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Tag: Labor Market

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.

Restoring Altitude: Economic Impacts of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Minimum Wage Proposal

June 18, 2018 / By Patrick Burns, Halil Toros and Daniel Flaming / Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ

The Port Authority that oversees LaGuardia, the John F. Kennedy and Newark Liberty international airports is considering a proposal that would raise the minimum wage for 40,000 low wage workers at regional airports to $19 per hour by 2023. If passed, it will create the highest publicly mandated minimum wage in the nation and will deeply impact local communities. An economic stimulus is projected in the communities where workers live. Their increased household spending is projected to increase economic output by over $465 million in 2023 and every year thereafter, creating 2,700 new jobs.

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.

All Alone: Antecedents of Chronic Homelessness

August 25, 2015 / By Daniel Flaming and Patrick Burns / the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation

Public assistance programs are Los Angeles’s primary interface with individuals experiencing homelessness and can be a catalyst for connecting at-risk and homeless recipients with crucial services and reducing the massive public costs associated with chronic homelessness. The vital role is to identify tripwire events among all recipients, particularly children and transition-age youth, and quickly connect at-risk individuals with needed employment, behavioral health and housing services.

Getting to Work: Unemployment and Economic Recovery in Los Angeles

February 1, 2012 / By Daniel Flaming and Patrick Burns / Economic Roundtable, the Pat Brown Institute

Unemployment and underemployment currently represent $25.8 billion in annual wages not earned in Los Angeles County, $28.2 billion in lost private sector economic activity and $4 billion in tax revenue not generated. Over a fifth of Los Angeles County’s labor force is unemployed or underemployed. Over a third of the county’s population lives in a household where one or more breadwinners are under-employed.

Water Use Efficiency and Jobs

December 1, 2011 / By Patrick Burns / City of Los Angeles Piping Industry, International Association of Plumbing and Mechanical Officials, National Inspection-Testing-Certification Corporation, Progress and Education Fund, the Community Development Department and Workforce Investment Board

At the peak of California’s most recent drought in 2009, the Los Angeles economy was in severe recession, with unemployment above 12 percent. These twin crises identified a policy opportunity to tackle both challenges together. Public investments in water use efficiency provide economic and job benefits alongside the environmental benefits from using less water. 

Impacts of Living Wages in the Airport Hospitality Enhancement Zone

December 8, 2010 / By Daniel Flaming and Patrick Burns / City of Los Angeles Administrative Officer

This study of the Airport Hospitality Enhancement Zone examines the economic impacts of minimum compensation requirements, outcomes from the non-tiered living wage requirement for both tipped and non-tipped hotel workers, and the costs and possible benefits of training for hotel workers. Hotels in the Airport Hospitality Zone are called upon by the City to pay workers a minimum of $10.30 an hour and $1.25 per hour in health benefits, or $11.55 an hour if health benefits are not provided. 

Ebbing Tides in the Golden State: Impacts of the 2008 Recession on California and Los Angeles County

June 8, 2009 / By Daniel Flaming, Patrick Burns and Michael Matsunaga / Economic Roundtable, the California Endowment

The most concrete characteristic of a recession is that demand disappears for some of the commodities produced by workers and unwanted unemployment is imposed on a large segment of the labor force. With growing job losses in the current recession it is important to know, whose boat falls when the economic tide recedes? 

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. 

From the Pockets of Strangers: Economic Impacts of Tourism in Los Angeles and Five Competing Metropolitan Destinations

January 1, 2006 / By Daniel Flaming, Patrick Burns and Brent Haydamack / LA INC, The Convention and Visitors Bureau

  While the visitor industry is a key economic engine for LA, it’s Lodging industry shows signs of structural weakness. Compared to the size of its visitor economy, LA’s Lodging inventory is only 62 percent of the national average. Compared to other cities with which it competes for tourism spending, LA’s Lodging industry serves a relatively small number of visitors given the size our economy. 

Hopeful Workers, Marginal Jobs: LA’s Off-The-Books Labor Force

December 5, 2005 / By Daniel Flaming, Brent Haydamack and Pascale Joassart / the City of Los Angeles' LA Economy Project

There is extensive evidence of a growing informal labor force in Los Angeles City and County, along with stagnant employment in the formal labor market. Between 2000 and 2004, the working age population in the county grew by 4.9 percent, but the number of wage and salary jobs (i.e., 

Prisoners of Hope: Welfare to Work in Los Angeles

July 1, 2003 / By Daniel Flaming, Mark Drayse and Brent Haydamack / Economic Roundtable

Why aren’t more welfare parents becoming economically self-sufficient after participating in the LA County Welfare to Work Program, GAIN (Greater Avenue for Independence)? What has happened to these parents since entering the labor market after GAIN? The answers to these and other questions are presented in “Prisoners of Hope,” a report originally requested by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on December 19, 2000. 

Running Out of Time: Voices of Parents Struggling to Move from Welfare to Work

July 1, 2002 / By Daniel Flaming, Patricia Kwon and Patrick Burns / Economic Roundtable

How do people change their lives? What kinds of help do working poor parents need to lift their families out of poverty? What obstacles do they face in trying to get a sustaining job? More than eight thousand people answered these questions through a survey undertaken to learn directly from working welfare parents and other poor families about the problems they face and the kinds of help they need to become self-sufficient. 

South Los Angeles Rising: Opportunities for Economic Self-Sufficiency Ten Years After the 1992 Civil Unrest

May 6, 2002 / By Daniel Flaming and Mark Drayse / Economic Roundtable

This briefing paper reports on business recovery in buildings damaged during the 1992 civil unrest, the availability of jobs in different areas of Los Angeles, and changes in South Los Angeles’ industry base since 1992. Where were buildings damaged during the civil unrest located? Most buildings damaged during the civil unrest were located on commercial streets in high poverty neighborhoods in South Los Angeles. 

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. 

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