piece of drywall that’s installed. Now, the subcontractor can circumvent paying them as an hourly wage and are now being paid by 1099, which means that no taxes are being taken out. [Emphasis added]
Diversity also damaged the unions by shredding California’s civic solidarity. In 2007, the progressive Southern Poverty Law Center posted a report with the title “Latino Gang Members in Southern California are Terrorizing and Killing Blacks.” In the same year, an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times described another murder by Latino gangs as “a manifestation of an increasingly common trend: Latino ethnic cleansing of African Americans from multiracial neighborhoods.”
The center’s board members include the executive director of the state’s SEIU union, a professor from the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the research director at the “Program for Environmental and Regional Equity” at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Outside California, President Donald Trump’s low-immigration policies are pressuring employers to raise Americans’ wages in a hot economy. The Wall Street Journal reportedAugust 29:
Overall, median weekly earnings rose 5% from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the same quarter in 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For workers between the ages of 25 and 34, that increase was 7.6%.
The New York Times laments that reduced immigration does force wages upwards and also does force companies to buy labor-saving, wage-boosting machinery. Instead, NYT prioritizes "ideas about America’s identity and culture.” http://bit.ly/2Zp2u2J
NYT Admits Fewer Immigrants Means Higher Wages, More Labor-Saving Machines
.
As Breitbart News has reported, U.S.
households headed by foreign-born
residents use nearly twice the welfare
of households headed by native-born
Americans.
CA Gov. Newsom: Stimulus Checks to Illegals ‘Being Considered’
2:26
California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) is reportedly considering issuing cash payments to the state’s illegal immigrants as part of a Golden State “Disaster Relief Fund” for the state’s illegal immigrants, according to a Wednesday Associated Press report.
When asked about giving potential financial assistance to illegal immigrants impacted by the coronavirus crisis, Newsom reportedly replied on Tuesday evening that “all of that is being considered.”
According to the report, Newsom said that the broader state-level stimulus package, which he hopes to roll out in May and is discussing with legislators, will have “some economic stimulus strategies at a state level, not just waiting for the federal government to do that for us.”
“Californians care deeply about undocumented residents in this state,” Newsom reportedly added.
The coronavirus relief bill that President Donald Trump signed will issue cash payments to individuals and couples who meet the income requirements and have Social Security numbers. Illegal immigrants are not eligible to receive the federal stimulus checks or the extra $600 a week in unemployment benefits.
Three House Democrats, two of whom are from California (Reps. Judy Chu and Lou Correa), recently introduced the Leave No Taxpayer Behind Act to amend the stimulus bill to issue stimulus cash payments to everyone with an ITIN (Individual Taxpayer Identification Number), which many illegal immigrants have, who qualifies.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) initially wanted the relief bill to issue cash payments to everyone with an ITIN, and high-profile progressives like Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have been more vocal about the need to issue cash payments to illegal immigrants with ITINs.
If you don’t believe undocumented workers should have access to relief during #COVID19, does that mean you’re willing return the billions they pay in taxes each year? Will you defund your schools?
Or, in this moment, will we recognize that we should just take care of each other?
The Associated Press, citing a California Latino Legislative Caucus report, noted that there are “about 2 million people in California” who are “suspected of living in the country illegally.”
The California Latino Legislative Caucus has reportedly asked Newsom to create the “Disaster Relief Fund” to issue cash payments to illegal immigrants impacted by the coronavirus crisis reportedly “until the state’s emergency proclamation is lifted or they are able to return to work.”
Our undocumented workers are either on the frontlines as essential workers w/o healthcare, adequate sick days & safety equipment or they’ve lost their job without ability to access the unemployment insurance or stimulus that they have helped pay into. We must do more. twitter.com/weareunidosus/…
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