The Ralph and Goldy Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies

To meet the demands of the changing labor market it is important for human resources management to improve and enhance their knowledge of the workforce. This report profiles the labor force in Southern California for Human Resources Round Table (HARRT) and presents key findings regarding diversity and aging. This report will provide employers with basic trends and implications and will help promote potential strategies to improve practice in shaping the quality of the workforce. This report is structured around five research objectives: • Analyze labor force trends in Southern California from 1980 to 2010. • Compare Southern California to the state and nation. • Profile labor force by gender, ethnicity, education, etc. • Examine the size of the older labor force. • Identify implications for employers.

This report provides baseline statistics needed for policy-oriented research on disadvantaged Asian-Pacific Americans (APAs) neighborhoods. We profile 17 poor APA neighborhoods across the United States and provide insights from a survey of community-based organizations (CBOs). The neighborhood profiles reveal diverse neighborhood characteristics, including variations in economic base, size, and ethnic composition. In spite of substantial differences, some common features are seen. Most neighborhoods are linguistically isolated immigrant communities with low educational attainment and low earnings. This report is the final product from a grant made by the Economic Development Administration to the National Coalition on Asian Pacific Americans Community Development (NCAPACD), the Little Tokyo Service Center and UCLA's Asian American Studies Center who contracted the Lewis Center out to conduct the survey.

This issue brief discusses the possibility of a premium assistance program in California that targets recent welfare recipients by addressing three main policy questions.

1) Are welfare recipients a good target population for a premium assistance program?

2) Who would be elligible for premium assistance and where do they work?

3) What are the challenges of premium assistance programs in California?

In the past three decades, the Los Angeles region has witnessed a large-scale spatial reorganization of poverty. Where once concentrated poverty was confined to neighborhoods in the inner-city, it has since spread to the suburbs. This shifting concentration of poor neighborhoods is driven mainly by immigration and broader changes in the regional economy. Increasing economic mobility for second and subsequent generations of immigrants through education is the region's key challenge.

Changes in the economic conditions are responsible for broad gains and losses across a region, but the ways that these changes play out at a neighborhood level throughout the region are not uniform. Neighborhoods may benefit or suffer disproportionately according to their mix of jobs and income sources, and the ability to respond to new conditions depends on the resources avialable to residents. Spatial differences in economic outcomes have been linked to secular economic changes in which the economy undergoes structural transformations. Communities are also influenced by the short-run up and down variation that are collectively referred to as the business cycle. In the past, little attention has been given to the effects of cyclical contractions and expansions on neighborhoods. This report represents an important first step in understanding the dynamic nature of neighborhood response to cyclical economic fluctuations, but mor study is clearly required. To facilitate such studies, we strongly recommend new efforts to make existing data available to researchers and to explore new avenues of data collection.

This working paper reports the findings from an analysis of the estimated undercount of the population in the 2000 Census for Los Angeles County. The Bureau of the Census improved its performance for 2000 relative to 1990, but the enumeration was not complete. The are three key findings: 1) Los Angeles County has a disproportionate number of the undercounted population; 2) the undercounted population is unevenly distributed within Los Angeles County across neighborhoods, varying across neighborhoods from -0.3% to 5.9%; and 3) neighborhoods with the highest under-count rates tend to be poor and predominantly minority, and have a relatively large number of children. Because of the geographic differences, disadvantaged neighborhoods and populations are at risk of being under-represented, under-served, and under-funded.

This report combines analysis of firm-level insurance data with welfare and employment information to explore the availability of employment-based insurance for welfare recipients who are transitioning into the labor market in Los Angeles county. To understand the complex and dynamic nature of this issue, multiple data sources are utilized to provide information from the perspective of both welfare recipients who are transitioning into the labor market (laborsupply side) and the firms that employ them (labor-demand side). The primary data sources include an employer benefits survey completed in 2000, administrative welfare and employment data covering a period from 1996-2001, and a survey of recent welfare recipients conducted in 2002/2003.

The demand for healthcare workers is growing, but the supply of workers has not kept pace. California has responded to this worker shortage by funding the Caregiver Training Initiative (CTI), part of the Governor's Aging with Dignity Initiative. One focus of the initiative is on the labor market issues facing caregivers. In late 2000, California's Health and Human Services Agency and the Employment Development Department (EDD) solicited UCLA to conduct a labor market analysis of caregivers. The primary purpose of this labor market analysis is to develop a better understanding of the caregiver labor market and the dynamics associated with this market.

This study was funded by the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency. In accordance with AB 2985, our analysis highlights the characteristics of the workforce most at risk of wage and hours violations, describes the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement (DLSE) efforts to enforce these violations, and presents a set of recommendations to improve enforcement strategies. To complete the study we relied on the synthesis of state documentation, publicly available data on the workforce, and state administrative data. When appropriate, and the available data permit, we compare the environment and operations in California to Illinois, New Jersey, and Washington, and compare workers and firms associated with complaints and enforcement to noncomplaint/ enforcement workers and firms.