I started in the public workforce system in 1979 with a community job training agency and have seen the system improve over the years. Today’s system is more focused on linking training to jobs, in involving employers, in making data on job placement rates more transparent. The new legislation helps nudge along these improvements.

However, WIOA will not significantly change the system or outcomes. Like its predecessors, the Job Training Partnership Act (1982) and the Workforce Investment Act (1998), WIOA involves modest adjustments to job training approaches (despite hundreds of meetings, conferences, and discussions). The same forms of recruitment, assessment, training, and placement will continue, usually by the same training and placement agencies.

Accompanying the enactment of WIOA, Vice President Joe Biden released a highly touted report on the future of job training, “What Works in Job Training: A Synthesis of the Evidence.” The report is mainly a rehash of the same ideas—sector-based training, employer-driven training—that were being discussed in 1979. It’s filled with empty job training government-speak, such as calls for “coordinated strategies across systems” or “flexible, innovative training strategies.”

In contrast to the limited change in the public workforce system, the private sector job training and placement system today is a frenzy of entrepreneurship, creativity, and energy. Much of this entrepreneurship is centered on Internet job training and placement tools.

A recent study by Transmosis, a nonprofit of tech entrepreneurs working on labor and employment, identified over 100 recently established websites aimed at improving the ability of job seekers to identify and apply for jobs, and/or improving the ability of employers to identify candidates who would be good fits. New websites are launching each week.

Some of these websites target specific industries and occupations, such as Doostang (finance) and Proven (hospitality). These sites can only succeed with the participation of employers, so their success hinges on deep knowledge of the industry and what businesses need. Other websites, such as MindSumo, Take the Interview, and Careerflo, enable job seekers to go beyond the traditional résumé and supplement their applications with video demonstrations, interviews, and portfolios. Still others, like YesGraph and Work4, expand the ability of job seekers to draw on referrals.

There are websites that are trying to expand the opportunities for internships (InternBound, Koofers, LaunchPath Project) and ones trying to expand the opportunities for project-based work (TaskRabbit, Thumbtack). There are more than 20 major websites aimed at helping job seekers better set and manage career goals.

These Internet tools are aimed at generating revenues, as they must be. But talk to the entrepreneurs behind them and you hear a social mission: improving the labor exchange, matching job seekers and employers, or giving job seekers options beyond the black holes of traditional job boards.

One example, Workpop.com, is a Los Angeles start-up founded by Chris Ovitz and Reed Shaffner, who see a better way than the online job boards to connect entry-level restaurant workers (busboys, waiters, bartenders) to job openings. Their site enables workers to apply for jobs through their phones, to store résumés on the site, and to make videos demonstrating what motivates them to do their jobs. Workhands.com, a start-up in San Francisco, is a type of LinkedIn for skilled workers in crafts such as carpentry, welding, and automotive repair. Akimboconnect.com, a start-up in New York and California, helps workers with disabilities better showcase their skills, and helps employers seek out such workers.

To be sure, many of these new websites will not be in operation two or three years from now. Employers have limited funds to spend on job placement, and the number of firms already competing for these dollars is far too many. Other attempts to monetize the job placement services have yet to gain traction.

Still, these entrepreneurs are trying to build a better system, and some will succeed, because they are not about meetings, process, forms. They are about enrolling job seekers, testing ideas, pivoting, adapting, moving on to the next idea.

Their enterprises will never replace the low-tech networking and one-to-one job counseling that remain the best route to employment today. Further, they cannot replace the experience and knowledge that the public workforce has built over the past five decades.

Indeed, the most promising path for better job placement is to integrate the old government workforce system with the innovation of private-sector entrepreneurs. This is starting to happen in Southern California. The South Bay Workforce Investment Board (SBWIB), which oversees the public workforce system in nine cities in south Los Angeles County, has joined with Workpop.com to increase hospitality industry placements, especially for entry-level workers. Workpop is not receiving any public funds—but it is drawing on SBWIB’s research on the hospitality sector and its ability to identify job seekers. SBWIB and its job-seeking clients benefit from Workpop.com’s Internet and mobile tools.

SBWIB director Jan Vogel has been in the training field for nearly 40 years. Rather than be dismissive of the new entrants, he welcomes them. “Partnering with these entrepreneurs enables our job centers to reach more companies and individuals faster and more effectively,” he said. “The new companies optimize the technological spirit that is exploding in California.”

The post Can U.S. Job Training Enter the 21st Century? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

They think wrong. Today, whether you go to college retains some importance in your employment options. But where you go to college is of almost no importance. Whether your degree, for example, is from UCLA or from less prestigious Sonoma State University matters far less than your academic performance and the skills you can show employers.

Research on the impact of college selection has focused on comparing the earnings of graduates of different colleges. In 1999, economists Alan B. Krueger and Stacy Berg Dale published a widely read study that compared the earnings of graduates of elite colleges with those of “moderately selective” schools. The latter group was composed of persons who had been admitted to an elite college but chose to attend another school.

The economists found that the earnings of the two groups 20 years after graduation differed little or not at all. In a larger follow-up study, released in 2011 and covering 19,000 college graduates, the economists reached a similar conclusion: Whether you went to University of Penn or Penn State University, Williams College or Miami University of Ohio, job outcomes were unaffected in terms of earnings.

Earnings are only a part of the employment picture. Other measures, like job satisfaction or social value, are more difficult to quantify. In a thoughtful 2004 essay, the writer Gregg Easterbrook interviewed college officials throughout the country to assess these impacts. His conclusion: on a range of measures of job satisfaction, attendance at an elite college had little impact.

Forty years ago, elite colleges offered a demonstrably higher level of education. Today, as many as 200 colleges across the U.S. offer a similar level of education and have excellent faculty and facilities.

The minor role that a job candidate’s college plays in hiring becomes even clearer when you talk to California workforce professionals. Kris Stadelman, the director of the NOVA Workforce Investment Board in Silicon Valley, is a leader in understanding how hiring criteria changed in California. “Employers are interested in what skills you bring and how these skills can be used in their business,” she explains. In one study, NOVA interviewed tech employers and learned that mastery of current technologies is the most critical factor in their hiring decisions. Few employers even mentioned college degrees as a factor. ”Especially in the tech industry, employers want to see skills applications rather than traditional resumes. Show, don’t tell,” says Stadelman.

Over the past three years, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Regional Commissioner Richard Holden and I have been researching hiring processes and criteria. We’ve found that this emphasis on skills extends beyond tech to other major employment sectors, including business services, financial services, healthcare, and hospitality. Employers seek people with skills that apply to the particular job—and who have the ability to solve problems and work in a team.

As a volunteer job coach, I encourage every young adult who is at all interested to attend college. Unless the family has a financial need, there is no reason for a young person to rush into the workforce—especially since our work lives now last an estimated 40 years.

I also say: If you have the good fortune to choose among colleges, it is worth taking the process seriously. Obtain as much information as possible to evaluate the location, size, and educational specialties of every school. But remember: The particular college degree will be of little consequence, especially after you’ve been in the labor force for more than a few years.

What’s most important is what you will do, at college and in life, to keep improving your skills, to develop your character, to remain persistent. You’ll also need some mazel.

That’s Yiddish for luck.

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This job landscape is partly due to forces outside the control of policymakers. But much of it is also the result of government policies and political rhetoric over the past decade. What has gone wrong, and how might we bring back full-time hiring?

Scott Hauge has been the owner of CAL Insurance, an independent insurance agency, since 1977. He currently has 28 employees in his business, based in San Francisco’s Sunset District. Since 2005, he has been head of Small Business California, a non-profit business advocacy organization that regularly communicates with more than 5,000 small businesses throughout the state. Recently, he asked those on his e-mail list about their hiring plans for the new 2013-14 fiscal year.

Business owners from across the state wrote about increases in local government fees, higher payroll costs, and, most of all, healthcare costs under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Their answers suggest that we have reached a tipping point against full-time hiring.

One lengthy and thoughtful response came from Henry Marvin of the Marvin Insurance Agency of Lancaster. “The tipping point for clients of mine is 50 employees,” he wrote. “If they are under 50 they don’t want to go over this amount and be subject to ACA fines. The American Family Leave Act is also at 50 employees. I have some employers at 60 employees that are going to lay off employees to go under the 50 limit.”

Marvin noted that the “other tipping point” is reached when an “employee costs an additional 40 percent or more” over his or her salary. When benefits and other costs reach this mark, employers will do anything to avoid to bringing on new people.

The owner of a Bay Area home healthcare business wrote that, while she needed to hire people, her business, and other businesses, were inclined to choose independent contractors. The owner personally preferred to use full-time employees, but she could not do that and stay competitive with those who depend on independent contractors. Other business owners wrote about moving away from full-time hiring because of fear of tax increases. Besides, they had learned to make do with fewer workers during the Great Recession.

Some payroll costs have decreased in the past decade, most notably workers’ compensation, which costs less than half of what it did per $100 of payroll a decade ago. But other costs—including those related to healthcare, federal payroll fees, and federal unemployment insurance mandates—have increased. Also, business owners fear that government, particularly the federal government, will continue to layer on fees and taxes to pay for social benefits and other government programs.

At first glance, the national and state payroll numbers look robust: The nation has gained 6.7 million payroll jobs since February 2010, and California has done even better on a per capita basis, gaining more than 800,000 payroll jobs. But these numbers are misleading. A good number of these jobs are not full-time (in July 2013, 8.3 million workers were involuntarily working part-time). The pace of job generation following the Great Recession is also considerably slower than after previous recessions in the post-World War II period, as detailed in a recent report from the Kauffman Foundation. Employers look at hiring and see mainly increased costs and challenges, so they have moved toward part-time work and independent contracting.

Businesses are easy targets for politicians. One recent example from San Francisco is the “family-friendly workplace” legislation proposed by Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, who has been looking for a winning issue as he runs for the State Assembly in 2014. In June, Chiu introduced an ordinance granting any employee who is a parent or caregiver the right to request a flexible work schedule—telecommuting, job sharing, working part-time, or adjusting hours. An employer could deny the request only if it would create an “undue hardship,” and the worker could appeal any denial to the city’s Office of Labor Standards Enforcement.

Chiu said he wanted to encourage families to remain in San Francisco, but the proposed ordinance targeted people working in San Francisco, not living in San Francisco. Further, most employers already make work schedule allowances for employees, especially valued employees. Making such schedules into a legal “right” would add whole new layers of legal confrontations and costs—and might even make arrangements less flexible.

Reversing some of the mandates and fees that affect employment is hardly the only strategy to encourage hiring in California and the United States. But it is an essential one. Without a fight against policies that undermine employment, the other strategies for hiring—building infrastructure, education, even creating targeted government jobs programs—will have minimal impact.

This does not mean that all increased employee costs should be opposed. Scott Hauge and Small Business California have supported state minimum wage hikes and increases in workers’ compensation payments to some people with disabilities. But they are able to see these individual costs in the context of many other costs and how they work together. Politicians tend to see any given policy in isolation. When policies that might be defensible on their own stack up, they produce cumulative impacts against hiring.

In Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, her book on the low-wage workforce, author Barbara Ehrenreich describes low-wage workers as “the major philanthropists of our society,” people who “endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high.” A member of the working poor is “an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.”

There is considerable truth in Ehrenreich’s argument, but it applies to more than just workers. To be in business and hire employees is to be responsible for paying these employees, whether money comes in or not. It is to be beset by local, state, and government entities demanding money to support their other activities. Today, small and medium-sized businesses have joined low-wage workers as major philanthropists of our society. It’s time we did a better job of helping them to help us.

The post Let’s Stop Making It Hard to Create Jobs appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Great Recession hastened the arrival of this New Normal. But the economic and social forces driving the New Normal predate 2007. The New Normal reflects structural, not cyclical, change in California. What to do?

Since leaving the state Employment Development Department (EDD) in 2004, I have volunteered as a job coach for workers in the Bay Area. Over years of helping people to look for jobs, I’ve found five distinguishing characteristics of successful efforts to find employment.

1. No whining: “It’s not you,” I tell job seekers. “It’s the New Normal.” We go over how the job world has shifted in California and why the job search is so much more difficult than in the past. But we don’t dwell on how bad things are. We move on. One untold story of the recession and its aftermath is the resilience of California workers. Most California job seekers submit stacks of resumes and never get a response, go on interviews that turn out to be humiliating charades, and wake up each morning and start again.

2. Job boards are only a starting point: In the past decade, online job boards have come to dominate job listings. But the ease of application, along with the surplus of applicants, means job board applications rarely result in interviews, much less hires. So submit a white paper on improving sales or performance, or make a video presentation on unusual skills, or get recommendations from current employees at the targeted firm. That last is particularly important. Because employers are inundated with job applications, they are giving more weight to recommendations from their current workers.

3. Tap the hidden job market: An estimated 50 percent or more of hires in California are for jobs not advertised through job boards. Jobs in this hidden market are reached through job networks, primarily those made up of family, friends, and former co-workers. The traditional networks have been augmented in recent years by social media sites, especially LinkedIn. These sites enable job seekers to hear of company needs and put themselves forward before any job is listed.

4. Get a foot in the door: Even when the economy is doing poorly, there is an enormous amount of worker movement among jobs and an enormous amount of hiring. In 2010 and 2011, as California unemployment remained above 11 percent, there were roughly 300,000 to 400,000 separate instances of hiring per month in California. In 2013, this number is averaging over 450,000 per month. Of course, even with this high volume of hires, employers can choose today among tens of applicants. Or hundreds. So be open to ways of demonstrating competence that can give you a leg up on employment. Part-time work is one way of doing so; project work is a second; and volunteering is a third. Each of these approaches combats the isolation and lack of confidence that often accompanies a job search.

5. Constant skills improvement: In his recent book The Start-Up of You, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman writes of the importance of what he calls “permanent beta”: refreshing and sharpening skills, adapting to new business conditions, expanding job networks. This should be done whether you have a job or not. The best job search technique is to keep learning new things and making new contacts. Never stop working on yourself.

I’ve been in California’s job training and placement world since 1979. Finding a job has never been easy, throughout this entire period. But today’s searches are especially hard. It’s brutal out there. For that reason, be good to your family and friends, especially those who are seeking jobs. Assist them in the job search as much as you can. Don’t hesitate to help an adult child or spouse or friend. It takes a village to find a job in California these days, or at least a network.

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Most of us, like my 23-year-old son William, are “Aspies,” diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, the “high-functioning” form of autism—although, as autism is a spectrum disorder, distinctions between types of autism are not sharp. Nearly all of us have some college education, and the majority have college degrees. Yet most of us exist on the margins of the job market, without steady jobs, even when the economy is good.

We start each meeting by going around the room and providing updates on our job searches:

• Robert is in early 30s, with a degree from San Francisco State University in child/adolescent education. His job history includes short-term stints as a courtesy clerk at a large supermarket, as a busman at a coffee shop chain, and a four-month position in the technology department of a major hotel.

• Gabriel, late 20s, who has some college credits, does short-term transcription gigs he finds through family contacts while he seeks a full-time job.

• Martha, also late 20s, has a master’s degree in library science but has been able only to find work 12 hours a week as a clerk in a small legal office.

• Mark, early 40s, worked in an IT consulting firm for 15 years, but his business partner died four years ago, and the business collapsed.

• Jim, 72, is the senior member of our group. He has college degrees in physics and chemistry and worked on a project basis a few years back for Apple. Mainly, though, he has worked in non-technology jobs: delivering pizza, doing yard work, supervising an afterschool program for youth. He comes to the Job Club regularly; at 72, he’s still out there looking.

We rely on volunteers—counselors, parents, graduate students. Cindy Zoeller is a workforce career coach in Sacramento who heard about the Job Club and drove 90 miles to our organizational meeting in November 2011. She volunteers as the club facilitator, preparing the agenda and handouts and leading each session. She in turn recruited Tim Gardiner, another career coach from Sacramento, and four enthusiastic graduate students from San Francisco State.

After providing updates on our job searches at our monthly meetings, we share job leads and practice job search techniques. At a recent meeting, the volunteers updated each participant’s resume. At other meetings we have practiced interviewing techniques, use of job boards, and job networks.

It is difficult to overstate how much has changed in public awareness of autism in the more than two decades since I first entered the autism community in California. In 1990, autism was an obscure condition that the general public knew largely from the movie Rain Man, if they knew it at all. Today, you cannot open a newspaper or log onto a news website without seeing some article on autism. Autism themes and characters are featured in television shows and in more and more movies (Adam, Mercury Rising, Mozart and the Whale, Temple Grandin).

In 1990, you might find in bookstores a handful of autism memoirs or novels with autistic characters (Sue Miller’s Family Pictures, which appeared in 1990, was the most prominent). Today, a new autism memoir appears almost every day, by parents and even grandparents, and there are so many autism novels that a new genre of “aut lit” has developed.

Despite this autism explosion in popular culture, the job situation for persons with autism has not changed a lot. Unemployment among Californians on the autism spectrum is estimated at between 60 and 70 percent, the same as in 1990. The passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 was expected to increase employment levels among persons with autism, along with other workers with disabilities. But this increase never came to pass, even when the economy was strong in the years prior to 2007 and the Great Recession.

Why is this so? The job search process rewards sophistication in finding job leads, in networking and interviewing. These are precisely the executive function skills that most of our members lack. Employers today receive hundreds of applicants for any job opening. They use computer programs to screen applications or rely on in-house references and networks to fill jobs. In both paths to jobs—anonymous job board applications and personal networks—our Job Club members are several steps behind.

We also lose jobs frequently due to real or perceived poor performance. We may be too slow in making change or answering the phone, or we file or shred documents in the wrong way, or a hundred other different mistakes.

In September, Mr. Marty Nemko, a well-known Bay Area job counselor who hosts a radio show on job search and writes a job column, came to visit us. He left appalled, as he described in this post. Nemko had come to our Job Club thinking of “Aspies” as highly intelligent if socially awkward. Instead, he reported that one person couldn’t remember his name, another said he was so exhausted at a job interview trying to appear normal that he “was useless for three days,” and a third “slipped into a mystical foreign language mid-sentence.” Mr. Nemko concluded that most of those in attendance had “anomalies severe enough to make it unlikely they could find stable employment in today’s job market except perhaps doing structured low-level work, in isolation.”

A number of our members were upset by this post, and Mr. Nemko did misconstrue and exaggerate some of what he saw at that meeting. But his account helps us see how we may appear to those outside the autism community. It underscores what a number of us at the Autism Job Club concluded some time ago: the conventional employment approaches of government job search programs and job counselors/coaches will never be enough. We need to build our own autism job networks, and have begun to do so.

So far, our autism job networks take two forms. One form, a very limited one, is the development of nonprofit businesses that can train and provide work experience to people on the autistic spectrum. We currently have one training program/business in software testing, The Specialists Guild, started by two of our members, Luby and Andy Aczel, who have over 25 years of experience in the technology field. The Specialist Guild last month graduated its first group of three trainees and is starting on a second group of three. Andy Aczel is now trying to generate clients for the business, although no matter what the trainee numbers will always be small.

Our main employment approach is to build a network of contacts in existing businesses. These contacts are drawn at least initially from the family, relatives, friends, and neighbors of people with autism—a substantial and growing group. We hope this autism network will help us to identify jobs particularly suited to people with autism. Pamela Buttery, a Job Club member and former real estate partner of Oakland Athletics owner Lewis Wolff, volunteers her time to go into technology companies with which we have contacts and identify jobs, such as software tester, that might be good fits. The social media and Internet commerce cluster of firms in the Bay Area is our initial focus for job placement.

Beyond assisting in placement, our network will assist in retention. Our workers often need additional time to get up to speed and to fit in operationally and socially. We benefit from patience and having someone cover our backs for a while.

Earlier this year, I participated in the search of one of our Job Club members, a senior at a California State University campus, for a summer job. He sent in nine or 10 online applications for internships at social media and Internet commerce firms and did not receive any response. We then turned to the local McDonald’s restaurants, since the owner of several of these restaurants had an interest in autism.

At his interview, our Job Club member laughed to himself at inappropriate times, picked up the interviewer’s pen and jabbed it in the air, and occasionally seemed lost in thought. Still, the owner wanted to give him a chance and hired him for the summer. Initially, this new employee made mistakes and did inappropriate things like picking up slightly used straws and putting them back in the straw holders. But after a time he got the hang of it. He did not miss a day all summer and was always early to work.

It’s too early to say if our autism network will succeed in any significant way. We are in a time of unprecedented unemployment, and even workers without autism are experiencing great difficulty getting any job. Also, facing constant pressure and competition, many firms have no bandwidth to take on an employment initiative. Early this year I met several times with officials at Zynga, the phenomenally successful Internet game company that was looking for big social issues to tackle. Today, as other online game companies provide new competition, Zynga is concentrating on maintaining its balance.

Despite these difficulties, the approach of building networks outside government is the best hope now for people with autism—just as it is, to a lesser extent, for non-autistic workers.

It takes a village to find a job in today’s economy, for nearly everyone. The job boards, such as Monster.com or Indeed.com, bring in a flood of applicants for each position. LinkedIn and the other professional development Internet sites are oversubscribed. All of us need to reach out when we need job assistance to our friends, colleagues and families, and be available to them in their job searches. We all need someone to cover our back when we start a new job, just as we need to help others in our networks adjust to employment duties.

We are all members of the Autism Job Club now.

The post The Autism Job Club appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

From January 1951 through November 1957, the unemployment rate in California never exceeded 5 percent. For much of the time, it was under 4 percent. The number of nonfarm payroll jobs grew from 3,406,900 in January 1951 to 4,877,100 in December 1959. In the following decades, the abundance continued, with nonfarm payrolls growing from 4,882,400 in January 1960 to 7,027,900 in December 1969.

I grew up in Los Angeles during this time, and whenever I speak to classmates (John Burroughs Jr. High ’67, Fairfax High ’70) we marvel at how the job world has shifted. What happened to that California?

The post-World War II California economy was dominated by large private companies in aerospace, heavy manufacturing, finance, insurance, telecommunications, and rapidly expanding public sector entities–the U.S. Postal Service, the state employment/unemployment offices, the local governments, and school systems. Once hired into these private or public entities, in the absence of misconduct, a worker could expect long-term employment.

The histories of California of the 1950s and 1960s capture this phenomenon. The father of D.J. Waldie (Holy Land) worked for the Southern California Gas Company designing pipelines for 30 years. Waldie’s neighbors in Lakewood were employed in nearby Long Beach at the Douglas Aircraft plant, which offered practically lifetime employment. In the major cities throughout the state, Kevin Starr (Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963) found confident new enterprises, fueling the state’s middle class with both stable blue-collar and white-collar jobs.

Today, the employee-employer relationship has become more distant, and job security has largely disappeared. In its place are variable, alternative types of employees: independent contractors, temporary workers, contract workers, leased workers, part-time workers, on-call workers, day laborers, and the self-employed.

In 1995, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) began to count workers in “alternative employment arrangements.” As the California labor economist Paul Wessen has noted, in the latest 2005 BLS “Contingent and Alternative Employment Arrangements” survey, roughly 1.5 million California workers are independent contractors who are outside of the payroll employment system. Another 481,000 workers are on-call workers (workers called to work only as needed); some 210,000 are temporary help agency workers; and 64,000 are workers provided by contract companies. Combined, they amount to 13 percent of California workers.

Not counted in these alternative work arrangements are other California workers without full-time, steady paychecks: part-time workers and self-employed business operators. In separate studies, the Economic Policy Institute and the AFL-CIO research division have estimated the percentage of workers in all of these “non-standard work arrangements” at 30 percent of the labor force. And that number leaves out the insecure employment in many standard payroll jobs in California. Certain occupations–particularly construction and agriculture–have long been characterized by seasonal and irregular work.

Today, no occupation is protected from layoffs or work interruptions. As late as 1979, when I entered the job world full-time in California, workers in the white-collar professions-in finance, real estate, law, insurance, health care management, education–could feel relatively safe after a number of years with a firm. Today no mortgage banker, investment banker, insurance executive, engineer, senior attorney, or healthcare manager is safe if she or he is not bringing in revenue. “Coffee is for closers,” Alec Baldwin’s character says in Glengarry Glen Ross, a bottom-line mindset that defines all occupations in California.

What is behind this change? Many of the same forces that have shaped employment nationwide: technology, the decline of private sector unions, the shifting culture of work, and most of all the rise of the global economy.

Technology has always been a force for job turnover in the state. Even in the roaring 1960s, state officials worried publicly that the automation of that period would leave many workers permanently unemployed. What is different today is the pace of technology.

Over the past decade, the speed of Internet commerce and social media business development has restructured California’s job world, particularly in retail, business services, and telecommunications. In my San Francisco neighborhood, businesses have always come and gone, but not with the speed of recent years. Borders bookstore, Blockbuster and Hollywood video stores, Mervyn’s department store–all crowded a few years ago–now are shuttered, casualties of Internet commerce.

Added to this march of technology is the decline of private sector unions in California (less than 8 percent of private-sector workers are unionized in the state) and the cultural shifts in employment. Employers will release employees as economics dictate, and employees will move to other employers with better economic offers–all, again, at a speed unthinkable a few decades ago.

The impact of technology and work culture pales in comparison to the changes wrought by the global economy. Few in California in the 1950s and 1960s recognized it at the time, but it’s clear that what we took to be the future was instead a brief interlude in economic history, when the United States and particularly California had economic dominance over a world economy wrecked by World War II.

By the 1970s, the rest of the world had begun to catch up. Beginning in the 1980s, our California heavy-manufacturing firms found themselves in global competition, and in the next decades this competition extended to finance, business services, accounting, technology, and even education. The confident large business enterprises of the ’50s and ’60s would soon find themselves retooling, cutting costs and personnel, outsourcing operations, or closing. The conventional wisdom is that all this insecurity and instability will only accelerate. In a new book called The Start Up of You, Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, argues that we all need to think of ourselves as start-ups: constantly selling ourselves, refreshing our skills, adapting to fast-changing business conditions. Hoffman and the conventional wisdom are probably right. For some Californians, those who possess the entrepreneurial skills and adaptive mental abilities, the new job world will be a blessing. For the rest–at least one-third of our labor force–it will be an even more difficult and challenging place.

Michael Bernick was the director of the state labor department, the Employment Development Department, 1999-2004; and since 2004 has been an attorney with the San Francisco-based Sedgwick law firm and a Milken Institute Fellow.

*Top photo courtesy of afagen. Interior photos courtesy of Michael Bernick.

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You wouldn’t have known it existed from the Los Angeles Times or local television and radio. But a vibrant distance running community emerged in the 1960s. This community was linked by a network of all-comers races, weekly road races and newly established marathons. Most importantly, new attitudes were emerging among these runners: about long distance running as a lifestyle, as well as about workout regimens, diet, lifelong training and the inclusion of women.

My older brother Jim, then a senior at Fairfax High, introduced me to long distance running in the summer of 1967, a few months before I was to start my freshman year. My first run was from our house in the Fairfax district to the top of Mt. Olympus in the Hollywood Hills. Though I ran only the first two miles and walked the rest, I was hooked.

Fairfax did not have a strong tradition of long distance and track athletes. According to Gabe Grosz’s history of Fairfax track, the school lost every track meet between 1962 and 1965. But all that changed in the fall of 1967 with the arrival of a new coach, John Kampmann.

Like other successful high school coaches, Kampmann brought a commitment and passion to the sport that was contagious. Running was not done part-time or occasionally; it was a daily, year-round regimen. Running was one part physical, and a larger part mental. Running was linked to diet, sleep and focus.

Long distance training under Coach Kampmann was a mix of approaches: speed-play techniques from Finland, repetitions on the track, and long slow distance (LSD). We ran in the Hollywood Hills, on the trails of Griffith Park, at the La Brea Tar Pits near Fairfax. We ran at the area’s golf courses, throughout Brentwood and UCLA, at the Santa Monica beach. On weekends, we ran through the canyons north of Sunset. We’d start at Burton Way and La Cienega and each week choose a different canyon: Franklin Canyon, Coldwater Canyon, Benedict Canyon, Beverly Glen Drive – 12, 14, 16 miles. Often on Sundays, we’d do a canyon run in the morning and come back at night with a three- or four-mile run at the Los Angeles Country Club.

By the next year, Fairfax was among the top cross country and track teams in the city. In the spring of 1968, Mike Wittlin set a city record with a two-mile time of 9:17. The following year, Dan Schechter won the city mile championship with a time of 4:16. In dual meets, the half-mile squad, led by Gary Shapiro, regularly ran in the 1:50s. Fairfax lost only one dual track meet in 1969. During the next two years, Fairfax won 14 straight dual meets.

Beyond competing as a team, we were part of the region’s distance community. We traveled throughout the region on weekends to compete in road races in Montebello, Pacific Palisades, Diamond Bar, Toms Peak and the Los Angeles Police Academy. We ran the Culver City Marathon in 1967 and 1968, and the Palos Verdes Marathon in 1969 and 1970. We traveled in a van to San Diego to run the Mission Bay Marathon in January 1970. During the summer, we competed in the all-comers meets at Venice High, Pierce College and Los Angeles Community College.

The region’s distance community was not large. Each road race might have 100 runners, and even the marathon races rarely had more than 200 or 300. The runners, though, traveled to the same races, met at the same handful of stores that sold running shoes and read the same books and articles on running, particularly the running bible, Track and Field News. Through these interactions, the running subculture grew.

Mainstream athletic culture in 1960s Southern California focused on a few team sports, primarily baseball, football, and basketball, in which a small number of athletes actually competed. Most high school athletes and non-athletes did not continue active exercise after graduation. But in distance running, everyone trained and competed. A main part of the sport involved reaching “PRs” (personal records), pushing yourself to improve your own time. Coach Kampmann gave as much attention to each runner’s personal record, from the slowest to the fastest runner, as to the team score.

Running did not stop in high school. It is a lifelong pursuit. At the road races, you’d see runners of all ages, and from a wide range of occupations. Further, the groundwork was being laid for the establishment of women’s high school and college teams, and for the full participation of women in all distance races.

Most of us from that running era at Fairfax have continued to find value in the distance running culture and continue to run daily. My own running career would have its ups and downs over the years. On a Saturday morning in May 1970, I ran my second Palo Verdes Marathon, finishing in 2 hours, 42 minutes – among the top 20 high school marathon times in the United States that year. Later that year, I went east to Harvard, where I joined the cross-country and track teams. My participation, though, ended after two mediocre years. A few years later, I competed again as a graduate student at Oxford University in England (where graduate students could compete on university teams), but stopped after an undistinguished year. In both cases, running had lost its cultural ties: the sense of purpose, the broader lifestyle, the camaraderie.

Since returning to California in 1976, I’ve continued to train, almost exclusively long slow distance, increasing my weekly miles over the past 10 years. Today, I run twice a day, around 40- 50 miles per week. If you’re on the Presidio roads and trails in San Francisco, you’ll see me at 6 a.m. and 8 p.m., usually with a Nike hat and a hiker’s light, running at a nine-minute-mile pace, alone and in thought.

Similarly, if you look around the streets of Southern California, you’ll see others from the 1960s Fairfax teams who continue distance running: Gary Shapiro, Eli Kantor, Jeff Rothman, Bobby Sherman, Mike Wittlin, Irwin Merein, Roy Cohen, Tom Flesch, Dale Lowenstein, Sam Kiwas.

But the full legacy of those Fairfax years stretches far beyond our teams. Long-distance running has soared in popularity, and today attracts thousands of runners, both men and women, to major races. Thanks to the coaching and life philosophy of John Kampmann and other Southern California running advocates of the 1960s, for many of us reminiscing about high school sports isn’t an exercise in remembering things long gone, but rather reflecting on the birth of ongoing life-affirming habits.

Michael Bernick, an attorney in San Francisco, has served in several government positions in California, including director of the state labor department, the Employment Development Department, 1999-2004, and director of the Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART), 1988-1996.

*Main photo originally published in Track and Field News, May 1969

**Photos courtesy of Michael Bernick.

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