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Building better jobs in a disruptive era

April 5, 2025 / By Daniel Flaming

The U.S. is imposing heavy tariffs to reshore manufacturing of the things we buy. This watershed change in the economic landscape is creating risks of inflation, higher consumer costs and a recession. However, these fractures in the economy are also opening possibilities for building a more equitable industrial base that we should seize.

Fast food workers get more pay and keep their jobs

September 16, 2024 / By Daniel Flaming

California has raised the minimum hourly wage for fast food workers to $20 an hour. This is a transformative step forward in the respect, dignity, racial justice, and living conditions for hard-pressed workers. Every California worker should should get the same break. Business groups argued against the wage hike, saying that young workers wouldn’t be able to find jobs any more, but they were wrong.

Jobs Prevent Homelessness

March 6, 2024 / By Daniel Flaming

Helping precariously housed people get decent jobs can have an immediate impact on reducing the number of homeless people living on the street. Unemployment and lack of income are by far the most common reasons that homeless individuals living on Los Angeles streets give for being unhoused.

Photograph of inland empire Amazon warehouse by Daniel Flaming, taken July 26, 2023. Owned by Economic Roundtable, creation of ERt staff.

Choosing concrete over people

September 29, 2023 / By Daniel Flaming

Large warehouses, some covering more than 20 acres, are being developed in existing neighborhoods, sometimes just across the street from people’s homes. The impacts of cargo handling spillover onto resident who live in close proximity to large warehouses and the diesel trucks that come and go create emissions, noise, congestion and traffic risks.

Image of theme park rollercoaster created by Daniel Flaming, 2023. Owned by Economic Roundtable, creation of ERt staff.

Homeless count rollercoaster

July 13, 2023 / By Daniel Flaming

Even though we want to see the tragedy of homelessness shrinking in our rear-view mirror, what we need most is an acurate picture of reality. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s annual count of homeless residents is supposed to tell us whether the problem is getting bigger or smaller, but the results are not as reliable as they should be.

Uncredited photograph no longer in active use on the Internet, except for the ERt website. Downloaded from the Seattle Weekly by Dan Flaming, July 11, 2023.

Yes, you can be employed and homeless.

June 1, 2023 / By Daniel Flaming

“What happens when you’re working but still can’t afford a place to live?” David Brancaccio asked this question on Marketplace Morning Report in his investigation of “the prevalence of homelessness among fast-food workers in California.” He asked, “when the report [Hungry Cooks] came out, there was pushback by the fast-food industry.

Credit for original image: Beef Bread Bun - free photo, Pixabay. Photograph modified by Economic Roundtable.

Fast food industry runs fact-free ad ignoring homelessness

May 8, 2023 / By Daniel Flaming

A restaurant industry group ran a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times to dispel public dismay about homeless fast food workers. This follows the LA Times article, “Low wages, short hours drive many fast-food workers into homelessness,” that covered our report, Hungry Cooks. Working conditions in the fast food industry are not a zero sum game where either franchise owners go out of business or fast food workers become homeless.

Image of painting by Ben Galos (American, 1894-1963), "Lewis Street" oil on canvas c.1935_43. In the collection of the Brooklyn College Library. Underwritten by the US Works Progress Administration (WPA), United States government work, open to fair use and non-commercial use.

The problems we don’t prevent grow in the shadows

December 18, 2022 / By Daniel Flaming

Human dignity and public costs are protected by helping vulnerable workers before the onset of chronic homelessness. The longer people are homeless, the worse their problems become, making it more difficult and expensive to stably house them. Predictive analytic screening tools can identify high -risk workers who are likely to become persistently homeless before preventable personal harm and public costs accumulate, and before the crisis of being homeless has diminished their capacity to work and their identity as a member of society.

Photograph "Hewitt Street at Palmetto Street, Los Angeles, September 19, 2005" by John Humble (American, born 1944) courtesy of the J Paul Getty Museum. Protected under the museum collection's non-commercial and fair use license terms.

Covid income and housing initiatives slowed the growth of homelessness

December 14, 2022 / By Daniel Flaming

The success of U.S. programs during the Pandemic recession in preventing homelessness is eye opening. The biggest lesson is that instead of looking just at people who are homeless now, we need to act early to prevent the disaster coming down the tracks – precariously housed workers losing jobs and falling into destitution.

Photograph of container ships at port in San Pedro Bay (Port of Los Angeles and Port of Long Beach) taken by Daniel Flaming, Economic Roundtable, Mar 10, 2022. Tour of the ports arranged and led by ILWU Coast Committeeman Frank Ponce De Leon. Owned by Economic Roundtable, creation of ERt staff.

Public benefits should offset public costs

July 7, 2022 / By Daniel Flaming

A photo-journalist named David Bacon asked a key question for his article in Capital & Main, “Should L.A. and Long Beach Get a New Deal From Their Powerhouse Ports?” The question was, What are the costs of running the ports that the shippers are not paying for, and that the public does?

American ports should serve the American public

June 30, 2022 / By Daniel Flaming

Terminal companies in the San Pedro Bay that are under the control of three international shipping alliances control 81 percent of the containers transported through the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach in 2021. Three-quarters of the containers leaving the ports are empty, holding nothing from California except air.

Photograph courtesy of UNITE HERE Local 11, photographer unknown. Photograph appears online in Los Angeles Daily News (SCNG) story "Coronavirus cuts: Hundreds of hospitality workers line up at food pantry," by Kevin Smith, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, March 17, 2020.

The kindness of strangers feeds us for a day, a job feeds us for life

January 11, 2021 / By Daniel Flaming

Workers’ motivation to support themselves through work and to obtain shelter with the income they earn is valuable both for them and for society. Work provides dignity and prevents the social costs that accompany destitution. The solution of employment costs less than the problem of homelessness.

Photograph uncredited by BBC staff, accompanying an Aug 22, 2020 BBC story by Jon Sopel (@jonsopel), "How a day trip to Tulsa in June upended Donald Trump's re-election campaign."

If wages don’t count why should votes?

December 3, 2020 / By Daniel Flaming

The outgoing president tweeted, “We believe these people are thieves. The big city machines are corrupt. This was a stolen election. When you see what happened in Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia & Milwaukee – massive voter fraud.” This line of sight sees some votes being legitimately cast by patriots but other votes illegitimately cast by people who shouldn’t be counted.

Selfie of George Floyd, by George Floyd. Originally posted to his Facebook account, used widely across the Internet since his murder with a variety of attributions. Uploaded to Flickr Creative Commons on May 29, 2020 by Prachatai. Protected there by the CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.

Racial Injustice and the Pandemic Economy

June 9, 2020 / By Daniel Flaming

George Floyd’s asphyxiation by a police officer shines a light on racial injustice. Reform has to begin, but not stop, with policing. We also need fundamental economic and government reforms to guarantee civil rights and economic equality and end structural racism. Despite protests throughout the nation demanding justice and equality, the stock market has gone up since the protests began, apparently discounting the possibility of structural change in the economy or the distribution of wealth.

Photograph by Nebojsa Mladjenovic, "1693 Leave this prison and be free.... ~ Rumi~." Uploaded to Flickr Creative Commons on December 20, 2013, taken on February 26, 2009. Protected under the CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED license.

Preventing Chronic Homelessness with Early Intervention

June 5, 2019 / By Daniel Flaming

Predictive tools can reveal the humanity of people living in shelters and on sidewalks, showing the risks they face so that we can intervene early to help those who are likely to stay homeless. Only 38 percent of people who become homeless remain homeless for more than a year.

Photograph by David Fulmer, "People walking on the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Blvd." Uploaded to Flickr Creative Commons on June 5, 2012, taken in Hollywood, California on April 11, 2012. Protected under the CC BY 2.0 DEED license.

Individuality within Homelessness

September 1, 2018 / By Daniel Flaming

There is a solution to every individual’s problems but there are no mass solutions. A large population experiences homelessness over the course of a year, but roughly two-thirds of these individuals escape homelessness in less than a year. Differing durations of homelessness point to differing types and difficulty of barriers to becoming stably housed.

(AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes) May 19, 2015. Workers react as the Los Angeles City Council votes to raise the minimum wage in the city to $15 an hour by 2020, making it the largest city in the nation to do so, in Los Angeles Tuesday, May 19, 2015.

762,000 Low-Wage Workers Got a Pay Raise July 1st

July 2, 2018 / By Daniel Flaming

The third annual minimum wage increase kicked in on July 1, bumping up the minimum wage for 762,000 Los Angeles workers with jobs in communities that have enacted minimum wage ordinances. If their employer has 26 or more employees, workers’ minimum wage increased to $13.25. This includes 71 percent of all workers benefiting or a total of 543,000 workers.

Photograph by Jane Carlen, Economic Roundtable staff, uploaded April 16, 2018. Photograph: Julia Silge of Stack Overflow presents an example of sentiment analysis using the tidytext package in R.

Takeaways from the 2018 Women in Analytics Conference

April 16, 2018 / By Jane Carlen

On April 13th, I attended the Women in Analytics Conference at Facebook HQ. I was one of about 300 women invited to attend. Attendees spanned a diverse range of practice areas including non-profits, tech, education and government. The morning program consisted of leading women in analytics describing their educational backgrounds and interests, and how they contribute in their current roles.

Graphic "Predictive Analytics Screening Tools" created by unknown. Image widely used and modified across the Internet, without attribution.

System-Based Tools for Guiding System-Wide Engagement

April 6, 2018 / By Daniel Flaming

Chronic homelessness is a catastrophe and the result of multiple failures, both before and after the onset of homelessness. Homelessness results from system-wide breakdowns and requires system-wide engagement. Homeless service providers can’t solve this problem by themselves. System-based predictive analytic tools can guide system-wide interventions to stop the cascade of failures.

Photograph by Lou Stejskal, "Sunday in Brooklyn | Brooklyn NY | 08/24/18." Uploaded to Flickr Creative Commons on September 9, 2018, taken on August 24, 2018. Protected under the CC BY 2.0 DEED license.

566,000 L.A. Workers Got a $1.3 Billion Pay Raise July 1st

June 30, 2017 / By Daniel Flaming

The second annual minimum wage increase kicked in on July 1, bringing the minimum wage for Los Angeles workers up to $12 an hour. The increase helps 482,000 workers who got lifted to $10.50 when the first increase went into effect July 1, 2016, and another 84,000 workers who were earning between $10.51 and $11.99.