Jerry Brown unveils Jobs Initiative for California’s Informal Economy

Posted by CotoBlogzz

Informal economies operating in the world today are usually viewed as an artifact of globalization.  Often referred to as  “under the table,” “underground,” “shadow,” and  “invisible,”  economies, many have developed around the economic survival activities of workers who have been excluded from the formal economy for a number of reasons and  include widely divergent groups, such as undocumented workers, professionals who do unreported jobs on the side, craft workers who exchange work in kind,  and marginalized native workers who, because of cutbacks in welfare programs, must accept any work they can find

A study  in the informal economy of the City of Los Angeles by the Economic Roundtable, a nonprofit, public policy research organization, titled Hopeful Workers, Marginal Jobs: LA’s Off-the-Books Labor Force, offers an in-depth look at the  local informal economy. The study shows that in the period following the economic recession of 2001 and as late as 2004 economic recovery was still out of sight. In spite of that, the informal economy held relatively steady during this period while the formal economy continued in serious decline. The 2005 data, not included in the Economic Roundtable study, indicates a continuation of the same trend and concludes that  that the economic stagnation of southern California that was triggered by the recession of 2001 would have been worse without the ameliorating effects of the informal economy.  The current gap between the states formal and informal economies is not to difficult to extrapolate, form the study.

With this in mind, Jerry Brown has launched a new Jobs Initiative to help stimulate California’s formal and informal economies:  The goal is to have up to 50% of the undocumented workers in California whether employed or not, be willing to come forward and bite the hand that fed them by asserting that their respective employers knew they were undocumented- not unlike the charges currently being levied against Meg Whitman.

The trail-blazing jobs initiative is self-funded and is estimated that it can create some 5 million jobs for unscrupulous attorneys.  Some sources tell us that the initiative is not seating well with Senator Boxer, as the only jobs she can point to having created are related to the printing of the  $3,000 signs with the message: “We are creating Jobs”.