California, which saw economic ups and downs in 2024, heads into a year of uncertainty that will be shaped in part by the actions of the incoming presidential administration. 

The state started this year with a multibillion-dollar budget deficit that has been mostly erased with help from its increasing reliance on the fortunes of Silicon Valley. With companies like Nvidia enjoying outsized revenue, profit and stock market gains, the taxes tech companies and employees paid into California coffers helped bring the deficit down. The Legislative Analyst’s Office recently said the budget is “roughly balanced,” estimating a $2 billion deficit next year. 

That will be of some help as Gov. Gavin Newsom tries to shore up funding for anticipated legal action against the administration of Donald Trump and balance that with all the state’s other needs. Among the promises of the president-elect that could have negative consequences on California include mass deportations and tariffs, both of which could drastically affect some of the state’s biggest industries, their workforces and the communities that rely on them. 

The state, which counts on income taxes for a big portion of its revenue, had an unemployment rate of 5.4% as of November. That was the nation’s second-highest jobless rate, attributable to the loss of many private-sector jobs as companies pulled back from their frantic hiring during the beginning of the pandemic. California is trying a regional approach to creating jobs, but the outcome of those efforts will depend on other factors, such as how businesses deal with the possible effects of tariffs, for example. If businesses’ costs go up because imports become more expensive or their exports decline because of retaliatory tariffs, job creation could go down.

The cost of living and doing business in California continued to rise, prompting both people and companies to move away — though some companies’ headquarters moves were largely symbolic because many of their employees remained in the state. Democratic legislative leaders, acknowledging that affordability issues drove more residents to look for change and vote for Republicans, said recently they plan to focus on policies to tackle the state’s high cost of living, including building more housing. 

Meanwhile, amid a continued slowdown in U.S. venture capital deals and initial public offerings, the number of companies in the state that went public rose to 39 from 25 last year, according to Pitchbook. When companies go public, they create wealth that can translate into tax revenue. 

2025 outlook

Californians are dealing with higher property insurance costs because many insurance companies stopped writing new policies in the state, citing wildfire risks and higher costs. Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara’s plan to address the insurance crisis will take effect early next year, and whether it works could affect not just individual property owners but also renters, small businesses and possibly the housing supply.

The state owes the federal government $20 billion for unemployment insurance that mostly stems from the pandemic, which has prompted the legislative analyst to recommend overhauling the way the unemployment insurance benefit system is funded. If lawmakers fail to address the issue, the system will continue to be underfunded and businesses will face increasing costs to pay down the debt. It would add to companies’ growing complaints about the costs of doing business in the state.

Lastly, federal funding for schools, universities, health care, job training and more have big question marks around them as Trump begins a second term. Costs for programs that the U.S. government has traditionally helped pay for could shift to local and state governments and affect the state’s economy as a whole.

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Californians who try to withdraw money but don’t have enough in their bank accounts won’t fall deeper into a financial hole from having to pay a fine, thanks to a new state law.

The law covers instances in which banks charge customers when their withdrawals are declined instantaneously, such as at ATMs, because of insufficient funds. It takes effect Jan. 1.

Assembly Bill 2017 applies to banks and credit unions that are regulated by the state; Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it in September. The bill was backed by several consumer advocacy groups, including the California Low-Income Consumer Coalition and East Bay Community Law Center, which called penalties for insufficient funds “junk fees” and said getting rid of them will protect financially vulnerable consumers. 

Tim Grayson, the bill’s author, said when he introduced it in May that it would “help prevent fee creep in the banking industry.” Grayson, a Democrat from Concord, is an incoming senator who was in the Assembly through the end of the 2024 legislative session.

The Consumer Federation of America, a sponsor of the bill, said common charges for insufficient funds are $30 or more.

The California Credit Union League, which at first opposed the bill and said credit unions “do not charge these types of fees,” eventually took a neutral position. But the state Department of Financial Protection & Innovation has found that many credit unions do have income from insufficient-fund charges; a 2022 state law tasked the agency with collecting data from banks and credit unions about their fees.

The law by Grayson is similar to a rule by the Consumer Protection Financial Bureau — the federal watchdog agency that’s in President-elect Donald Trump’s crosshairs — that applies to federally chartered banks. 

In line with the growing nationwide push to eliminate junk fees, Newsom also signed another bill addressing overdraft fees: Senate Bill 1075 will limit credit-union fees for insufficient funds to $14 unless a lower federal limit is set. That becomes law in 2026. And he signed Assembly Bill 2863, which will make it easier for consumers to cancel subscriptions and requires companies to get consent from their customers before charging them to renew or when a free trial ends. It goes into effect July 1.

Striking Amazon and Starbucks workers are on picket lines instead of delivering last-minute presents or handing customers Christmas-themed drinks, as their unions pressure the companies during the holidays — and before a less union-friendly president is sworn into office. 

The workers accuse their employers of refusing to recognize their unions or to bargain in good faith. They have been organizing for more than four years but have yet to land a contract. Some have filed complaints with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging union-busting behavior by the companies, including coercion, threats, discipline and firings. Amazon and Starbucks have also filed complaints against the unions, accusing them of coercion, violence and illegal strikes.

Soon, the board will likely be less sympathetic to unions after the Senate earlier this month failed to extend the term of then-Chairperson Lauren McFerran. The five-member board had three Democratic members including McFerran. President-elect Donald Trump will have the chance to appoint two more Republicans.

“The Trump NLRB the first time around was the most right-wing, anti-labor NLRB in the entire nearly 90-year history of the board,” said William Gould, a former chairperson of the National Labor Relations Board during President Bill Clinton’s administration and a professor emeritus at Stanford University. 

Gould said he doesn’t remember “any board so eager and activist to reverse what had gone on before.” Because of that, he expects that “most of what the Biden board has done will be overturned by the Trump board,” he said. 

Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump transition team, did not respond to specific questions about the board. In an email, she instead described the president-elect as a champion of workers, writing, “The working men and women of America have been left behind, which is why President Trump and Republicans saw historic support from working class voters. President Trump will keep his promise to the hardworking men and women of America by bringing jobs back home, restoring American manufacturing, slashing inflation, and cutting taxes.” 

An analysis of Trump’s policies by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation found his proposed tax cuts would disproportionately benefit higher-income taxpayers, while his planned tariffs would fall hardest on the middle and working class. 

Labor leaders said a reversal of Biden-era labor board decisions does not bode well for their unionizing efforts — many of them in, or started in, California — though they added that they do not expect workers and unions to quit trying. 

California unions are preparing to ask state legislators and Gov. Gavin Newsom to toughen up the state’s own policies as “insurance” against potentially weaker federal rules. The California Labor Federation plans to revive a long-shot bill Newsom vetoed last year that would have allowed workers to receive unemployment benefits if they strike. They also will push state lawmakers to protect private-sector unionization, in the event that right is eroded in federal law.

“We want to make sure we can preserve what we have,” said Labor Federation leader Lorena Gonzalez. 

Under the Biden administration, the NLRB’s director has taken more aggressive action to enforce laws that require employers to bargain in good faith and prohibit retaliation, and taken a series of legal positions favorable to organizing workers. 

They include what John Logan, professor and chairperson of Labor and Employment Studies at San Francisco State University, said was “the most important action” of the board in the Biden years: a 2023 decision that established a new standard on when employers must bargain with unions without a representation election. If a majority of employees vote to unionize, employers must recognize and bargain with the union, or else seek an election within 14 days. If employers engage in unfair labor practices during the process, the board could order them to bargain with the union.

He expects the board to reverse that ruling under Trump.

Issues at Amazon 

Already, companies have been resisting that decision. 

Amazon workers are striking in part to try to force the company to bargain with some of its subcontracted workers. They cite a Los Angeles regional NLRB director’s August 2024 finding that the e-commerce giant was a “joint employer” of a group of delivery drivers, who work for a nationwide network of contractors the company calls “delivery service partners.” That means the finding holds Amazon legally responsible for the wages, working conditions and treatment of the subcontracted workers. If the determination withstands lengthy legal challenges, that could open the door for the workers to bargain directly with Amazon. 

The regional director’s finding stemmed from a group of Palmdale drivers who worked for the contractor Battle-Tested Strategies and who became the first Amazon delivery drivers in the country to unionize in April 2023. Amazon ended its contract with Battle Tested — retaliation, the  Teamsters claimed, for the union drive. Amazon denied that, saying it cut the contract over “repeated” breaches by the delivery company, and the regional director dismissed the retaliation claim.

But the regulator said both Amazon and Battle Tested failed to negotiate with the drivers’ union on working conditions, including the effects of the contract termination on the drivers’ jobs. In September, the agency filed a complaint before the labor board trying to force Amazon to bargain; the larger company in turn sued the NLRB director and the board in federal court, seeking to halt any order to bargain and arguing the board itself is unconstitutional.

Whether larger companies should be considered employers of the workers of their contractors is an unsettled area of federal labor law that has been repeatedly reversed by different labor relations boards since the Obama administration. It’s another instance in which the current board made it easier to unionize workers but a new board under Trump could very well reverse the decision. 

Amazon warehouse worker Leah Pensler, 26, helped organize her coworkers at a delivery facility in San Francisco. Pensler, who walked the picket line Thursday, told CalMatters that since more than 100 workers at the facility signed union cards and joined the Teamsters in October, the company has denied they formed a union.

Pensler also said “Amazon has worked hard to scare workers by (saying) that with union representation, people may not receive the same working conditions and pay we currently have.” The labor board’s regulators made similar charges in its complaint against Amazon in the Palmdale case. 

Eileen Hards, a spokesperson for Amazon, said “the Teamsters promise a lot of things that they can’t guarantee.”

Hards also called the strikes by the Teamsters illegal. For one thing, she said, Amazon does not consider the delivery drivers on strike to be its employees. And she said the San Francisco facility did not hold a vote, and that “in order to be recognized they have to file with the NLRB,” which those workers did not. 

But Emily Orlach, a spokesperson for the Teamsters, said that under the new standard established in 2023, Amazon is legally required to negotiate with the workers. 

Also, Amazon, SpaceX and a few other major corporations that have been accused by the labor board of violating workplace rights have in recent years argued before the federal courts that the board itself is unconstitutional. 

The Amazon strike is ongoing. 

Issues at Starbucks

Starbucks Workers United member baristas at several stores in different states walked off the job beginning Friday. The union says the strikes are now in 13 states and will spread to more than 300 stores Tuesday, continuing through Christmas Eve.

JJ Dizon, a barista in Yuba City, said during a virtual announcement Thursday that she was proud of the progress the union has made in bargaining with Starbucks — that the union was in “the home stretch” of months of negotiations for a contract on behalf of 537 union stores and more than 10,000 workers. The company employed about 211,000 workers in the United States as of September, according to its latest annual financial report. 

But other workers who spoke on the call said the company’s new chief executive, Brian Niccol, took the reins in September and “started to chill bargaining.” They characterized Starbucks’ proposed 2% raises as “insulting.”

“The labor movement has reached a tipping point while the CEOs remain in their towers,” Dizon said. 

Starbucks spokesperson Phil Gee said in an emailed statement ahead of the strike announcement that it was “disappointing” that the union was thinking of striking, considering that the two sides had “reached 30 meaningful agreements on dozens of topics Workers United delegates told us were important to them, including many economic issues.”

“If the delegates want to serve the partners they represent, they need to continue the work of negotiating an agreement,” Gee said.

Logan, the SF State professor, said that for both the Starbucks and Amazon workers, “this might be their last, best chance to pressure the companies in public before Trump comes into office.” 

Brandon Dawkins is an officer with Service Employees International Union Local 1021, which has been organizing Starbucks stores in Northern California, 22 of which have voted to unionize so far. Fifty-three stores in the state have taken union-authorization votes since 2022, 37 of which have voted to unionize. He said Starbucks workers have lived through a previous Trump NLRB before, but acknowledged there could be more changes this time around.

“We have to continue to organize no matter what,” Dawkins said. 

The future of organizing

Among the other things Gould, the former labor board chairperson, said the Trump board will likely reverse is the 2021 decision requiring colleges to treat graduate students as employees, which gives them the right to bargain collectively. 

“That won’t eliminate collective bargaining at the universities,” he said. “But it will be a signal to universities to exploit any advantage they have, and to weaken unions that are already there.”

Gonzalez of the California Labor Federation said she doesn’t expect a tougher legal landscape to stem a rising tide of union activity. 

She said the current labor board’s rulings have been “nice to have,” but even under a more worker-friendly administration, it’s been hard for regulators to force large employers such as Amazon and Starbucks to the bargaining table. 

“It’s not like we had a magic bullet,” she said. The companies “will continue to fight, and yet, workers are still coming together and demanding their rights.”

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UC Berkeley professor Susan Shaheen has sent over a dozen students to the Education Symposium, a two-day conference that exposes college juniors and seniors in California to careers in transportation. 

During the event, students learn about the transportation industry, get matched with a mentor, meet with practitioners in the field and participate in a competition. At the end, they’re eligible to apply for three Education Symposium scholarships to enter the industry.

The symposium is organized by the California Transportation Foundation, a non-profit started by Heinz Heckeroth, a former deputy director for the California Department of Transportation. The foundation works to make students interested in transportation careers, offering dozens of scholarships to students to enter the field, among other things. 

“My perception has been that a lot of people who go to it are very inspired,” Shaheen, who is on the board for the foundation, said. “You’re hearing from people who are really senior in the field, and they’re talking to you, they’re focused on you, they’re answering your questions, and working side-by-side with you on a project for the symposium.”

As part of this year’s symposium, held in Fresno in November, students participated in a mock grant competition, designing proposals to address sustainable transportation. 

“Transportation is not necessarily the sexiest career choice,” said Marnie Primmer, the executive director for the foundation.  “It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that maybe some other career choices open to students,  but that’s why our education symposium is such a great opportunity, because it introduces students to what it’s really like to be a transportation professional.”

Part of what makes the program successful is the type of mentors it’s able to recruit, according to Primmer and Shaheen. These include people working in both the public and private sectors and academia. They range from engineers to planners to policymakers and many of them are high-ranking in their sphere, with several former directors of Caltrans serving as mentors.

A key challenge Primmer faces with courting students is helping them understand exactly what jobs there are in the transportation industry: everything from the engineers that design highways to the policymakers that plan public transit systems to the maintenance workers who keep the systems functioning.

In the past few years, the industry has seen a dip in students interested in transportation, Primmer said. For example, engineering students have opted for careers in software engineering instead of civil engineering. However, this is changing as students seek more hands-on careers, she said. 

“If you work on a highway project, or you work on a new transit system, you actually get to see the fruits of your labor and the impact that it makes on your community,” she said. “With many students who are interested in passion projects, and in connecting their purpose with their career, civil engineering becomes a much more attractive opportunity, because you’re actually seeing the results of the work you put in.”

Many of Shaheen’s students are interested in sustainable transportation, particularly since she directs the Innovative Mobility Research lab at the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at Berkeley. “With any transition, the jobs do change,” she said. “When we go from horse and carriage to car, there’s major changes. And when you make changes to electronics, to the sensing systems, or the propulsion systems and how they’re fueled, that involves education and workforce development.” 

Another major shift in the industry, perhaps the biggest one, is self-driving cars, Primmer said. Google, Apple, Ford, Mercedes, Tesla, Honda, Toyota and more are all working on self-driving programs. 

“I think that technology is advancing in a way that will be transformative for transportation in the next 5 to 10 years,” she said. “But I do think that opens up new opportunities for students who are tech savvy and who are willing to be the bridge between how we’ve always done things, and how we’re going to do things in the future.”

Primmer says one of the most important ways to attract students to the industry is storytelling, which helps them put it in perspective. 

“It’s the foundation of everything we do,” she said. “You can’t get to your dentist appointment, you couldn’t get there if you didn’t have a good transportation network. Your access to education, your access to good paying jobs, your access to amenities in your community, is all dependent on a functioning transportation network.”

People living in the northernmost reaches of California refer to their community as the “Redwood Curtain,” a nod to the region’s abundance of redwoods and natural beauty — but also its remoteness.

With a combined population of less than half a million people scattered across Del Norte, Siskiyou, Modoc, Humboldt, Trinity, Shasta and Lassen counties, the area faces relatively lower wages, extremist politics and brain drain, and fewer educational opportunities compared to other parts of the state.

Most of the seven northernmost counties have seen decreasing or stagnant population trends in recent years, U.S. Census Bureau data show, along with the outmigration of working-age young people. 

But workforce development boards, local officials and employers are looking to shift that narrative, using one-on-one mentoring, paid training in growing industries, and inclusive recruitment practices to help young Californians find — and keep — jobs in the region they grew up in.

“Young people in our counties are looking at either leaving the area, or not. That’s the first choice they make,” said Heather Chavez, director of workforce programs at the NorTEC Workforce Development Board. “It’s unpopular if you’re not leaving high school to go to a four-year college. There’s definitely a stigma around that — it’s students, it’s teachers, it’s parents, it’s employers, it’s everyone.”

Within that landscape, part of Chavez’s mission is to find “great, great, great jobs” for young people who can’t afford to leave their hometowns, or who find themselves without a high school or higher education degree. 

Funded largely by the federal Department of Labor, NorTEC, which stands for the Northern Rural Training and Employment Consortium, aims to improve education, employment and upward mobility across 11 northern counties.

NorTEC provides one-on-one intensive mentoring — plus financial support for bus passes, interview and work clothes, or supplies required by a training program — to those between 16 and 24 who aren’t in school. Last year, 267 people were enrolled in the program; twelve months later, 77% were still employed in industries ranging from food service, hospitality, tourism, seasonal forestry or recreation-related jobs, manufacturing and food processing and health care, Chavez said.

The region’s data is mixed when it comes to population dropoff among young people. Between 2017 and 2022, northwestern Del Norte County lost up to 1.2% of its population in every age bracket between 15 and 59, while Humboldt, Lassen, Siskiyou and Trinity also saw losses among young workers, according to state Employment Development Department data. Shasta County, however — home to the roughly 93,000-person city of Redding and Shasta-Trinity National Forest — made gains among those between 15 and 44. 

California overall has seen a declining population in the last few years, a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, low birth rates and relatively low levels of immigration, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

In the far north, these trends are expected to increase the demand for health care, even as those jobs remain difficult to fill, according to Randall Weaver, a labor market researcher at the state employment department. In Modoc, for instance, about 30% of the county’s 8,500 residents are over the age of 65.

Five of the region’s top 10 employers were health care-related in the past year, Weaver said, while the industry also accounted for about 50% of the top 10 occupations with the most online advertisements. But lower wages and stereotypes of rural living — along with fewer resources for cutting-edge medical infrastructure — make it tough to compete with “larger institutions with deeper pockets” in the Bay Area or Los Angeles.

“There’s clearly demand,” Weaver said. “The question is whether some of the limitations have a dampening effect on the market, and keep the positions from getting filled.”

Employers want to grow the hiring pool by finding and nurturing local talent. Earlier this year, Lassen Community College in Susanville launched a registered nursing program, which the program director described as “strategically designed to meet the escalating demand” for nurses locally and across California. Meanwhile, the Alliance for Workforce Development, one of three services providers contracted by NoRTEC in the region, is helping to grow three in-house training programs with Lassen and Modoc health providers, which provide free, paid training for entry-level health care roles such as certified medical or nursing assistantships.

The idea is not only to receive an education locally, but to “get jobs here, locally, that pay well,” said Kim Keith, the alliance’s director of youth programs. This autumn, a cohort of about a dozen students attended a $17 hourly certified nursing assistant training program, performing their clinical hours in-house at the Lassen Nursing and Rehabilitation Center.

Of course, not all of California’s far north is dealing with the same challenges. Coastal Humboldt, which has a relatively larger labor force and a four-year university, has attracted major recent investments in two offshore wind farms, along with a yellowtail kingfish farm, that officials hope will spawn permanent jobs.

But the county — which has the highest poverty rate of about 18% compared to the other six — is still “scraping and clawing” to recruit people into certain industries, including lawyers, engineers and law enforcement, said Zachary O’Hanen, the county’s director of human resources.

To combat that, O’Hanen’s team has spearheaded efforts to embrace “belongingness” and inclusivity in its recruitment tactics for the public sector, looking to attract the best talent in a county that is rapidly diversifying. The approach has shown anecdotal success in terms of a jump in applications to county positions and recent diverse hires, O’Hanen said.

And while the “Redwood Curtain” stereotypes may persist, the region has a way of pulling people back in: After moving away to Oregon, O’Hanen returned to Humboldt, craving access to nature, the snow, the coast, and the slower pace of life.

“You leave, because you want to see the world, and then you go, ‘Well, maybe the grass wasn’t greener,’” O’Hanen said.

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People who have spent time in jail can learn how to repair and sell bikes if they get into a cohort program for Community Cycles of California, a San Jose-based non-profit that helps people who typically face barriers to employment develop business skills. 

The non-profit gives 10 people who are “justice-involved” the opportunity to learn how to run a business. Many of the participants are also veterans or have been homeless in their past, according to Colin Bruce, who co-founded the non-profit with a friend, Cindy Ahola. 

Participants spend about 40% of their time in the classroom completing various workshops and trainings and 60% of their time rotating jobs within the shop, such as marketing, accounting, office management, retail, bike repairs and building bikes. 

What’s new about the program, Bruce says, is it’s able to offer a 40-hour work week for the six months it runs. This is different from similar workforce development efforts, which typically offer 20-hour or so gigs or limited services, such as resume help. When Bruce and Ahola first started Community Cycles in 2017, they partnered with outside organizations who had a similar part-time model. But around 80% of  participants left the program for full-time jobs.

“These are people that need every penny they can get to keep the roof over their head and pay for food,” he said. “They left to go be short order cooks or a security guard or something like that. And rightly so, because they were working part-time in these programs, they were often, ‘Hey I can’t come in tomorrow, I’ve got to go to my other part-time job.’ They needed two or three part-time jobs just to survive.”

Bruce and Ahola decided to focus the non-profit on bicycles because of his personal passion for bikes. It also gives people who can’t afford a car more independence over their transportation options. 

“The first and last mile are critical,” Bruce said. “Just getting to a bus or train or things like that, bikes are one of the best ways to do it. And commuting less than five miles or so is pretty common around the San Jose area.”

Community Cycles was able to fund its cohort members $23 per hour for 40 hours of work in large part because of a grant from the Breaking Barriers to Employment Initiative, a California state program that awards money to help people who face significant barriers to employment, such as those recently out of jail, get jobs.

Breaking Barriers has completed just one round of funding so far and is in the middle of its second round. In the first and second rounds, it has spent about $27 million on 53 organizations, almost all of them community-based, according to Leti Shafer, a manager in the workforce development department of the Foundation for California Community Colleges, who administers the Breaking Barriers grant program. 

Other examples of grantees include Homeward Bound of Marin and St. John’s for Real Change, which assist people without housing. These organizations offer support services for participants, such as childcare and job preparation. Homeward Bound also provides six months of employment in different types of businesses, such as how to make and sell dog treats. 

Like all grant programs, Breaking Barriers is “as stable as the budget,” Joelle Ball, deputy director of the California Workforce Development Board, said. The initiative “hardly got anything” this past year, for example. Ball said the budget operates on a 10-year cycle, and in years where the California Legislature has more pressing payments, there’s not much money leftover for grants. 

“It’s reliant on the Legislature putting that earmark for the program into the budget,” Ball said. “This is how it is for all of our grant programs. “We don’t have any control over it. We can’t lobby, we can’t ask the Legislature for money, we can’t do any of that. What we do advocate for is if you want to put money into workforce programs with us, put it into our programs that exist.”

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Child care centers throughout California struggled to find people with the right credentials to look after their babies, toddlers and preschoolers. At the same time, many people who wanted to become early childhood educators faced difficulties in earning the credentials. 

The Service Employees International Union and its partner organizations thought of a fix: creating apprenticeships for these would-be workers that paid for their college tuition, books and tutoring to earn teaching permits  and offered them wages for their training. 

The union was able to help build these apprenticeships in part because of the Workforce Accelerator Fund, a pot of money intended to go to California-based organizations with ideas about solving different workforce woes. The California Workforce Development Board received money for the fund in 2014 and piloted it soon after with leftover federal dollars for workforce development. 

“In early childhood education the employers do not have extra money to pay for people who are not fully qualified to work,” said Pamm Shaw, who was executive director of the early childhood department for the YMCA of the East Bay. The service employees union partnered with child care centers, such as the YMCA of the East Bay, to carry out the apprenticeships. Shaw has worked with dollars from five accelerator grants, either directly from the fund or through subcontracts. “Most people don’t get paid for training at the K-12 level, let alone the preschool level. For us, it was really critical to get outside funding.”

The people that end up in these early childhood care apprenticeship programs are also largely low-income, about half are immigrants and almost all of them are women, which means it is achieving one of the accelerator fund’s goals: helping populations that commonly face barriers to employment get jobs. Each year, the fund picks a different set of Californians to prioritize, such as veterans, tribal nations, youth, unhoused people, disabled people, immigrants and others. 

Since its inception, the Workforce Accelerator Fund has awarded over $52 million and assisted about 250 projects. Some of those include building career pipelines in the hotel and water/wastewater sectors, according to Joelle Ball, deputy director of the California Workforce Development Board.

“Having funding that supports innovative space in government is different, and it’s appreciated in the field, and it results in some unique solutions,” Ball said. “To try to change the workforce system or the government in general is like turning the Titanic. It takes a long time and the right people behind making those changes. But if we’re seeding those changes at the ground level with something like Accelerator and it grows from there, that to me is the best way to make policy for the state.”

When Ball looks at who to fund, she said she prioritizes two things: a unique idea and a competent core team. Grant applicants must illustrate a gap in the workforce system and describe how their idea plans to address it. They must also have a core team that includes the “customers” (i.e. the workers or employers), experts that understand the workforce system, innovators that are testing the idea, and people in a position to change policy. 

The accelerator fund is intentionally broad and has funded many different entities, Ball said. But the diversity of grants has made it difficult to measure the fund’s exact impact. “It’s a whole entire fruit basket of projects, not apples to apples,” she said. “It’s harder to measure with clean data what the return on those investments are. But we’re looking at what system changes have happened because of Accelerator? What impacts to the workforce system have happened because of Accelerator?”

Tracking systemic changes takes time and keeping up with past grantees requires time and money.

The service employees union’s early childhood apprenticeships program is one of the accelerator fund’s repeat grantees that scaled. Part of the reason it was able to do that is because of the networking and technical support the fund provided, according to Dr. Randi Wolfe, who wrote and administered the grants for the union and has since become a national leader for early care educator apprenticeships.

“It let us get to know people,” Wolfe said. “They would always have these statewide meetings of all the grantees. All of us were new to this. Nobody really knew what they were doing, we were all learning together.” 

Wolfe later started a nonprofit addressing jobs in early childhood education. That nonprofit, Early Care & Education Pathways to Success, has outgrown the size of grants the accelerator fund gave out, she said, but those initial meetings and grants were key. 

“The best thing about the grant was I got to know people, I got to ask a million questions, and I got to learn things, which is why 10 years later, I’ve built what I’ve built … It’s not the level we’re at (anymore),” she said. “But at the beginning, it was very important.”

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Starting Jan. 1, California employers won’t be able to require workers to attend any meetings related to their political or religious views — or how their bosses feel about unions. 

That’s according to a new law, Senate Bill 399, that is one of the most prominent of the usual wave of new workplace laws businesses are expected to follow each year. 

The legislation came as the Legislature’s Democratic supermajority sought to support a rising wave of unionization across California and the nation. 

The law bans mandatory workplace meetings in which the employer discusses their “opinion about religious or political matters,” the latter of which is defined to include the decision on whether to join a union. Workers cannot be disciplined for refusing to attend such a meeting under SB 399. 

The new law’s proponents, including the California Labor Federation, say such meetings can intimidate workers out of exercising their right to unionize, though retaliation from employers is already illegal. 

Business groups such as the California Chamber of Commerce opposed the new law, arguing it would infringe on employers’ right to free speech and ability to discuss the effects of laws or regulation on their industries. The law includes exceptions for employees, such as those working for political parties, whose job includes talking about politics.

California is joining nine other mostly Democratic states that have recently banned these so-called captive audience meetings. The law’s passage was a victory for the labor movement as it braces for the Trump administration next month.

Under President Joe Biden, the National Labor Relations Board has also sought to curb the meetings, which for decades prior boards have generally allowed as long as employers aren’t threatening workers or withholding benefits from those who support a union. 

In November, the board ruled in a case involving Amazon that captive-audience meetings violate the federal law guaranteeing workers the right to unionize, but many labor experts expect the decision to be overturned once President-elect Donald Trump takes office. In that case, California’s ban on the meetings would still apply, though employers have been challenging other states’ captive audience laws in court. 

Other new employment laws that go into effect Jan. 1 include:

• An increase to the minimum wage, from $16 an hour to $16.50. Voters in November defeated an effort to further increase the wage to $18, but current law automatically adjusts the minimum wage during inflationary periods. 
• Employers will also be required to allow workers to use their time off more flexibly. Under AB 2123, they can no longer force employees to use as much as two weeks of vacation time before taking paid family leave, the state program that gives workers some benefits for taking time off to care for a newborn child or sick family member. 
• And under AB 2499 workers can use sick time to perform jury duty. That new law also expands the reasons workers can take unpaid, protected leave when they are victims of crime. 

Some changes will apply to specific industries. Farmworkers will be allowed to use paid sick days to avoid working outside during periods of wildfire smoke, extreme heat or flooding. Performers and entertainers will have the right to refuse studios and production companies using AI-generated “digital replicas” of their images or voices to reproduce or replace their work. In July 2025, domestic workers who are employed by house-cleaner or nanny agencies to work in clients’ private homes will be subject for the first time to workplace safety laws.

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More than 7 million adults in California lack a college degree — and they typically make less money as a result. Today, standing in a welding classroom at Shasta College, a community college in Redding, Gov. Gavin Newsom presented an outline of the state’s Master Plan for Career Education. He said the plan will overhaul the state’s convoluted job training programs and help get adults “the benefit of a life well-lived without some fancy degree.” 

One focus of the new plan is on translating students’ work experience into college credits. It’s already a priority for California’s 116 community colleges, which have a goal to provide at least 250,000 students with college credits for certain kinds of work experience.

In a press release, Newsom said the state would put more money into this goal and that he would roll out a new kind of transcript, known as a “Career Passport,” to help workers showcase both their academic and professional know-how. The new “Career Passports” would also help increase the number of apprentices — a key goal of his administration — according to the press release.

The jobs plan also continues a years-long effort to make state employment more accessible to adults without college degrees. Research shows these adults often have the right skills, even if they lack the right diploma. In an executive order last August, Newsom asked the California Department of Human Resources to move faster — catching up with efforts that other states have already made.

“California’s been a leader in that space and we’re going to continue to lead in that space,” he said in Redding today, after noting the state has already removed education requirements from about 30,000 jobs. He said he plans to remove requirements from more than 30,000 new jobs in the next year.

Still, it’s just a fraction of the state’s total workforce. This year, the Legislature failed to pass a bill by Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, a San Ramon Democrat, that would have gone much further, making college degree requirements an exception rather than the norm. Camille Travis, a spokesperson for the state’s human resources department, said the bill would have forced the state to re-evaluate the qualifications of roughly 200,000 state jobs. 

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Starting Jan. 1, alcohol and cannabis sales could expand in some parts of California thanks to two new laws that aim to increase central city foot traffic, which has yet to fully recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Senate Bill 969, authored by state Sen. Scott Weiner, will let local governments designate “entertainment zones,” where bars and restaurants can sell alcoholic beverages for people to drink on public streets and sidewalks. 

Some organizations, such as the California Alcohol Policy Alliance, oppose SB 969 because it could contribute to drunk driving accidents and increased alcohol mortality rates. 

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a similar bill in 2022, but it was limited to San Francisco. In September, the city experimented with an entertainment zone for Oktoberfest and reported at least 10 times more foot traffic than the 2023 celebration. 

“Getting people out in the streets to enjoy themselves is critical for communities across our state to bounce back from the pandemic,” Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat, said in a statement. 

There’s still a lot of broader economic uneasiness, among business leaders and Californians concerned about the cost of living. Newsom has embarked on a jobs tour.

AB 1775 legalizes Amsterdam-style cannabis cafes, allowing lounges to also sell food and drinks that aren’t pre-packaged. After opposition from the American Heart and Lung Association and Newsom’s veto of a similar bill in 2022, AB 1775 includes additional protections for workers against secondhand smoke. 

“Lots of people want to enjoy legal cannabis in the company of others,” bill author Assemblymember Matt Haney, also a San Francisco Democrat, said in a statement. “And many people want to do that while sipping coffee, eating a sandwich, or listening to music. There’s no doubt that cannabis cafes will bring massive economic, cultural and creative opportunities and benefits to our state.”

This story was written by former CalMatters politics intern Jenna Peterson.