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Tag: Job Quality

The Work Behind Work: Combatting Homelessness with Jobs

February 14, 2024 / By Seth Pickens, Daniel Flaming, Manuel Gomez and Ana Alvarez

The most common reason unhoused individuals give for why they do not have a place of their own to live is unemployment and lack of income. Homelessness is primarily a problem of income. Upstream interventions that lead to employment will significantly reduce the number of men, women and children who experience homelessness.

Recognizing and Helping High-Need Homeless Individuals: Five Homeless Predictive Screening Tools

March 2, 2023 / By Daniel Flaming / Economic Roundtable

Preventive vs. Remedial Screening Tools The Economic Roundtable has developed five predictive screening tools to identify and prioritize high-need homeless individuals who will have high future public costs because of ongoing crises in their lives that are resolved in expensive institutional settings, including jails and hospitals. 

Tools from the Realization Project: Resource Library for Identifing and Helping Workers at Risk of Persistent Homelessness

December 9, 2022 / By Daniel Flaming / Economic Roundtable

The Realization Project is a system-change demonstration project of the Economic Roundtable. It has produced public domain library of screening, instructional, personal restoration, and employment tools. The project uses predictive analytic screening tools, which can be downloaded here, to identify unemployed workers with a high risk of becoming persistently homeless. 

Locked Out: Unemployment and Homelessness in the Covid Economy

January 11, 2021 / By Daniel Flaming, Anthony W. Orlando, Patrick Burns and Seth Pickens / Economic Roundtable

COVID-driven loss of jobs and employment income will cause the number of homeless workers to increase each year through 2023. Without large-scale, government employment programs the Pandemic Recession is projected to cause twice as much homelessness as the 2008 Great Recession. The Economic Roundtable used data from the 2008 Great Recession to estimate the linkage between job loss and homelessness and forecast the amount and type of pandemic-driven homelessness in Los Angeles, California and the United States. 

Too Big to Govern: Public Balance Sheet for the World’s Largest Store

November 26, 2019 / By Daniel Flaming and Patrick Burns / Los Angeles County Federation of Labor

Households in the Los Angeles metro region paid $7.2 billion for packages from Amazon.com in 2018. Less publicly visible was more than $790 million paid out in public subsidies and uncompensated public costs that supported Amazon’s profitability. It is time for Amazon to come of age and pay its own way. This means paying its full costs to the communities that host it and the workers who create its profits.

Rapid Re-employment Offers an Escape from Cardboard City: Homelessness Is an Income Problem as well as a Housing Problem

June 6, 2019 / By Daniel Flaming / Los Angeles Times

More taxpayer dollars are being spent on homeless housing and services, yet homelessness in Los Angeles County increased 12% last year and chronic homelessness is up 17%. Society needs to do better. Homelessness is an income problem as well as a housing problem — and both need to be addressed to solve L.A.’s 

Working for the Mouse: A Survey of Disneyland Resort Employees

February 27, 2018 / By Peter Dreier, Daniel Flaming, Lucero Herrera, Martha Matsuoka, Jane Carlen and Patrick Burns / The Coalition of Resort Labor Unions

Disneyland Resort is the most iconic theme park in the world. Disney’s best-known characters are present in the park and woven into America’s national culture, recognized and celebrated around the world. People share more photographs from their visits to Disneyland than from any other place in the world, making it the most Instagrammed location on earth. However, employees report high instances of homelessness, food insecurity, ever-shifting work schedules, extra-long commutes, and low wages.

Planning Economic Growth

August 1, 2007 / By Daniel Flaming / Economic Roundtable

There are at least three reasons why it has become important for Los Angeles to exert purposeful influence on its own economic trajectory: The population has grown steadily but the number of jobs in the formal economy, where employers comply with labor law, is still below the level of 1990. 

Workers Without Rights

May 6, 2002 / By Pascale Joassart and Daniel Flaming / Economic Roundtable

The informal economy produces legal goods and services that are not effectively regulated. Such activities can give rise to abuses by employers who fail to respect basic labor, safety, immigration, and tax laws, leaving workers without rights. By definition the informal economy is hidden "under the table" and "off the books." However, by comparing different sources of employment data we can identify industries where a significant share of jobs appear to be unreported. Industry characteristics such as worker demographics can also be used as an additional indicator of informal employment.

The Cage of Poverty

September 1, 2000 / By Daniel Flaming, Mark Drayse and Peter Force / Economic Roundtable

In his 1963 letter from the Birmingham jail Martin Luther King, Jr. described the despair of people “smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society.” It is important to understand the extent to which this image of entrapment still describes the wage-earning lives of the working poor as they try to support their families. 

On the Edge: A Progress Report on Welfare to Work in Los Angeles

January 1, 1999 / By Daniel Flaming, Mark Drayse and Peter Force / Economic Roundtable

The loss of a welfare safety net for most adults for most of their lives makes the quality of jobs available to the working poor and their success in finding and keeping jobs increasingly important. The economic and civic life of the Los Angeles region will be shaped by connections that are made, or fail to be made, between the growing ranks of working poor and opportunities for steady, sustaining, productive employment. 

South Bay Economic Adjustment Strategy

November 1, 1998 / By Daniel Flaming, Mark Drayse, Michael Beltramo-Beltramo and Associates, Tom Jirovsky-Kosmont and Associates Inc, Frank Taplin-Kosmont and Associates, David Rigby-UCLA Department of Geography and John Wilson-USC Department of Geography / the County of Los Angeles South Bay Communities and Community Development Commission

The South Bay Economic Adjustment Strategy has been prepared to help elected officials, public sector staff, business leaders, and citizens take coordinated, effective action to recover jobs lost because of defense cutbacks. The strategy has been prepared under a grant from the Office of Economic Adjustment in the Department of Defense that was administered by Los Angeles County’s Community Development Commission. 
Photograph "Clondalkin dole protest" by The Workers Party of Ireland (no individual photographer mentioned). Uploaded to Flickr Creative Commons on August 15, 2010, taken on September 10, 2009 outside the Social Welfare Local Office, Clondalkin (County Dublin), Ireland. Protected under the CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED license.

Survival Skills: Welfare to Work in Los Angeles

January 1, 1998 / By Mark Drayse, Cher-Amie Inocentes, Daniel Flaming and Peter Force / Economic Roundtable

Recent welfare reform legislation mandates that aid recipients become employed and economically self-sufficient. The allowable interval of continuous assistance is limited to 24 months for current recipients and 18 months for new recipients, with a lifetime limit of five years on welfare. At least 150,000 current welfare recipients in Los Angeles County must move into the workforce, securing at least partial employment by December 1999. 
The USS Arizona Memorial glows in the night in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec. 6, 2006. DoD photo by Petty Officer 1st Class James E. Foehl, U.S Navy.

Technology and Jobs: Defense Conversion in the Los Angeles Region

February 8, 1994 / By Daniel Flaming and Mark Drayse / Economic Roundtable

SYNOPSIS This survey of industry perceptions of defense conversion in the Los Angeles region followed two years after the bench mark survey of aerospace firms conducted to prepare the “Economic Adjustment Strategy for Defense Reductions.” The purpose was to explore such questions as: Are aerospace firms in the greater Los Angeles region becoming less dependent on defense contracts? 

Los Angeles County Economic Adjustment Strategy for Defense Reductions

April 1, 1992 / By Daniel Flaming, Michael Beltramo-Beltramo and Associates, Odessa Dubinsky, Elizabeth Reid, Katherine Bulow-Bulow And Associates, David Hensley-UCLA Business Forcasting Project and Allen J. Scott-UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies / Los Angeles County Community Development Commission, United States Department of Commerce: Economic Development Administration

Background An interdisciplinary research team analyzed information about the labor market, economy, industries, and defense linkages of Los Angeles County. The report recommends an economic adjustment strategy to reduce severe job losses projected as a result of cutbacks in defense funding for Los Angeles County industries. 

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