1 / California’s Polarized Workforce
The California economy and its workforce are diverse, complex, and ever-changing.
Any mention of jobs in California brings to mind Silicon Valley and the technology industry. A drive across the state’s major highways, however, gives a more complete picture of the state’s economy: farmland, factories and warehouses, universities, hospitals, state parks, and windmills dot the landscape. Aged school buses usher immigrant farm workers down grove-lined highways from field to field, towing portable toilets. Big rigs move trailers and shipping containers between ports, railroad depots, and distribution centers. Commuter cars ranging from Mercedes-Benz and Teslas to vintage classics and discontinued Geo Trackers and Kia Spectras carry workers to and from their jobs and their recreation. In short, the California economy and its workforce are diverse, complex, and ever-changing.
California’s economy once benefited from strong population growth, with immigration and domestic migration supplying a talented and diverse workforce.
By 2000, however, California’s population growth rate had slowed to the national average of less than 1 percent and continued to decline: between 2015 and 2020, California’s population grew at just 0.2 percent, about half of the national average.
Studies show that these declines resulted in part from a 55 percent reduction in international migration to the U.S. and a tripling of net domestic migration away from the state between 2015 and 2020.
The reasons for slowing population growth are likely even more complex and intertwined, with tax increases, job opportunities in other states, and California’s high cost-of-living contributing to the trend.
By 2000, California’s population growth rate had slowed to the national average of less than 1 percent and continued to decline between 2015 and 2020.
An additional factor may also be contributing to California’s slowing growth rate: an observable increase in occupational, skill, and wage polarization that includes growing income inequality and other related phenomena.
We focus on polarization as the key obstacle for California policymakers, organizations, and educational institutions to address when considering how to promote economic mobility, equality, and a thriving workforce.
Scholars of work and employment define “employment polarization” in a number of different ways. Some definitions are based on skills and occupations, highlighting a gap between the set of skills required for entry-level, low-paying jobs and the skills needed to perform in higher-paying, higher-quality jobs in upper levels of an organization.
This body of research shows that polarization makes it difficult to climb the ladder of a given occupation without formal, resource-intensive education or training. In other words, workers struggle to achieve mobility between these two types of occupations because occupational ladders are often missing many rungs: workers cannot readily acquire necessary skills to move towards higher-paying, higher-quality jobs by doing entry-level work.
Polarization is a key obstacle for California policymakers, organizations, and educational institutions.
The skills present in entry-level warehouse work, for example, do not translate well to a career in warehouse robotics; likewise, customer service skills do not align with the skills needed to change industries altogether and become a backend software engineer. Advancement out of entry-level jobs, then, is increasingly difficult as jobs polarize.