This report provides an overview of the working conditions and characteristics of public school food service workers, in comparison to other relevant workers in public schools and other food service workers.
Until the state can make much-needed improvements to its property and commercial tax structure, officials will continue to propose drastic service cuts. Eliminating or freezing vacant positions in state and local budget processes may be a convenient way to cut expenses, but without substantive staffing analysis the impact of leaving those positions empty could pose a severe burden on existing staff, Californians, and the economy.
We outline core principles for how government action on AI can benefit public and private sector workers, and comment on how two recent executive orders reflect those principles. Our goal is to help inform the significant work that lies ahead for federal, state, and local governments in their efforts to model responsible use of AI.
We find that job vacancies in local government appear to be a widespread and significant problem for the public sector affecting a wide range of occupations across wage levels and educational requirements. We offer suggested policy solutions raised by subject matter experts and other reports and analyses on job vacancy challenges in local government.
Teachers’ willingness to strike represents not just a resurgence of union power, but also their determination to call attention to the dire consequences of decades of California’s underinvestment in K-12 education.
Sara Hinkley said that changing degree requirements is “one small part” of the solution to the civil service vacancies problem in California.
In addition to California’s tight labor market and population losses, San Francisco is particularly unsuited to filling police department positions, Hinkley said — most of its adult population is college-educated, and thus can get higher-paying jobs in the private sector.
Sara Hinkley, of the UC Berkeley Labor Center, contended Thursday there’s no clear evidence that taxes or any other single factor drives business decisions to locate somewhere or move.
If we are to sustain a meaningful democracy, the Democrats need a compelling campaign to fix our public spending so that it supports the majority of Americans on whose backs the economy has been resting.
“One of the shortcoming around the whole conversation around job creation is that we don’t often go back and look to see how accurate the models actually were,” said Hinkley of UC Berkeley.
“Disasters, including pandemics, are often times when there’s an opening for privatization. Sometimes, the public sector can’t really adapt because it’s required to serve everybody,” says Dr. Hinkley.
