Hiring

Counting the days until summer vacation starts, students at Brea-Olinda High School who are hoping a job will fall into their laps may be in for a bit of a jolt. Normally, the Orange County school's job board is stocked with 25 to 30 notices from prospective employers this time of year. This spring, however, there are only half as many job offers on the board. "We haven't been getting a lot of calls from business people," said Jim McWilliam, the school's career guidance specialist.

The Kings were five points out of a playoff spot and stood a wobbly 11th in the Western Conference on Dec. 22, the day Darryl Sutter made his debut as their coach. The team he took over was flailing. General Manager Dean Lombardi thought he had acquired the final pieces for a contender six months earlier when he traded for center Mike Richards and signed free-agent winger Simon Gagne, but the offense was sputtering. Coach Terry Murray's defense-oriented foundation had become the team's ceiling, leaving no room for skill or creativity.

Casino mogul Steve Wynn says hiring will begin Sunday for 5,300 positions at his new Encore resort on the Las Vegas Strip. Company executives said hiring would be handled online. Encore, with 2,034 rooms, is scheduled to open by the end of the year.

Dear Liz: Our mother just turned 64, and our father is divorcing her. She hasn't worked in years because of significant physical and mental health issues. My sister and I have been trying to figure out how she's going to survive on $750 a month, which is the equivalent of half his Social Security. She has always had serious issues with money management, which is why there are no retirement savings or a house. We are now about to embark on the maze of social service benefits that an older woman below the poverty line can receive, partly so we can decide whether she's better off staying put where she is in Arkansas, moving to my sister's in Texas, moving to be near me in Maryland, or moving to her childhood home of Chicago, where most of her friends are. For a lot of complicated reasons (mostly related to the mental health issues)

David Joyce marched his way to the front of the U.S. immigration line using his pocketbook, sinking half a million dollars into a Vermont ski resort. The British citizen had spent years in a futile effort to secure green cards for himself, his wife and their 9-year-old son so they could relocate to sunny Florida. Then, a fellow emigre tipped him off to a little-known federal program that helps foreigners gain permanent U.S. residency by investing in American businesses. Graphic: Number of investors' visas to U.S. "In six months, we had our green cards," said Joyce, 51. "Considering everything we've been through, this was easy.

LAFAYETTE, La. - Visitors to this oil town might be forgiven for wondering whether the BP oil spill and subsequent drilling moratorium ever happened. "Now hiring" signs are plastered on billboards around town, and hotels such as the Crowne Plaza are chock full of seminars training students to work on offshore rigs. Many offshore companies can't find enough workers for the jobs they're listing. This parish has the lowest unemployment rate in Louisiana, 4.8%. Such is the opportunity on the offshore rigs that Sheila Clark, whose husband, Donald, died in the Deepwater Horizon explosion two years ago, said her 22-year-old son recently asked her how she'd feel if he went to work on a rig. "I can't stop him," said Clark, who moved to Baton Rouge after her husband's death.

The painful slump endured by California's aerospace industry finally appears to be over after six long years. Companies are landing new contracts again, massive layoffs are fewer and farther between, and production is picking up. But the aerospace industry--the backbone of a prosperous state economy a decade ago--now operates in a sober new world where fundamental changes have occurred.

More signs emerged Tuesday that the U.S. auto industry may actually be recovering from its deep slump, despite estimates of anemic January sales and Toyota Motor Corp.'s suspending sales of eight vehicle models because of accelerator problems. Ford Motor Co. said it would hire 1,200 workers, and General Motors Co. announced a big investment in manufacturing electric engines. Also, Dutch sports-car maker Spyker Cars said Tuesday that it had struck a deal to acquire Saab from General Motors.

Most employers would balk at hiring newly sober workers or those still battling drug or alcohol abuse. Not Jon Esformes, owner of Westwood Country Market and Cafe in Los Angeles. Esformes opened the business 14 months ago, serving brioche French toast, house-made granola, grilled panini and chopped salads to neighborhood families and businesspeople. He welcomes job candidates at various stages of recovery -- as long as they are qualified, willing and able to perform the work.

Amid an aggressive push to bolster its ranks with thousands of new deputies, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department loosened its hiring practices and gave jobs to recruits who in the past would have been rejected, according to a department watchdog report released Thursday. Among those hired were applicants with criminal records, drug and alcohol problems and financial woes. One recruit, for example, had been released from another police agency after using excessive force.

University of California regents Wednesday discussed the possibility of a 6% tuition increase for next fall but pledged that they would lobby hard to avoid such a $732-per-student hike. With such money worries rippling through the 10-campus system, the regents approved the hiring of a new chancellor for UC San Diego at a $411,084 salary, which is 4.8% higher than his predecessor, Marye Anne Fox. In addition, Pradeep Khosla, now the engineering dean at Carnegie Mellon University, will receive a relocation bonus of nearly $24,700 annually for his first four years.

In another move to beef up its mobile offering, Facebook has hired the entire staff of Lightbox, a tiny start-up known for its popular photo sharing app for Android smartphones. The hiring of the seven-person team at Lightbox comes as the social network nears what is expected to be the largest ever Internet initial public offering. Investors have been weighing the value of Facebook and have questioned how well it will be able to generate ad revenue from mobile devices. Facebook made more than $3 billion off of ads seen on its laptop and desktop website in 2011 but has not yet figured out how to monetize its 500 million mobile app users.

Once again addressing the controversial issue of executive pay, a panel of the California State University Board of Trustees voted Tuesday to freeze state-funded pay for new campus presidents but allow individual college foundations to raise funds to boost those salaries. The nonprofit campus foundations would be able to augment taxpayer-funded pay for new executives up to 10% above that of their predecessor. The policy would be reviewed in 2014. Four members of the Special Committee on Presidential Selection and Compensation meeting in Long Beach voted for the change, with one member absent.

Even a large pay raise for a college president is unlikely to have a noticeable impact on daily campus life. It wouldn't require an increase in student fees or lead to a significant reduction in the number of courses being offered. But that doesn't mean presidential pay at California State University is unimportant; a commitment to shared sacrifice is necessary to help everyone power through tough times. Four months after adopting a controversial policy that allowed new campus presidents a 10% pay increase over what their predecessors had earned, Cal State's compensation committee will try again on Tuesday.

A convicted killer who died on death row while his appeal languished before the California Supreme Court should have his case decided posthumously, his attorney told the state high court. Scott F. Kauffman, who represented Dennis Lawley for 19 years, contends that his client was innocent of a 1989 murder for hire that sent him to San Quentin. Lawley, he said, deserves a ruling on his claims, even if the outcome will have no practical consequence. "Mr. Lawley's death does not erase the injustice of his conviction and sentence," Kauffman told the court in a written motion.

Rep. Brad Sherman's reelection campaign is asking federal authorities to investigate what it says is improper coordination between his main rival, fellow Democratic Rep. Howard Berman, and a "super PAC" formed to support Berman in the nationally watched contest. In a complaint planned for delivery to the Federal Election Commission on Monday, Sherman campaign manager Scott Abrams alleges that a Berman operative did not wait the required 120 days between working for the Berman campaign and contracting with the super PAC. Such fundraising groups, which emerged as a controversial factor in the presidential primary contest, can collect unlimited amounts of money to use in support of, or opposition to, specific candidates.

2010 will not be the year the hiring floodgates open. Although certain sectors of the economy are showing signs of a thaw, employers say they plan to tread carefully in the coming year, and those that are hiring say they will wait until the second half to fill jobs. But there is hope for employees who saw hours and benefits slashed, or who took on extra responsibilities as companies tried to hold on to the talent that kept them afloat in tough times. Tom Wilson, managing director at investment management firm Brinker Capital, said unemployment was expected to decline by 1 percentage point each year as the economy recovers, meaning that by the end of 2010, unemployment would hover at about 9%. Over the last 18 months, people have "hunkered down" at their jobs, said Brian Kropp, managing director of the Corporate Leadership Council, which surveys about 300,000 employees each quarter.

Faced with an unrelenting fiscal crisis, Los Angeles city officials have refused to hire needed analysts for the Los Angeles Police Department's crime laboratory, hampering a plan to eliminate a backlog of untested DNA evidence from rape cases and angering victims' rights advocates. Last spring, despite a near freeze on all city hiring, the City Council set aside $1.4 million to hire 26 staffers for the LAPD lab and cover their salaries for about six months. The proposed hires were part of a three-year plan that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and other officials unveiled in 2008, vowing at the time that it would remedy the chronic staffing shortfalls in the lab that had led to a massive backup of evidence.

SACRAMENTO - You might think a tax law that rewards companies for killing California jobs and resurrecting them in another state would be dumped. Very quickly. Especially if it also rewards them for selling off property here and rebuilding elsewhere. Or, put another way, if the law provides a tax incentive not to hire or invest in California in the first place. You'd repeal it. A no-brainer. Makes no sense, except for the companies using the loophole while profiting from selling their products here in the nation's largest consumer market.

Re "Vets struggle to go from war to work," April 26 Veterans are a minority group representing about 8% of our nation's population, selflessly serving on behalf of the other 92%. They pledged their lives to defend our Constitution, which protects the many freedoms we take for granted. Some delivered on that pledge, while many are disabled for life from their military injuries. AMVETS, a national veterans organization, proposed a federal law to include veterans as a protected class against employment discrimination that currently includes race, age, gender, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation or gender identity.