9-7-09

 
9-7-09
Modesto Bee
Experts say valley jobs will take years to rebound...Marijke Rowland
http://www.modbee.com/local/v-print/story/844622.html
This Labor Day, while many in the Northern San Joaquin Valley are grateful to have a day off, many others would do anything to have a day of work.
With the unemployment rate hovering in the high teens in most valley counties, economic forecasters can offer only cold comfort with predictions of several more months of job losses before the trend starts to gradually turn around.
"I think a year from now we're going to be talking about unemployment rates similar to what we have now," said Jeff Michael, director of the Business Forecasting Center at the University of the Pacific.
"I think we'll see our peak in unemployment this winter and start to improve a little from there. We'll start to have conversations about employment growth. But in terms of really getting back to where we were before the recession, we're looking at years -- maybe 2013, 2014."
In Stanislaus County, the jobless rate was 16.3 percent for July with 39,800 people unemployed, according to the state Employment Development Department.
Stanislaus and most of its surrounding counties well outpaced the state's record-setting unemployment rate of 11.9 percent for July.
Go to any job fair booth or ask any human resources director what the employment picture is like and they will tell you the number of applicants for each opening is overwhelming.
In April, soy milk production and packaging manufacturer SunOpta Inc. received 980 applications for 30 openings at its new Modesto plant.
Job seekers are faced with impersonal online applications and few call backs.
"One position I applied for had 140 applicants and I'm finding that typical wherever I go," said Ceres resident Mike Martin, while looking for work at a recent Modesto job fair. "It's really frustrating. I look at the stock market and I see some things recovering. But from a grass-roots level, I don't see any recovery yet."
California's recovery is further complicated by the state's budget crisis and cuts to such traditionally stable fields as education and government.
A report released Sunday by the nonpartisan, nonprofit California Budget Project shows that the past two years of job losses have wiped out the four previous years of job gains statewide. Some 950,000 nonfarm jobs have been lost, setting the state back to its 2000 employment level.
"This downturn stands apart from prior recessions for both the breadth and depth of job losses," said Alissa Anderson, deputy director for the California Budget Project, which advocates for the state's working families. "Nearly all major sectors have lost jobs in this recession. Jobs are just really hard to come by right now."
If, as expected, the valley follows its seasonal hiring patterns there should be another dip in employment by October lasting through the winter as farm work and accompanying manufacturing jobs shut down.
Nanette Potter, Central Valley regional manager for the state Employment Development Department, said most economic forecasters don't predict a significant pickup in employment until 2010. But because the valley is in a deeper rut than the rest of the state, it will take it longer to come out.
Still, the jobless rate hasn't matched its record-high from the last major recession when Stanislaus County hit 19.7 percent unemployment in February 1993.
Potter said each industry came out of that recession differently, with manufacturing leading the way later that same year and farming and construction lagging behind until 1995 and 1996, respectively.
"The valley is not going to be ahead of California," she said.
Michael, with UOP's Business Forecasting Center, said the region could be burdened with double-digit unemployment for five years.
"It has been a dramatic fall," he said. "It is hard to see what industry is going to lead us out of this. Where is the boost? Everyone is struggling right now."
He said any indicators of recovery will come from signs of stabilization in the housing market, slowdowns of store closures, loosening of credits market and increases in consumer confidence.
While painful, Michael said, this recession may alter personal and corporate spending habits to such an extent as to prevent another boom-and-bust recession of this magnitude.
"In some ways, this is making things more normal," he said. "We had almost a 15-year erosion of savings and more spending. ... So some of this is healthy. We want a recovery that is sustainable and not one that is artificially propped up by a new, nonsustainable thing."
Some think the area could emerge stronger as a result of the current crisis.
"With the economy the way it is, businesses know they have to do something different," said Lea Ann Hoogestraat, the Stanislaus Economic Development & Workforce Alliance economic development manager. "The reality is, some of these jobs simply won't come back. But as bad as things are, this is also a time of opportunity. It's a time to better your education or improve your business operation or just change directions."
The Alliance is approaching the problem from several angles.
Its Worknet has a database of more than 4,500 job seekers, which can be matched to employers with work orders. Worknet also works with the schools to improve the education of the work force and businesses to attract new industries and retain those already here.
The vast majority of the Alliance services are free, from application screening to demographic research, training workshops and career services.
Faced with realities of the job market, more unemployed workers are headed back to school to improve their skills, said Keith Griffith, Workforce Alliance senior manager for education. He said enrollment is up at Modesto Junior College, California State University, Stanislaus, and private vocational schools.
"Education is the cornerstone to economic development," he said. "If you don't have an educated work force you can't keep business or attract new ones.
The Alliance also is targeting industries with growth potential in the area including advanced manufacturing, transportation and distribution, renewable energy, biotech, agribusiness and health care.
Still, many of these initiatives may take decades to be fully realized.
"You can't turn a ship on a dime," Hoogestraat said. "When you talk about a community addressing the issue of education, that's a big ship. But you have to start somewhere.
"Our world has changed," she said. "The jobs that do come back may be better than the jobs that we lost. You have to eat the elephant one bite at a time."
Freso Bee
Wyo. community blames fracking for water woes...BOB MOEN,Associated Press Writer

http://www.fresnobee.com/559/v-print/story/1628670.html
PAVILLION, Wyo. A glass of water drawn from John Fenton's underground well outside his rural log home built against a rocky ridge looks and tastes as clear and refreshing as any bottled water.
But Fenton's water contains traces of arsenic, barium, cobalt, copper and other compounds identified in water tests that cannot be seen, smelled or tasted.
"It definitely makes you think every time you turn the faucet on," said Fenton, who farms hay on about 200 acres outside his home, located about 130 miles west of Casper.
He and other residents outside this small rural, farming community blame their water woes - and what they perceive to be the unusual health problems in their midst - on hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," a common technique used in drilling new oil and gas wells.
Those kind of complaints have surfaced across the county in areas where energy producers use fracking. But the industry says the practice is safe, and the federal government has exempted the process from its oversight.
Fracking involves injecting water, sand and chemicals under high pressure into the ground to force open channels in deep tight sand and rock formations so that oil and gas can be more easily recovered. Fracking has been used for decades, but improvements in the process and new drilling techniques have led to its use in unlocking heretofore large, unrecoverable natural gas reserves.
Some states are investigating complaints associated with fracking, but this community in central Wyoming is the only place where the Environmental Protection Agency has opened its own investigation, according to agency officials. Here, Fenton and his neighbors formed their own advocacy group, Pavillion Area Concerned Citizens, and pleaded with the EPA and state environmental officials to test their water wells.
Preliminary EPA testing in Pavillion has found traces of toxins in some drinking water wells, but the EPA is doing more tests to determine how much is there, whether it poses a health hazard and where it came from.
EnCana Corp., which owns the Pavillion gas field, says there's no evidence its operations have caused the water problems and there could be any number of sources of the contamination in a field that has been drilled for many years.
Legislation has been introduced in Congress that would place fracking under oversight of the Environmental Protection Agency. Industry is fighting the proposal as unwarranted and as a potential killer of both jobs and the its ability to tap the nation's abundant supplies of natural gas.
"You're familiar with the Jed Clampett well where you have a shotgun and you shoot it down there and the oil pops right out; they're all gone," said Chris Tucker, spokesman for Energy in Depth, an industry coalition formed to fight off federal regulation of fracking. "Now we produce much further down and have to use technology that is much more advanced."
Detractors contend fracking uses dangerous toxins and compounds and disturbs underground geology, fouling underground water sources and damaging water wells.
"There are numerous reports of groundwater contamination from this, but because fracturing is an unregulated practice nobody is monitoring the situation," said Gwen Lachelt, director of the Oil and Gas Accountability Project, a program of Earthworks, a nonprofit environmental watchdog group.
Currently, fracking is exempt from federal regulation because an EPA study determined in 2004 there was no evidence that fracking threatened drinking water. Critics sat the study was flawed.
The two sides also disagree over whether the individual states or the EPA should regulate fracking, and over whether the industry has adequately disclosed the contents of the fracking fluids.
Legislation introduced in Congress by Democratic Reps. Diana DeGette of Colorado and Maurice Hinchey of New York would place fracking under federal oversight.
DeGette's spokesman, Kristofer Eisenla, said the congresswoman recognizes the need for fracking to recover natural gas, but she also is concerned about stories of people losing wells and having drinking water contaminated in areas where fracking has taken place.
The EnCana gas field just outside Pavillion, population of about 165, is located on the Wind River Indian Reservation. The area is marked with buttes and rivers and streams that drain water from surrounding mountain ranges into the Wind River.
Looking out from Fenton's front porch, which runs long the width of his home, the Owl Creek Mountains rise in the distance on the far end of a lush, green, irrigated valley where Fenton raises hay and where a few homes are nestled in clumps of trees. Within about 100 feet of Fenton's porch and interspersed throughout the valley are small colonies of industry tanks, pipes and small buildings painted a beige, earth-tone color.
EnCana spokesman Randy Teeuwen said that drilling in the Pavillion field occurred for decades before his company acquired the field in 2004 and drilled more wells using the fracking technique.
Teeuwen said the company made sure it stayed away from groundwater that is used for drinking by area residents. Encana stopped drilling the area in 2006.
But residents say they began to notice water becoming discolored and smelling different.
Fenton said his mother-in-law lost her sense of smell and taste; another neighbor contracted a rare cancer; others reported seizures, miscarriages and liver disease.
Eleven of 39 wells tested here by the EPA this year showed some toxins, including the compounds found in Fenton's well. Two wells serving the town were found to be clean. EPA advised owners of contaminated wells to stop using them until it could do more testing.
"Something has happened to affect the quality of the water," said Fenton, a tall, lean man with large hands and a soft grip, "and the only thing that we know that's been done is the drilling of the gas wells."
But Tucker said the toxins and compounds could have come from any number of sources, including how previous oil and gas companies active in the field handled waste water pumped out with the gas and stored in pits, which may not have been lined properly.

San Francisco Chronicle
The high costs of ballast-water stowaways...Kari Lydersen, Washington Post
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/06/MNPP19GCDF.DTL&type=printable
The St. Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959 to great fanfare. The system of canals connecting the Atlantic Ocean and the five Great Lakes cut a lucrative international trade route through the heartland and gave the United States a refuge and staging ground for ships and submarines in case of war with the Soviet Union.
No one expected the seaway to become the key player in a different war, the invasion of nonnative aquatic species into the Great Lakes, which has dramatically altered ecosystems and costs hundreds of millions of dollars a year. About a third of the 186 invasive species in the Great Lakes are thought to have entered on oceangoing ships in the ballast water they take on for stabilization when carrying little or no cargo.
Zebra and quagga mussels from the Black Sea clog intake structures for municipal water systems and power plants. The mussels also gobble plankton so voraciously that little is left for other organisms. Round gobies and other invasive fish beat out native fish for food supplies, harming the lucrative commercial and sport fishing industries. Ballast is even blamed for the emergence of viral hemorrhagic septicemia, often called "fish ebola," resulting in large fish kills in the past several years.
And as infected pleasure boats are hauled to other lakes or species swim and float into tributaries, or even the Mississippi River, invasive species that came in with the ballast are spreading throughout the United States. Large quagga and zebra mussel colonies have been found in California and Nevada and are threatening to spread through California's many miles of municipal water pipes.
"The seaway turned the Great Lakes into a North American beachhead for invasives from other continents," said Jeff Alexander, author of the book "Pandora's Locks: The Opening of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway." "There's no telling how much more damage these critters will cause and how much more money they'll cost us."
No federal standards
There are no federal standards for ballast treatment, although the Environmental Protection Agency and the Coast Guard are working on requirements that should reduce the amount of live organisms in ballast water.
Since 1993, ships have been required to exchange their ballast in the Atlantic before entering the Seaway, replacing water from whatever port they had last visited with high-seas water containing little life.
But until 2008, U.S.-bound ships loaded with cargo and hence containing no ballast were exempt from any regulations. These ships are called NOBOBs, for No Ballast on Board. But their "empty" ballast tanks contain many tons of muddy slop teeming with bacteria, small marine organisms, eggs and larvae.
NOBOBs typically unload their cargo - often steel - in Great Lakes ports like Detroit and Cleveland, suck water into their ballast tanks, then head to other Great Lakes ports - Duluth, Toledo or Milwaukee - to load up on grain and dump their ballast, now mixed with the biologically rich mud.
New rinsing rule
Since last year, NOBOBs have been required to "swish and spit," or wash their tanks out with salt water, before entering the Seaway. This is an effort to kill most invasive organisms that could survive in the Great Lakes, because the species of concern generally come from brackish European estuaries, and their cells burst when immersed in ocean salt water. The practice appears to have been effective, as no new invasive species have been reported in the Great Lakes since the "bloody red shrimp" in 2006, according to David Reid, a research scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Nonetheless, scientists and legislators say the ballast water and mud that remain in tanks must be treated to avoid future invasive species or contamination by pathogens like cholera, E. coli and cryptosporidium, which also can lurk in tanks.
"Mother Nature always throws a variant at you," Reid said. "There are organisms that can survive salt exposure and survive in the Great Lakes. Having well-documented functional treatment systems that do kill as many of the organisms in ballast as physically possible is a better idea than just relying on ballast exchange or salinity exposure with flushing."
2004 treaty
In 2004, the International Maritime Organization, part of the United Nations, drafted a treaty mandating that dumped ballast water contain no more than 10 live organisms larger than 50 micrometers (about the width of a hair) per cubic meter of water. Pushing for stricter standards, the United States did not ratify the treaty, though it is the basis of permit requirements being considered by the EPA.
The Coast Guard issued long-awaited ballast regulations last week that basically mimic the International Maritime Organization's standards for five years and then become more stringent. The proposed regulations, open for a 90-day public comment period, are less ambitious than what environmentalists and many legislators say are needed to prevent more ballast-borne invasives.
For several years, Congress has considered legislation to set national ballast standards. The House passed a bill in 2008 that was supported by environmental and shipping interests, but the Senate did not pass it, partly because of fears raised by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., that the bill could pre-empt states' rights to regulate ballast.
States make own rules
With no federal action on ballast, states have been setting their own limits.
Steve Fisher, executive director of the American Great Lakes Ports Association, called different regulations in each state a "nightmare scenario." He said current technology cannot meet New York's standards, which are 100 times stronger than the IMO treaty, and he expects that the state will have to close ports or relax its rules.
Jim Tierney, assistant commissioner for water resources at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, disagreed. "It's not that hard to kill things," he said. "You can heat them up, crush them, pressurize them, put a chemical on them. We think this is a problem that can be solved in a very economical fashion."
Los Angeles Times
L.A.'s warehouse workers: invisible and exploited
Toiling in obscurity, L.A.-area warehouse workers endure harsh conditions and unfair wages...Harold Meyerson. Harold Meyerson is editor at large of the American Prospect and an Op-Ed columnist for the Washington Post
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-meyerson7-2009sep07,0,7175930,print.story
Los Angeles has long been a place where it's easy -- dangerously easy -- to labor in obscurity. Just ask any of the 90,000 workers employed at the immense warehouses of Ontario and Fontana, where more than half the goods unloaded at L.A. and Long Beach harbors are trucked, sorted and sent on their way to Wal-Marts, Targets, Home Depots and the like for a thousand miles around. The warehouses are a key switch-point in our new global supply chain, the place where Asian production meets American consumption.
Globally important thogh they may be, and even though they employ the largest concentration of private-sector blue-collar workers in Southern California, the warehouses are all but invisible. There are no signs on their exteriors, just gray or white windowless walls on the boxlike behemoths (some of them comprising more than a million square feet) abutting interstates 10 and 15 as they traverse the Inland Empire. The only way to identify the buildings is by the trucks parked at their loading docks: The one with 200 Wal-Mart trucks is a Wal-Mart warehouse.
But so far as its workers are concerned, it isn't. The retailers usually don't own the warehouses (they're owned by commercial property companies) or operate them (they're operated by logistics companies). And neither the retailers nor the property companies nor the logistics companies employ most of the workers. Though many have worked full time in the same job for years, a majority of them are actually employed by one or another of the 270 temp agencies that dot the local terrain.
Fontana and Ontario have become company towns in which the companies whose goods are being handled disavow any responsibility for the conditions in which tens of thousands of largely immigrant warehouse workers toil. At its best, warehouse work is fast-paced, risky and hot (many of the warehouses lack air conditioning, and temperatures inside can rise to over 100 degrees in summer). "If people have to go to the bathroom, they have to wait until the break," a worker named Homero, who loads trucks in an area warehouse, told me in May. "If people get sick, they have to stay on the job."
The temps -- even if their jobs are functionally indistinguishable from those of full-time employees -- get no benefits and make little more than minimum wage. A complaint that the Change to Win labor federation (which has been endeavoring to organize these workers) has filed with the Labor Department documents a wide range of alleged abuses to which workers at dozens of warehouses have been subjected, including being compelled to work extra hours either for no overtime or for no pay at all, and being ordered not to report on-the-job injuries to government agencies.
The temp system at the warehouses is exquisitely calibrated to keep the supply chain fast and cheap -- and to protect retailers from the legal liability that comes with being an employer of record. As Edna Bonacich and Jake B. Wilson have documented in their 2008 book, "Getting the Goods: Ports, Labor, and the Logistics Revolution," the temps in one retailer's warehouses -- and this was before the economic downturn that devastated the Inland Empire -- were paid just $8.50 an hour when hired, though some could eventually work their way up to $12. The full-time workers employed by the company made about one-third more than the temps.
The descent of Southern California warehouse work to the level of temp exploitation is relatively recent -- a consequence, chiefly, of the torrent of Chinese imports sped through the region by mega-retailers such as Wal-Mart, which have the power to force wage reductions all along the global supply chain. As Bonacich and Juan David de Lara documented in a study released this February, temporary employment in the Inland Empire grew by a stunning 575% from 1990 to 2007.
Blue-collar L.A. has never had the prominence of blue-collar Detroit or blue-collar Chicago: "The industry" in Los Angeles means show business. Even when Los Angeles was the second-largest producer of cars (the auto factories all closed in the 1970s and '80s) and the epicenter of aerospace production (the defense plants shuttered or scaled way back at the end of the Cold War), L.A.'s blue-collar world might have been on another planet for all that millions of Angelenos ever saw or thought about it. Los Angeles is so vast and segmented that it has long been more invisible to itself than any other American city.
But even by L.A.'s standards of blue-collar invisibility, many warehouse workers in the Inland Empire labor in profound obscurity -- off in a corner of greater Los Angeles, in unmarked mega-sweatshops, working long hours for temp wages with none of the rights of full-time employees.
On Labor Day, we need to acknowledge both their existence and the value of their work -- and support their efforts to get decently paid for it.