Another bad week for jobs
The news that Santa Rosa stent-maker TriVascular is progressing with European trials and is continuing to hire is welcome.
Also this week, telecom-equipment maker Calix in Petaluma said it had raised $82 million in its initial public offering. More good news.
But even these positive developments, and certainly there are more to come, are overwhelmed by larger and continuing job losses driven by the bad economy and assaults on business.
This week, the trusted UCLA Anderson Forecast said national unemployment will remain in the double digits until 2012 even while the economy posts tepid growth, which is of little consequence for those without jobs. Ditto for California.
Earlier this month, in a stunning blow to Marin County’s thriving film and gaming industry, Disney announced it will close its 450-employee studio in Novato. Disney blamed the economy.
On April 1, the NUMMI auto plant in Fremont opened in 1984 will shut down. About 4,700 people will lose their jobs.
And it, unfortunately, gets worse.
Though the public was largely unaware, attached to the sweeping health care bill was a complete federal takeover of college student loans from private banks and lenders. Thousands of private-sector jobs have or will be lost, lenders said.
Incredibly, some of the savings the government projects it will see from the college loan grab were used to offset costs of its health care fiasco. Students will see only marginal increases in school funding. Community colleges, which originally were supposed to receive $10 billion under the program for job training, got one fifth of that. And so it goes.
In the first 48 hours after President Obama signed his health care bill into law, Caterpillar and Deere and Co. announced a combined $250 million in charges related to higher tax costs for retiree prescription benefits. And Verizon notified employees by e-mail, “We expect that Verizon’s costs will increase in the short term,” according to news reports.
Bill Hawkins, the CEO of Medtronic Inc., said the bill’s 2.3 percent excise tax on medical device makers could force his company to eliminate 1,000 jobs.
For small companies, the National Federation of Independent Business said it is concerned the legislation’s tax credit for covering employees will discourage companies with fewer than 50 workers from expanding. “The tax credit itself is limited by a firm’s size and wages, so if you want to remain eligible, you need to remain small and not pay high wages,” NFIB said.
Now that – along with many of the other disincentives to business today – is the kind of job booster we don’t need.
•••
Brad Bollinger is Business Journal editor in chief and associate publisher. He can be reached at 707-521-4251 or bbollinger@busjrnl.com.
Submit Your Comments