Labor

Nov. 5 (UPI) — ADP reported Wednesday that jobs growth for October provided better insight after fears of further decline after September’s report.

Some 42,000 jobs were added over the month in companies with at least 250 workers following September’s drop of around 29,000, according to Automatic Data Processing Inc. However, a revision showed 3,000 fewer jobs in September.

“Private employers added jobs in October for the first time since July, but hiring was modest relative to what we reported earlier this year,” said Nela Richardson, ADP’s chief economist.

ADP data showed that small business lost around 34,000 employees.

“Meanwhile, pay growth has been largely flat for more than a year, indicating that shifts in supply and demand are balanced,” Richardson said in a release.

Job categories in utility, transpiration and trade gained 47,000, which offset losses in other job areas. In addition, around 26,000 jobs were added in health and education services with 11,000 in finance.

A decline in some 17,000 roles in the area of information services was seen despite the ongoing boom in the artificial intelligence industry.

But the manufacturing sector continues to struggle in the growing aftermath of tax-like tariffs imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump in his bid to revive American manufacturing jobs.

Small business account for three of every four U.S. jobs, according to ADP.

ADP’s chief economist stated the shift away from growth in small business is noteworthy.

“While big companies make headlines, small companies drive hiring,” Richardson told CNBC.

“So to see that weakness at the small company level is still a concern, and I think that’s one of the reasons why the recovery has been so tepid.”

The payroll processing giant reported an average monthly growth of 60,000 jobs a month for the first half of the year, but that figure showed a decline in the year’s second half.

The historic ongoing shutdown by the Republican-controlled federal government resulted in a suspension in data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which typically is at the forefront of detailed job data. In addition, a temporary stop in SNAP benefits is poised to heighten food insecurity in the United States.

You may not know Eliot Mack’s name, but if a small robot has ever crept around your kitchen, you know his work.

Before he turned his MIT-trained mind to filmmaking, Mack helped lead a small team of engineers trying to solve a deeply relatable problem: how to avoid vacuuming. Whether it was figuring out how to get around furniture legs or unclog the brushes after a run-in with long hair, Mack designed everything onscreen first with software, troubleshooting virtually and getting 80% of the way there before a single part was ever manufactured.

The result was the Roomba.

When Mack pivoted to filmmaking in the early 2000s, he was struck by how chaotic Hollywood’s process felt. “You pitch the script, get the green light and you’re flying into production,” he says, sounding both amused and baffled. “There’s no CAD template, no centralized database. I was like, how do movies even get made?”

That question sent Mack down a new path, trading dust bunnies for the creative bottlenecks that slow Hollywood down.

In 2004 he founded Lightcraft Technology, a startup developing what would later be known as virtual production tools, born out of his belief that if you could design a robot in software, you should be able to design a shot the same way. The company’s early system, Previzion, sold for $180,000 and was used on sci-fi and fantasy shows like “V” and “Once Upon a Time.” But Jetset, its latest AI-assisted tool set, runs on an iPhone and offers a free tier, with pro features topping out at just $80 a month. It lets filmmakers scan a location, drop it into virtual space and block out scenes with camera moves, lighting and characters. They can preview shots, overlay elements and organize footage for editing — all from a phone. No soundstage, no big crew, no gatekeepers. Lightcraft’s pitch: “a movie studio in your pocket.”

A series on how the AI revolution is reshaping the creative foundations of Hollywood — from storytelling and performance to production, labor and power.

The goal, Mack says, is to put more power in the hands of the people making the work. “One of the big problems is how siloed Hollywood is,” he says. “We talked to an Oscar-winning editor who said, ‘I’m never going to get to make my movie’ — he was pigeonholed as just an editor. Same with an animator we know who has two Oscars.”

Eliot Mack, CEO of Lightcraft, an AI-powered virtual-production startup, wants to give creators the power and freedom to bring their ideas to life.

(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)

To Mack, the revolution of Jetset recalls the scrappy, guerrilla spirit of Roger Corman’s low-budget productions, which launched the early careers of directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. For generations of creatives stuck waiting on permission or funding, he sees this moment as a reset button.

“The things you got good at — writing, directing, acting, creating, storytelling — they’re still crazy useful,” he says. “What’s changing is the amount of schlepping you have to do before you get to do the fun stuff. Your 20s are a gift. You want to be creating at the absolute speed of sound. We’re trying to get to a place where you don’t have to ask anyone. You can just make the thing.”

AI is reshaping nearly every part of the filmmaking pipeline. Storyboards can now be generated from a script draft. Lighting and camera angles can be tested before anyone touches a piece of gear. Rough cuts, placeholder VFX, even digital costume mock-ups can all be created before the first shot is filmed. What once took a full crew, a soundstage and a six-figure budget can now happen in minutes, sometimes at the hands of a single person with a laptop.

This wave of automation is arriving just as Hollywood is gripped by existential anxiety. The 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes brought the industry to a standstill and put AI at the center of a fight over its future. Since then, production has slowed, crew sizes have shrunk and the streaming boom has given way to consolidation and cost-cutting.

According to FilmLA, on-location filming in Greater Los Angeles dropped 22.4% in early 2025 compared with the year before. For many of the crew members and craftspeople still competing for those jobs, AI doesn’t feel like an innovation. It feels like a new way to justify doing more with less, only to end up with work that’s less original or creative.

“AI scrapes everything we artists have made off the internet and creates a completely static, banal world that can never imagine anything that hasn’t happened before,” documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis warned during a directors panel at the 2023 Telluride Film Festival, held in the midst of the strikes. “That’s the real weakness of the AI dream — it’s stuck with the ghosts. And I think we’ll get fed up with that.”

How you feel about these changes often depends on where you sit and how far along you are in your career. For people just starting out, AI can offer a way to experiment, move faster and bypass the usual barriers to entry. For veterans behind the scenes, it often feels like a threat to the expertise they’ve spent decades honing.

Past technological shifts — the arrival of sound, the rise of digital cameras, the advancement of CGI — changed how movies were made, but not necessarily who made them. Each wave brought new roles: boom operators and dialogue coaches, color consultants and digital compositors. Innovation usually meant more jobs, not fewer.

But AI doesn’t just change the tools. It threatens to erase the people who once used the old ones.

Diego Mariscal has seen first hand as AI has cut potential jobs for grips.

(Jennifer Rose Clasen)

Diego Mariscal, 43, a veteran dolly grip who has worked on “The Mandalorian” and “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” saw the writing on the wall during a recent shoot. A visual effects supervisor opened his laptop to show off a reel of high-end commercials and something was missing. “There were no blue screens — none,” Mariscal recalls. “That’s what we do. We put up blues as grips. You’d normally hire an extra 10 people and have an extra three days of pre-rigging, setting up all these blue screens. He was like, ‘We don’t need it anymore. I just use AI to clip it out.’”

Mariscal runs Crew Stories, a private Facebook group with nearly 100,000 members, where working crew members share job leads, trade tips and voice their growing fears. He tries to keep up with the steady drip of AI news. “I read about AI all day, every day,” he says. “At least 20 posts a day.”

His fear isn’t just about fewer jobs — it’s about what comes next. “I’ve been doing this since I was 19,” Mariscal says of his specialized dolly work, which involves setting up heavy equipment and guiding the camera smoothly through complex shots. “I can push a cart in a parking lot. I can push a lawnmower. What else can I do?”

Who wins, who loses and what does James Cameron think?

Before AI and digital doubles, Mike Marino learned the craft of transformation the human way: through hands-on work and a fascination that bordered on obsession.

Marino was 5 years old when he first saw “The Elephant Man” on HBO. Horrified yet transfixed, he became fixated on prosthetics and the emotional power they could carry. As a teenager in New York, he pored over issues of Fangoria, studied monsters and makeup effects and experimented with sculpting his own latex masks on his bedroom floor.

Prosthetics artist Mike Marino asks a big question related to generative AI: What role do the human creatives play?

(Sean Dougherty / For The Times)

Decades later, Marino, 48, has become one of Hollywood’s leading makeup artists, earning Oscar nominations for “Coming 2 America,” “The Batman” and last year’s dark comedy “A Different Man,” in which he helped transform Sebastian Stan into a disfigured actor.

His is the kind of tactile, handcrafted work that once seemed irreplaceable. But today AI tools are increasingly capable of achieving similar effects digitally: de-aging actors, altering faces, even generating entire performances. What used to take weeks of experimentation and hours in a makeup trailer can now be approximated with a few prompts and a trained model. To Marino, AI is more than a new set of tools. It’s a fundamental change in what it means to create.

“If AI is so good it can replace a human, then why have any human beings?” he says. “This is about taste. It’s about choice. I’m a human being. I’m an artist. I have my own ideas — mine. Just because you can make 10,000 spaceships in a movie, should you?”

Marino is no technophobe. His team regularly uses 3D scanning and printing. But he draws the line at outsourcing creative judgment to a machine. “I’m hoping there are artists who want to work with humans and not machines,” he says. “If we let AI just run amok with no taste, no choice, no morality behind it, then we’re gone.”

Not everyone sees AI’s rise in film production as a zero-sum game. Some technologists imagine a middle path. Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and one of the world’s leading AI researchers, believes the future of filmmaking lies in a “human-machine partnership.”

AI, Rus argues, can take on time-consuming tasks like animating background extras, color correction or previsualizing effects, freeing up people to focus on what requires intuition and taste. “AI can help with the routine work,” she says. “But the human touch and emotional authenticity are essential.”

Few directors have spent more time grappling with the dangers and potential of artificial intelligence than James Cameron. Nearly 40 years before generative tools entered Hollywood’s workflow, he imagined a rogue AI triggering global apocalypse in 1984’s “The Terminator,” giving the world Skynet — now a cultural shorthand for the dark side of machine intelligence. Today, he continues to straddle that line, using AI behind the scenes on the upcoming “Avatar: Fire and Ash” to optimize visual effects and performance-capture, while keeping creative decisions in human hands. The latest sequel, due Dec. 19, promises to push the franchise’s spectacle and scale even further; a newly released trailer reveals volcanic eruptions, aerial battles and a new clan of Na’vi.

A scene from “Avatar: The Way of Water.” Director James Cameron differentiates between using machine-learning to reduce monotonous movie-making work and generative AI.

(Courtesy of 20th Century Studios/Courtesy of 20th Century Studios)

“You can automate a lot of processes that right now tie up a lot of artists doing mundane tasks,” Cameron told The Times in 2023 at a Beyond Fest screening of his 1989 film “The Abyss.” “So if we could accelerate the postproduction pipeline, then we can make more movies. Then those artists will get to do more exciting things.”

For Cameron, the promise of AI lies in efficiency, not elimination. “I think in our particular industry, it’s not going to replace people; it’s going to free them to do other things,” he believes. “It’s going to accelerate the process and bring the price down, which would be good because, you know, some movies are a little more expensive than others. And a lot of that has to do with human energy.”

Cameron himself directed five films between 1984 and 1994 and only three in the three decades since, though each one has grown increasingly complex and ambitious.

That said, Cameron has never been one to chase shortcuts for their own sake. “I think you can make pre-viz and design easier, but I don’t know if it makes it better,” he says. “I mean, if easy is your thing. Easy has never been my thing.”

He draws a line between the machine-learning techniques his team has used since the first “Avatar” to help automate tedious tasks and the newer wave of generative AI models making headlines today.

“The big explosion has been around image-based generative models that use everything from every image that’s ever been created,” he says. “We’d never use any of them. The images we make are computer-created, but they’re not AI-created.”

In his view, nothing synthetic can replace the instincts of a flesh-and-blood artist. “We have human artists that do all the designs,” he says. “We don’t need AI. We’ve got meat-I. And I’m one of the meat-artists that come up with all that stuff. We don’t need a computer. Maybe other people need it. We don’t.”

Reshaping creativity — and creative labor

Rick Carter didn’t go looking for AI as a tool. He discovered it as a lifeline.

The two-time Oscar-winning production designer, who worked with Cameron on “Avatar” and whose credits include “Jurassic Park” and “Forrest Gump,” began experimenting with generative AI tools like Midjourney and Runway during the pandemic, looking for a way to keep his creative instincts sharp while the industry was on pause. A longtime painter, he was drawn to the freedom the programs offered.

“I saw that there was an opportunity to create images where I didn’t have to go to anybody else for approval, which is the way I would paint,” Carter says by phone from Paris. “None of the gatekeeping would matter. I have a whole lot of stories on my own that I’ve tried to get into the world in various ways and suddenly there was a way to visualize them.”

Midjourney and Runway can create richly detailed images — and in Runway’s case, short video clips — from a text prompt or a combination of text and visuals. Trained on billions of images and audiovisual materials scraped from the internet, these systems learn to mimic style, lighting, composition and form, often with eerie precision. In a production pipeline, these tools can help concept artists visualize characters or sets, let directors generate shot ideas or give costume designers and makeup artists a fast way to test looks, long before physical production begins.

But as these tools gain traction in Hollywood, a deeper legal and creative dilemma is coming into focus: Who owns the work they produce? And what about the copyrighted material used to train them?

In June, Disney and Universal filed a federal copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, accusing the company of generating unauthorized replicas of characters such as Spider-Man, Darth Vader and Shrek using AI models trained on copyrighted material: what the suit calls a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.” It’s the most high-profile of several legal challenges now putting copyright law to the test in the age of generative AI.

“Forrest Gump” director Robert Zemeckis, left, with production designer Rick Carter at an art installation of the movie’s famed bench. (Carter family)

(Carter family)

Working with generative models, Carter began crafting what he calls “riffs of consciousness,” embracing AI as a kind of collaborative partner, one he could play off of intuitively. The process reminded him of the loose, improvisational early stages of filmmaking, a space he knows well from decades of working with directors like Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg.

“I’ll just start with a visual or a word prompt and see how it iterates from there and what it triggers in my mind,” Carter says. “Then I incorporate that so it builds on its own in an almost free-associative way. But it’s still based upon my own intuitive, emotional, artistic, even spiritual needs at that moment.”

He describes the experience as a dialogue between two minds, one digital and one human: “One AI is artificial intelligence. The other AI is authentic intelligence — that’s us. We’ve earned it over this whole span of time on the planet.”

Sometimes, Carter says, the most evocative results come from mistakes. While sketching out a story about a hippie detective searching for a missing woman in the Himalayas, he accidentally typed “womb” into ChatGPT instead of “woman.” The AI ran with it, returning three pages of wild plot ideas involving gurus, seekers and a bizarre mystery set in motion by the disappearance.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “I would never have taken it that far. The AI is so precocious. It is trying so much to please that it will literally make something out of the mistake you make.”

Carter hasn’t used generative AI on a film yet; most of his creations are shared only with friends. But he says the technology is already slipping into creative workflows in covert ways. “There are issues with copyrights with most of the studios so for now, it’s going to be mostly underground,” he says. “People will use it but they won’t acknowledge that they’re using it — they’ll have an illustrator do something over it, or take a photo so there’s no digital trail.”

Carter has lived through a major technological shift before. “I remember when we went from analog to digital, from ‘Jurassic Park’ on,” he says. “There were a lot of wonderful artists who could draw and paint in ways that were just fantastic but they couldn’t adapt. They didn’t want to — even the idea of it felt like the wrong way to make art. And, of course, most of them suffered because they didn’t make it from the Rolodex to the database in terms of people calling them up.”

He worries that some artists may approach the technology with a rigid sense of authorship. “Early on, I found that the less I used my own ego as a barometer for whether something was artistic, the more I leaned into the process of collaboratively making something bigger than the sum of its parts — and the bigger and better the movies became.”

Others, like storyboard artist Sam Tung, are bracing against the same wave with a quiet but unshakable defiance.

Tung, whose credits include “Twisters” and Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of “The Odyssey,” has spent the last two years tracking the rise of generative tools, not just their capabilities but their implications. As co-chair of the Animation Guild’s AI Committee, he has been on the front lines of conversations about how these technologies could reshape creative labor.

To artists like Tung, the rise of generative tools feels deeply personal. “If you are an illustrator or a writer or whatever, you had to give up other things to take time to develop those skills,” he says. “Nobody comes out of the womb being able to draw or write or act. Anybody who does that professionally spent years honing those skills.”

Tung has no interest in handing that over to a machine. “It’s not that I’m scared of it — I just don’t need it,” he says. “If I want to draw something or paint something, I’ll do it myself. That way it’s exactly what I want and I actually enjoy the process. When people tell me they responded to a drawing I did or a short film I made with friends, it feels great. But anything I’ve made with AI, I’ve quickly forgotten about. There’s basically nothing I get from putting it on social media, other than the ire of my peers.”

What unsettles him isn’t just the slickness of AI’s output but how that polish is being used to justify smaller crews and faster turnarounds. “If this is left unchecked, it’s very easy to imagine a worst-case scenario where team sizes and contract durations shrink,” Tung says. “A producer who barely understands how it works might say, ‘Don’t you have AI to do 70% of this? Why do you need a whole week to turn around a sequence? Just press the button that says: MAKE MOVIE.’ ”

At 73, Carter isn’t chasing jobs. His legacy is secure. “If they don’t hire me again, that’s OK,” he says. “I’m not in that game anymore.” He grew up in Hollywood — his father was Jack Lemmon’s longtime publicist and producing partner — and has spent his life watching the industry evolve. Now, he’s witnessing a reckoning unlike any he, or anyone else, has ever imagined.

“I do have concerns about who is developing AI and what their values are,” he says. “What they use all this for is not necessarily something I would approve of — politically, socially, emotionally. But I don’t think I’m in a position to approve or not.”

Earlier this year, the Palisades fire destroyed Carter’s home, taking with it years of paintings and personal artwork. AI, he says, has given him a way to keep creating through the upheaval. “It saved me through the pandemic, and now it’s saving me through the fire,” he says, as if daring the universe to test him again. “It’s like, go ahead, throw something else at me.”

‘Prompt and pray?’ Not so fast

Many in the industry may still be dipping a toe into the waters of AI. Verena Puhm dove in.

The Austrian-born filmmaker studied acting and directing in Munich and Salzburg before moving to Los Angeles, where she built a globe-spanning career producing, writing and developing content for international networks and streamers. Her credits range from CNN’s docuseries “History of the Sitcom” to the German reboot of the cult anthology “Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction” and a naval documentary available on Tubi. More recently, she has channeled that same creative range into a deepening exploration of generative tools.

Puhm first began dabbling with AI while using Midjourney to design a pitch deck, but it wasn’t until she entered a timed generative AI filmmaking challenge at the 2024 AI on the Lot conference — informally dubbed a “gen battle” — that the creative potential of the medium hit her.

“In two hours, I made a little mock commercial,” she remembers, proudly. “It was actually pretty well received and fun. And I was like, Oh, wow, I did this in two hours. What could I do in two days or two weeks?”

What started as experimentation soon became a second act. This summer, Puhm was named head of studio for Dream Lab LA, a new creative arm of Luma AI, which develops generative video tools for filmmakers and creators. There, she’s helping shape new storytelling formats and supporting emerging creators working at the intersection of cinema and technology. She may not be a household name, but in the world of experimental storytelling, she’s fast becoming a key figure.

Verena Puhm, a director, writer and producer, has used generative AI in a number of her projects, says it’s breaking down barriers to entry.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

Some critics dismiss AI filmmaking as little more than “prompt and pray”: typing in a few words and hoping something usable comes out. Puhm bristles at the phrase.

“Anybody that says that tells me they’ve never tried it at all, because it is not that easy and simple,” she says. “You can buy a paintbrush at Home Depot for, what, $2? That doesn’t make you a painter. When smartphones first came out, there was a lot of content being made but that didn’t mean everyone was a filmmaker.”

What excites her most is how AI is breaking down the barriers that once kept ambitious ideas out of reach. Luma’s new Modify Video tool lets filmmakers tweak footage after it’s shot, changing wardrobe, aging a character, shifting the time of day, all without reshoots or traditional VFX. It can turn a garage into a spaceship, swap a cloudy sky for the aurora borealis or morph an actor into a six-eyed alien, no green screen required.

“It’s such a relief as an artist,” Puhm says. “If there’s a project I’ve been sitting on for six years because I didn’t have a $5 million budget — suddenly there’s no limit. I remember shopping projects around and being told by producers, ‘This scene has to go, that has to go,’ just to keep the budget low. Now everything is open.”

That sense of access resonates far beyond Los Angeles. At a panel during AI on the Lot, “Blue Beetle” director Ángel Manuel Soto reflected on how transformative AI might have been when he was first starting out. “I wish tools like this existed when I wanted to make movies in Puerto Rico, because nobody would lend me a camera,” he said. “Access to equipment is a privilege we sometimes take for granted. I see this helping kids like me from the projects tell stories without going bankrupt — or stealing, which I don’t condone.”

Puhm welcomes criticism of AI but only when it’s informed. “If you hate AI and you’ve actually tested the tools and educated yourself, I’ll be your biggest supporter,” she says. “But if you’re just speaking out of fear, with no understanding, then what are you even basing your opinion on?”

She understands why some filmmakers feel rattled, especially those who, like her, grew up dreaming of seeing their work on the big screen. “I still want to make features and TV series — that’s what I set out to do,” she says. “I hope movie theaters don’t go away. But if the same story I want to tell reaches millions of people on a phone and they’re excited about it, will I really care that it wasn’t in a theater?”

“I just feel like we have to adapt to the reality of things,” she continues. “That might sometimes be uncomfortable, but there is so much opportunity if you lean in. Right now any filmmaker can suddenly tell a story at a high production value that they could have never done before, and that is beautiful and empowering.”

For many, embracing AI boils down to a simple choice: adapt or get cut from the frame.

Hal Watmough, a BAFTA-winning British editor with two decades of experience, first began experimenting with AI out of a mix of curiosity and dread. “I was scared,” he admits. “This thing was coming into the industry and threatening our jobs and was going to make us obsolete.” But once he started playing with tools like Midjourney and Runway, he quickly saw how they could not only speed up the process but allow him to rethink what his career could be.

For an editor used to working only with what he was given, the ability to generate footage on the fly, cut with it immediately and experiment endlessly without waiting on a crew or a shoot was a revelation. “It was still pretty janky at that stage, but I could see the potential,” he says. “It was kind of intoxicating. I started to think, I’d like to start making things that I haven’t seen before.”

After honing his skills with various AI tools, Watmough created a wistful, vibrant five-minute animated short called “LATE,” about an aging artist passing his wisdom to a young office worker. Over two weeks, he generated 2,181 images using AI, then curated and refined them frame by frame to shape the story.

Earlier this year, he submitted “LATE” to what was billed as the world’s first AI animation contest, hosted by Curious Refuge, an online education hub for creative technologists — and, to his delight, he won. The prize included $10,000, a pitch meeting with production company Promise Studios and, as an absurd bonus, his face printed on a potato. But for Watmough, the real reward was the sense that he had found a new creative identity.

“There’s something to the fact that the winner of the first AI animation competition was an editor,” Watmough says. “With the advent of AI, yes, you could call yourself a filmmaker but essentially I’d say most people are editors. You’re curating, selecting, picking what you like — relying on your taste.”

Thanks to AI, he says he’s made more personal passion projects in the past year and a half than during his entire previous career. “I’ll be walking or running and ideas just come. Now I can go home that night and try them,” he says. “None of that would exist without AI. So either something exists within AI or it never exists at all. And all the happiness and fulfillment that comes with it for the creator doesn’t exist either.”

Watmough hasn’t entirely lost his fear of what AI might do to the creative workforce, even as he is energized by what it makes possible. “A lot of people I speak to in film and TV are worried about losing their jobs and I’m not saying the infrastructure roles won’t radically change,” he says. “But I don’t think AI is going to replace that many — if any — creative people.”

What it will do, he says, is raise the bar. “If anyone can create anything, then average work will basically become extinct or pointless. AI can churn out remakes until the cows come home. You’ll have to pioneer to exist.”

He likens the current moment to the birth of cinema more than a century ago — specifically the Lumière brothers’ “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat,” the 1896 short that famously startled early audiences. In the silent one-minute film, a steam train rumbles toward the camera, growing larger. Some viewers reportedly leaped from their seats, convinced it was about to crash into them.

“People ran out of the theater screaming,” Watmough says. “Now we don’t even think about it. With AI, we’re at that stage again. We’re watching the steam train come into the station and people are either really excited or they’re running out of the theater in fear. That’s where we are, right at the start. And the potential is limitless.”

Then again, he adds with a dry laugh, “I’m an eternal optimist, so take what I say with a grain of salt.”

With the fate of President’s Trump’s right-wing agenda at stake, the California ballot measure crafted to tilt Congress to Democratic control has turned into a fight among millionaires and billionaires, a former president, a past movie-star governor and the nation’s top partisans.

Californians have been inundated with political ads popping up on every screen — no cellphone, computer or living-room television is spared — trying to sway them about Proposition 50, which will reconfigure the districts of the largest state congressional delegation in the union.

Besides opposing pleas from former President Obama and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the state’s powerful, left-leaning labor unions are another factor that may influence the outcome of the Nov. 4 special election.

Unions representing California school teachers, carpenters, state workers and nurses have plowed more than $23 million into efforts to pass Proposition 50, according to an analysis of campaign finance disclosure reports about donations exceeding $100,000. That’s nearly one-third of the six-figure donations reported through Thursday.

Not only do these groups have major interests in the state capitol, including charter school reform, minimum wage hikes and preserving government healthcare programs, they also are deeply aligned with efforts by Gov. Gavin Newsom and his fellow Democrats to put their party in control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2026 election.
“There are real issues here that are at stake,” said veteran Democratic strategist Gale Kaufman, who has represented several unions that have contributed to Newsom’s committee supporting Proposition 50.

“There’s always a risk when making sizable donations, that you’re putting yourself out there,” Kaufman said. “But the truth is on Proposition 50, I think it’s much less calculated than normal contributions. It really is about the issue, not about currying favor with members of the Legislature, or the congressional delegation, or the governor. Even though, of course, it benefits them if we win.”

High stakes brings in big money from across the nation

Newsom’s pro-Proposition 50 committee has raised more than $116 million, according to campaign disclosure filings through Thursday afternoon, though that number is sure to increase once additional donations are disclosed in the latest fundraising reports that are due by midnight Thursday.

The multimillion-dollar donations provide the best evidence of what’s at stake, and how Proposition 50 could determine control of the House during the final two years of Trump’s presidency. If the Democrats take control of the House, not only could that derail major parts of Trumps agenda, it probably would lead to a slew of congressional hearings on Trump’s immigration crackdown, use of the military in American cities, accepting a $400-million luxury airliner from Qatari’s royal family, the cutting of research funding to universities and the president’s ties to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, among many others.

The House Majority PAC — the Democrats’ congressional fundraising arm — has donated at least $15 million to the pro-Proposition 50 campaign, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) was in Los Angeles to campaign for the ballot measure last weekend. Obama joined Newsom on a livestream promoting the proposition Wednesday, and Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin hosted a bilingual phone bank in Los Angeles on Thursday.

“Make no mistake about what they’re trying to do and why it’s so important that we fight back,” Martin said. “We’re not going to be the only party with one hand tied behind our back. If they want a showdown, we’re going to give them a showdown and in just a little under two weeks it starts right here with Prop. 50 in California.”

Billionaire financier George Soros — a generous donor to liberal causes and a bogeyman to Republicans — has contributed $10 million. Others have chosen to fund separate entities campaigning in favor of Proposition 50, notably billionaire hedge-fund founder Tom Steyer, who chipped in $12 million.

On the opposition side, the largest donor is Charles Munger Jr., the son of the longtime investment partner of billionaire Warren Buffett, who has contributed $32.8 million to one of the two main committees opposing Proposition 50. The Congressional Leadership Fund — the GOP’s political arm in the House — has donated $5 million to the other main anti-Proposition 50 committee and $8 million to the California Republican Party.

Although Republicans may control the White House and Congress, the California GOP wields no real power in Sacramento, so it’s not surprising that Republican efforts opposing Proposition 50 have not received major donations from entities with business before the state.

The California Chamber of Commerce opted to remain neutral on Proposition 50. Chevron and the California Resources Corp., petroleum companies that have given to California Republicans in the past, also remain on the sidelines.

In contrast, Democrats control every statewide office and hold supermajorities in both houses of the California Legislature. The pro-Proposition 50 campaign has been showered with donations from groups aligned with Sacramento’s legislative leaders — with labor organizations chief among them.

Among the labor donors, the powerful carpenters unions have donated at least $4 million. Newsom hailed them in July when he signed legislation altering a landmark environmental law for urban apartment developments to boost the supply of housing. The California Conference of Carpenters union has become one of the most pro-housing voices in the state.

“This is the third of the last four years we’ve been together signing landmark housing reforms, and it simply would not have happened without the Carpenters,” Newsom said at the time.

Daniel M. Curtin, director of the California Conference of Carpenters, pointed to a letter he wrote to legislators in August urging them to put redistricting on the ballot because of the effect of Trump’s policies on the state’s workers.

“These are not normal times, and this isn’t politics as usual. Not only has the Trump administration denied disaster assistance to victims of California’s devastating forest fires, he’s damaging our CA economy with mass arrests of law-abiding workers without warrants,” wrote Curtin, whose union has 70,000 members in the state. “The Trump administration is now unilaterally withdrawing from legally binding union collective bargaining agreements with federal workforce unions. The President has made it clear that this is just the beginning.”

Proposition 50 was prompted by Trump urging Republican leaders in Texas to redraw their congressional districts to boost the number of GOP members in the House and keep the party in control after the 2026 election. Newsom sought to counter the move by altering California’s congressional boundaries in a rare mid-decade redistricting.

With 52 members in the House, the state has the largest congressional delegation in the nation. But unlike many states, California’s districts are drawn by an independent commission created by voters in 2010 in an effort to end partisan gerrymandering and incumbent protection.

The state’s districts would not have been redrawn until after the 2030 U.S. census, but the Legislature and Newsom agreed in August to put Proposition 50, which would give Democrats the potential to pick up five seats, on the November ballot.

Money from California unions pours in

Although much of the money supporting the efforts comes from wealth Democratic donors and partisan groups aimed at helping Democrats take control of Congress, a significant portion comes from labor unions.

The Service Employees International Union, which represents more than 700,000 healthcare workers, social workers, in-home caregivers and school employees and other state and local government workers, has contributed more than $5.5 million to the committee.

On Oct. 12, the union celebrated Newsom signing bills ensuring that workers, regardless of immigration status, are informed about their civil and labor rights under state and federal law as well as updating legal guidance to state and local agencies about protecting private information, such as court records and medical data, from being misused by federal authorities.

“Thank you to Governor Newsom for … standing up to federal overreach and indiscriminate, violent attacks on our communities,” David Huerta, president of SEIU California, said in a statement.

Huerta was arrested during the first day of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in Los Angeles in June and charged with a felony. But federal prosecutors are instead pursuing a misdemeanor case against him, according to a Friday court filing.

An SEIU representative did not respond to requests for comment.

The California Teachers Assn., another potent force in state politics, has contributed more than $3.3 million, along with millions more from other education unions such as the National Education Assn., the California Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of Teachers.

CTA had a mixed record in this year’s legislative session.

Newsom vetoed a bill to crack down on charter school fraud, Senate Bill 414. The CTA opposed the bill, arguing that it didn’t go far enough to target fraud in some of the schools, and had urged the governor to reject it.

Newsom signed CTA-backed bills that placed strict limits on ICE agents’ access to school grounds. But he also vetoed union-backed bill that would have required the state Board of Education to adopt health education instructional materials by July 1, 2028.

CTA President David Goldberg said their donations are driven not only by issues important to the union’s members, but also the students they serve who are dependent on federally funded assistance programs and impacted by policies such as immigration.

“It’s about our livelihood but it really is about fundamental issues … for people who serve students who are just incredibly under attack right now,” Goldberg said.

“The governor’s support for labor would be exactly the same with or without Proposition 50 on the ballot. But he would acknowledge this year is more urgent than ever for labor and working people,” said Newsom spokesperson Bob Salladay. “Trump is taking a wrecking ball to collective bargaining, to fair wages and safe working conditions. He would be backing them up under any circumstances, but especially now.”

Critics of Proposition 50 argue that these contributions are among the reasons voters should oppose the ballot measure.

“The independent redistricting commission exists to prevent conflicts of interest and money from influencing line drawing,” said Amy Thoma, a spokesperson for the Voters First Coalition, the committee backed by Munger Jr., who bankrolled the 2010 ballot measure to create the independent commission. “That’s why we want to preserve its independence.”

Other labor leaders argued that although they are not always in lockstep with Newsom, they need to support Proposition 50 because of the importance of Democrats winning the congressional majority next year.

Lorena Gonzalez, the head of the powerful California Labor Federation, said the timing of the member unions’ donations of millions of dollars to Newsom’s ballot measure committee for an election taking place shortly after the bill-signing period was “unfortunate” and “weird.”

“Because we have so many bills in front of him, we were gun-shy,” she said, noting that the federation has sparred with the governor over issues such as the effect of artificial intelligence in the workplace. “Never be too close to your elected officials. Because we see the good, the bad, the ugly.”

Times staff writers Andrea Flores and Brittny Mejia contributed to this report.

Maria worked cleaning schools in Florida for $13 an hour. Every two weeks, she’d get a $900 paycheck from her employer, a contractor. Not much — but enough to cover rent in the house that she and her 11-year-old son share with five families, plus electricity, a cellphone and groceries.

In August, it all ended.

When she showed up at the job one morning, her boss told her that she couldn’t work there anymore. The Trump administration had terminated the Biden administration’s humanitarian parole program, which provided legal work permits for Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans like Maria.

“I feel desperate,’’ said Maria, 48, who requested anonymity to talk about her ordeal because she fears being detained and deported. “I don’t have any money to buy anything. I have $5 in my account. I’m left with nothing.’’

President Trump’s sweeping crackdown on immigration is throwing foreigners like Maria out of work and shaking the American economy and job market. And it’s happening at a time when hiring is already deteriorating amid uncertainty over Trump’s tariffs and other trade policies.

Immigrants do jobs — cleaning houses, picking tomatoes, painting fences — that most native-born Americans won’t, and for less money. But they also bring the technical skills and entrepreneurial energy that have helped make the United States the world’s economic superpower.

Trump is attacking immigration at both ends of the spectrum, deporting low-wage laborers and discouraging skilled foreigners from bringing their talents to the United States.

And he is targeting an influx of foreign workers that eased labor shortages and upward pressure on wages and prices at a time when most economists thought that taming inflation would require sky-high interest rates and a recession — a fate the United States escaped in 2023 and 2024.

“Immigrants are good for the economy,’’ said Lee Branstetter, an economist at Carnegie-Mellon University. “Because we had a lot of immigration over the past five years, an inflationary surge was not as bad as many people expected.”

More workers filling more jobs and spending more money has also helped drive economic growth and create still more job openings. Economists worry that Trump’s deportations and limits on even legal immigration will do the reverse.

In a July report, researchers Wendy Edelberg and Tara Watson of the centrist Brookings Institution and Stan Veuger of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute calculated that the loss of foreign workers will mean that monthly U.S. job growth “could be near zero or negative in the next few years.’’

Hiring has already slowed significantly, averaging a meager 29,000 a month from June through August. (The September jobs report has been delayed by the ongoing shutdown of the federal government.) During the post-pandemic hiring boom of 2021-23, by contrast, employers added a stunning 400,000 jobs a month.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, citing fallout from Trump’s immigration and trade policies, downgraded its forecast for U.S. economic growth this year to 1.4% from the 1.9% it had previously expected and from 2.5% in 2024.

‘We need these people’

Goodwin Living, an Alexandria, Va., nonprofit that provides senior housing, healthcare and hospice services, had to lay off four employees from Haiti after the Trump administration terminated their work permits. The Haitians had been allowed to work under a humanitarian parole program and had earned promotions at Goodwin.

“That was a very, very difficult day for us,” Chief Executive Rob Liebreich said. “It was really unfortunate to have to say goodbye to them, and we’re still struggling to fill those roles.’’

Liebreich is worried that 60 additional immigrant workers could lose their temporary legal right to live and work in the United States. “We need all those hands,’’ he said. “We need all these people.”

Goodwin Living has 1,500 employees, 60% of them from foreign countries. It has struggled to find enough nurses, therapists and maintenance staff. Trump’s immigration crackdown, Liebreich said, is “making it harder.’’

The ICE crackdown

Trump’s immigration ambitions, intended to turn back what he calls an “invasion’’ at America’s southern border and secure jobs for U.S.-born workers, were once viewed with skepticism because of the money and economic disruption required to reach his goal of deporting 1 million people a year. But legislation that Trump signed into law July 4 — and which Republicans named the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — suddenly made his plans plausible.

The law pours $150 billion into immigration enforcement, setting aside $46.5 billion to hire 10,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and $45 billion to increase the capacity of immigrant detention centers.

And his empowered ICE agents have shown a willingness to move fast and break things — even when their aggression conflicts with other administration goals.

Last month, immigration authorities raided a Hyundai battery plant in Georgia, detained 300 South Korean workers and showed video of some of them shackled in chains. They’d been working to get the plant up and running, bringing expertise in battery technology and Hyundai procedures that local American workers didn’t have.

The incident enraged the South Koreans and ran counter to Trump’s push to lure foreign manufacturers to invest in America. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung warned that the country’s other companies might be reluctant about betting on America if their workers couldn’t get visas promptly and risked getting detained.

Sending Medicaid recipients to the fields

America’s farmers are among the president’s most dependable supporters.

But John Boyd Jr., who farms 1,300 acres of soybeans, wheat and corn in southern Virginia, said that the immigration raids — and the threat of them — are hurting farmers already contending with low crop prices, high costs and fallout from Trump’s trade war with China, which has stopped buying U.S. soybeans and sorghum.

“You’ve got ICE out here, herding these people up,’’ said Boyd, founder of the National Black Farmers Assn. “[Trump] says they’re murderers and thieves and drug dealers, all this stuff. But these are people who are in this country doing hard work that many Americans don’t want to do.’’

Boyd scoffed at Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ suggestion in July that U.S.-born Medicaid recipients could head to the fields to meet work requirements imposed as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. “People in the city aren’t coming back to the farm to do this kind of work,’’ he said. “It takes a certain type of person to bend over in 100-degree heat.’’

The Trump administration admits that the immigration crackdown is causing labor shortages on the farm that could translate into higher prices at the supermarket.

“The near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens combined with the lack of an available legal workforce results in significant disruptions to production costs and [threatens] the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S. consumers,’’ the Labor Department said in an Oct. 2 filing to the Federal Register.

‘You’re not welcome here’

Jed Kolko of the Peterson Institute for International Economics said that job growth is slowing in businesses that rely on immigrants. Construction companies, for instance, have shed 10,000 jobs since May.

“Those are the short-term effects,’’ said Kolko, a Commerce Department official in the Biden administration. “The longer-term effects are more serious because immigrants traditionally have contributed more than their share of patents, innovation, productivity.’’

Especially worrisome to many economists was Trump’s sudden announcement last month that he was raising the fee on H-1B visas, meant to lure hard-to-find skilled foreign workers to the United States, from as little as $215 to $100,000.

“A $100,000 visa fee is not just a bureaucratic cost — it’s a signal,” said Dany Bahar, senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. “It tells global talent: You are not welcome here.”

Some are already packing up.

In Washington, D.C., one H-1B visa holder, a Harvard graduate from India who works for a nonprofit helping Africa’s poor, said Trump’s signal to employers is clear: Think twice about hiring H-1B visa holders.

The man, who requested anonymity, is already preparing paperwork to move to the United Kingdom.

“The damage is already done, unfortunately,’’ he said.

Associated Press writers Wiseman and Salomon reported from Washington and Miami, respectively. AP writers Fu Ting and Christopher Rugaber in Washington contributed to this report.

Federal authorities are now pursuing a misdemeanor charge against David Huerta, president of Service Employees International Union California, who was arrested during the first day of a series of immigration raids that swept the region.

Prosecutors originally brought a felony charge of conspiracy to impede an officer against Huerta, accusing him of obstructing federal authorities from serving a search warrant at a Los Angeles workplace and arresting dozens of undocumented immigrants on June 6.

On Friday, court filings show federal prosecutors filed a lesser charge against Huerta of “obstruction resistance or opposition of a federal officer,” which carries a punishment of up to a year in federal prison. The felony he was charged with previously could have put him behind bars for up to six years.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles declined to comment.

In a statement, Huerta’s attorneys, Abbe David Lowell and Marilyn Bednarski, said they would “seek the speediest trial to vindicate David.” The lawyers said that “in the four months that have passed since David’s arrest, it has become even clearer there were no grounds for charging him and certainly none for the way he was treated.”

“It’s clear that David Huerta is being singled out not for anything he did but for who he is — a life-long workers’ advocate who has been an outspoken critic of its immigration policies. These charges are a clear attempt to silence a leading voice who dared to challenge a cruel, politically driven campaign of fear,” the statement read.

The labor union previously stated that Huerta was detained “while exercising his First Amendment right to observe and document law enforcement activity.” Huerta is one of more than 60 people charged federally in the Central District of California tied to immigration protests and enforcement actions.

Two recent misdemeanor trials against protesters charged with assaulting a federal officer both ended in acquittals. Some protesters have taken plea deals.

In a statement Friday, Huerta said he is “being targeted for exercising my constitutional rights for standing up against an administration that has declared open war on working families, immigrants, and basic human dignity.”

“The baseless charges brought against me are not just about me, they are meant to intimidate anyone who dares to speak out, organize, or demand justice. I will not be silenced,” he said.

Huerta was held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles for days, prompting thousands of union members, activists and supporters to rally for his release. California Democratic Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla also sent a letter to the Homeland Security and Justice departments demanding a review of Huerta’s arrest.

A judge ordered Huerta released in June on a $50,000 bond.

The case against Huerta centers on a June 6 workplace immigration raid at Ambiance Apparel. According to the original criminal complaint filed, Huerta arrived at the site around noon Friday, joining several other protesters.

Huerta and other protesters “appeared to be communicating with each other in a concerted effort to disrupt the law enforcement operations,” a federal agent wrote in the complaint.

The agent wrote that Huerta was yelling at and taunting officers and later sat cross-legged in front of a vehicle gate to the location where law enforcement authorities were serving a search warrant.

Huerta also “at various times stood up and paced in front of the gate, effectively preventing law enforcement vehicles from entering or exiting the premises through the gate to execute the search warrant,” the agent wrote in the affidavit.

The agent wrote that they told Huerta that if he kept blocking the Ambiance gate, he would be arrested.

According to the complaint, as a white law enforcement van tried to get through the gate, Huerta stood in its path.

Because Huerta “was being uncooperative, the officer put his hands on HUERTA in an attempt to move him out of the path of the vehicle.”

“I saw HUERTA push back, and in response, the officer pushed HUERTA to the ground,” the agent wrote. “The officer and I then handcuffed HUERTA and arrested him.”

According to a statement from SEIU-United Service Workers West, SEIU California State Council, and the Service Employees International Union, “Huerta was thrown to the ground, tackled, pepper sprayed, and detained by federal agents while exercising his constitutional rights at an ICE raid in Los Angeles.” Video of his arrest went viral.

“Despite David’s harsh treatment at the hands of law enforcement, he is now facing an unjust charge,” the statement read. “This administration has turned the military against our own people, terrorizing entire communities, and even detaining U.S. citizens who are exercising their constitutional rights to speak out.”

Acting U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, posted a photo on the social media site X of Huerta, hands behind his back, after the arrest.

“Let me be clear: I don’t care who you are — if you impede federal agents, you will be arrested and prosecuted,” Essayli wrote. “No one has the right to assault, obstruct, or interfere with federal authorities carrying out their duties.”

In an interview with Sacramento TV news oulet KCRA last month, Essayli referred to Huerta as Gov. Gavin Newsom’s “buddy” and said he “deliberately obstructed a search warrant.”

While speaking with reporters in June, Schiff said Huerta was “exercising his lawful right to be present and observe these immigration raids.”

“It’s obviously a very traumatic thing, and now that it looks like the Justice Department wants to try and make an example out of him, it’s all the more traumatic,” Schiff said. “But this is part of the Trump playbook. They selectively use the Justice Department to go after their adversaries. It’s what they do.”

The National Labor Relations Board has sued California to block a law that empowers a state agency to oversee some private-sector labor disputes and union elections.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 288 into law last month in response to the Trump administration’s hampering of federal regulators. It gives the state’s Public Employment Relations Board the ability to step in and oversee union elections, charges of workplace retaliation and other issues in the event the federal labor board is unable, or declines, to decide cases.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, argues the law usurps the NLRB’s authority “by attempting to regulate areas explicitly reserved for federal oversight.”

The lawsuit echos the NLRB’s challenge to a recent New York law that similarly seeks to expand the powers of its state labor board.

NLRB attorneys contend in the lawsuits that the laws create parallel regulatory systems that conflict with federal labor law.

The NLRB is tasked with safeguarding the right of private employees to unionize or organize in other ways to improve their working conditions.

Lawmakers in New York and California said they passed their bills to fill a gap, because the NLRB has been functionally paralyzed since January, when President Trump fired one of its Democratic board members. The unprecedented firing of that member, Gwynne Wilcox, left the board without the three-member quorum it needs to rule on cases.

Wilcox has challenged her firing in court, arguing that appointed board members can only be fired for “malfeasance or neglect of duty.” But her removal was upheld by the Supreme Court for now, until her case can make its way through lower courts.

Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, last month called AB 288 “the most significant labor law reform in nearly a century.”

The California Public Employment Relations Board typically has authority only over public sector employees. But when the new law goes into effect on Jan. 1, workers in the private sector who are unable to get a timely response at the federal level can also petition the state board to take up their cases and enforce their rights.

The state’s labor board can choose to take on a case when the NLRB “has expressly or impliedly ceded jurisdiction,” according to language in the law. That includes when charges filed with the agency or an election certification have languished with a regional director for more than six months — or when the federal board doesn’t have a quorum of members or is otherwise hampered.

The NLRB’s paralysis has put hundreds of cases in limbo, with the agency currently lacking the ability to compel employers to bargain with their workers’ unions, or to stop unfair treatment on the job.

However, the agency’s acting general counsel — Trump appointee William Cowen — has said that only a fraction of cases require decisions from the typically five-member board and that the agency’s work has been largely unaffected, with regional offices continuing to process union elections and unfair labor practice charges.

SAN DIEGO — Six Democrats running for governor next year focused on housing affordability, the cost of living and healthcare cuts as the most daunting issues facing Californians at a labor forum on Saturday in San Diego.

Largely in lockstep about these matters, the candidates highlighted their political resumes and life stories to try to create contrasts and curry favor with attendees.

Former state Assembly Majority Leader Ian Calderon, in his first gubernatorial forum since entering the race in late September, leaned into his experience as the first millennial elected to the state legislature.

“I feel like my experience and my passion uniquely positioned me in this race to ride a lane that nobody else can ride, being a millennial and being young and having a different perspective,” said Calderon, 39.

Concerns about his four children’s future as well as the state’s reliance on Washington, D.C., drove his decision to run for governor after choosing not to seek reelection to the legislature in 2020.

“I want [my children] to have opportunity. I want them to have a future. I want life to be better. I want it to be easier,” Calderon, whose family has deep roots in politics. State leaders must focus “on D.C.-proofing California. We cannot continue to depend on D.C. and expect that they’re going to give a s—t about us and what our needs are, because they don’t.”

Former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, who also served as the state’s attorney general after a 24-year stint in Congress, argued that it is critical to elect a governor who has experience.

“Would you let someone who’s never flown a plane tell you, ‘I can fly that plane back to land’ if they’ve never done it before?” Becerra asked. “Do you give the keys to the governor’s office to someone who hasn’t done this before?”

He contrasted himself with other candidates in the race by invoking a barking chihuahua behind a chain-link fence.

“Where’s the bite?” he said, after citing his history, such as suing President Trump 122 times, and leading the sprawling federal health bureaucracy during the pandemic. “You don’t just grow teeth overnight.”

Calderon and Becerra were among six Democratic candidates who spoke at length to about 150 California leaders of multiple chapters of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

The union has more than 200,000 members in California and is being battered by the federal government shutdown, the state’s budget deficit and impending healthcare strikes. AFSCME is a powerful force in California politics, providing troops to knock on voters’ doors and man phone banks.

The forum came as the gubernatorial field to replace termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom is in flux.

Former Vice President Kamala Harris announced earlier this summer that she has opted against running for the seat. Former Senate Leader Toni Atkins suspended her gubernatorial campaign in late September.

Rumors continue to swirl about whether billionaire businessman Rick Caruso or Sen. Alex Padilla will join the field.

“I am weighing it. But my focus is first and foremost on encouraging people to vote for Proposition 50,” the congressional redistricting matter on the November ballot, Padilla told the New York Times in an interview published Saturday. “The other decision? That race is not until next year. So that decision will come.”

Wealthy Democratic businessman Stephen J. Cloobeck and Republican Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco declined an invitation to participate in the forum, citing prior commitments.

The union will consider an endorsement at a future conference, said Matthew Maldonado, executive director for District Council 36, which represents 25,000 workers in Southern California.

Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa leaned into his longtime roots in labor before he ran for office. But he also alluded to tensions with unions after being elected mayor in 2006.

Labeled a “scab” when he crossed picket lines the following year during a major city workers’ strike, Villaraigosa also clashed with unions over furloughs and layoffs during the recession. His relationship with labor hit a low in 2010 when Villaraigosa called the city’s teachers union, where he once worked, “the largest obstacle to creating quality schools.”

“I want you to know something about me. I’m not going to say yes to every darn thing that everybody comes up to me with, including sometimes the unions,” Villaraigosa said. “When I was mayor, they’ll tell you sometimes I had to say no. Why? I wasn’t going to go bankrupt, and I knew I had to protect pensions and the rest of it.”

He pledged to work with labor if elected governor.

Labor leaders asked most of the questions at the forum, with all of the candidates being asked about the same topics, such as if they supported and would campaign for a proposed state constitutional amendment to help UC workers with down-payment loans for houses.

“Hell yes,” said former Rep. Katie Porter of Irvine, who teaches at UC Irvine’s law school and benefited from a program created by state university leaders to allow faculty to buy houses priced below the market rate in costly Orange County because the high cost of housing in the region was an obstacle in recruiting professors.

“I get to benefit from UC Irvine’s investment in their professionals and professors and professional staff housing, but they are not doing it for everyone,” she said, noting workers such as clerks, janitors, and patient-care staff don’t have access to similar benefits.

State Supt. of Instruction Tony Thurmond, who entered the gathering dancing to Dr. Dre and Tupac’s “California Love,” agreed to support the housing loans as well as to walk picket lines with tens of thousands of Kaiser health employees expected to go on strike later this month.

“I will be there,” Thurmond responded, adding that he had just spoken on the phone with Kaiser’s CEO, and urged him to meet labor demands about staffing, pay, retirement and benefits, especially in the aftermath of their work during the pandemic. “Just get it done, damn it, and give them what they’re asking for.”

Former state Controller Betty Yee agreed to both requests as well, arguing that the healthcare employers are focused on profit at the expense of patient care.

“Yes, absolutely,” she said when asked about joining the Kaiser picket line. “Shame on them. You cannot be expected to take care of others if you cannot take care of yourselves.”

AFSCME local leaders listening to former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra speak at a gubernatorial forum Saturday in San Diego.

(Seema Mehta / Los Angeles Times)

President Clinton’s Mexican financial rescue package, which once looked so solid that it even had the support of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and other leading Republicans, is in trouble. It’s stalled in a House committee, and Gingrich is warning that it could be defeated if it is brought to a vote too quickly.

Everyone is blaming somebody else for this impasse. Gingrich faults Clinton for poor leadership of balky Democrats. White House spokesmen ask why Dole and Gingrich can’t keep the Republicans in line.

In fact, both sides share the blame. They clearly underestimated the ability of demagogues like Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan to turn the Mexican loan guarantees into a symbolic issue. By railing against the proposal as a “bailout” of Wall Street and corrupt Mexican officials, these demagogues play to popular prejudices against both Mexico and big business.

So saving the Mexican loan guarantees won’t be easy, but it’s important that it be done. If you think that problems like illegal immigration are bad now, wait and see how tough things will get along our southern border if the Mexican economy goes into the tank for a decade rather than the couple of years most experts estimate it will take Mexico to recover if the loan guarantees are approved.

What could the White House offer skeptics in Congress to sell the loan guarantees? How about a plan to end illegal immigration on the Mexican border?

It wouldn’t be easy, of course, but control of our southern border can be achieved over time, and with the cooperation of the Mexican government. But it would not be done in the way envisioned by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and other members of Congress who are demanding that Mexico send more police to the border to stop emigration in exchange for the loan guarantees. That would be politically unpalatable in Mexico.

But controlling illegal immigration could be done if we negotiated an agreement with the Mexican government that would open U.S. borders to a flow of Mexican workers, as long as they register with the appropriate authorities and agree to leave once they are done working here. Their return could be guaranteed by withholding part of their pay, say 25%, until they are back home.

This idea will sound familiar to anyone who has studied the history of the Mexican border. It’s an updated version of the bracero program, which brought Mexicans into this country to meet the farm labor shortage during World War II; more than 4 1/2 million had been admitted legally by the time the program ended in 1964.

There were, unfortunately, many abuses in the bracero program. Corrupt officials on the Mexican side gave preference to workers who paid them bribes. And some U.S. farmers treated Mexican workers little better than slaves, paying low wages and forcing them to live and work under miserable conditions. Such abuses would have to be avoided this time around, but that could be more easily done than in the past. For one thing, even the poorest Mexican peasant is much more sophisticated about his labor rights nowadays. The Mexican government is also more sophisticated, and has experts in think tanks like Tijuana’s Colegio de la Frontera Norte who have been researching the flow of Mexican migrants for years and could advise both Washington and Mexico City on how to set up a viable guest-worker program. And, with all the focus on immigration issues in the United States these days, the news media and Latino activists would surely raise a hue and cry over any abuses that did creep in.

In fact, the only real roadblock one can imagine to such a reasonable proposal might come from some of the more ardent immigration restrictionists in this country. But, if arrest statistics are any indication, 50% to 60% of the illegal immigrants they keep screaming about are Mexican. So if they are legalized, we eliminate half of the “illegal alien problem” in one fell swoop.

Such a program might even find such unlikely champions as Harold Ezell, a former immigration official and co-author of Proposition 187, and Gov. Pete Wilson, its biggest champion. Both have suggested a guest-worker program as a means of meeting any labor shortages that can’t be filled by U.S. workers.

Let’s face it, Mexican workers are going to keep coming here despite Proposition 187 and other anti-immigrant measures, because jobs are waiting for them in certain sectors of the U.S. economy, like agriculture and light manufacturing. So why not put aside any pretense that we don’t want them and cut a deal with Mexico that will benefit both countries?

Responding to the Trump administration‘s hampering of federal regulators, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday signed a bill greatly expanding California’s power over workplace disputes and union elections.

The legislation, Assembly Bill 288, gives the state authority to step in and oversee union elections, charges of workplace retaliation and other disputes between private employers and workers in the event the National Labor Relations Board fails to respond.

As Newsom signed the worker rights bill, his office drew a sharp contrast with the gridlock in Washington, D.C., where a government shutdown looms.

“With the federal government not only asleep at the wheel, but driving into incoming traffic, it is more important than ever that states stand up to protect workers,” Newsom said in a statement. “California is a proud labor state — and we will continue standing up for the workers that keep our state running and our economy booming.”

The NLRB, which is tasked with safeguarding the right of private employees to unionize or organize in other ways to improve their working conditions, has been functionally paralyzed since it lost quorum in January, when Trump fired one of its board members.

The Trump administration has also proposed sweeping cuts to the agency’s staff and canceled leases for regional offices in many states, while Amazon, SpaceX and other companies brought lodged challenges to the 90-year-old federal agency’s constitutionality in court.

With this law in place, workers unable to get a timely response at the federal level can petition the California Public Employment Relations Board to enforce their rights.

The law creates a Public Employee Relations Board Enforcement Fund, financed by civil penalties paid by employers cited for labor violations to help pay for the added responsibilities for the state labor board.

“This is the most significant labor law reform in nearly a century,” said Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions. “California workers will no longer be forced to rely on a failing federal agency when they join together to unionize.”

The state’s labor board can choose to take on a case when the NLRB “has expressly or impliedly ceded jurisdiction,” according to language in the law. That includes when charges filed with the agency or an election certification have languished with a regional director for more than six months — or when the federal board doesn’t have a quorum of members or is hampered in other ways.

The law could draw legal challenges over whether the bill infringes on federal law.

It was opposed by the California Chamber of Commerce, which warned that the bill improperly attempts to give California’s labor board authority even as the federal agency’s regional offices continuing to process elections as well as charges filed by workers and employers.

The chamber argued that “courts have repeatedly held that states are prohibited from regulating this space.”

Catherine Fisk, Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong Professor of Law at UC Berkeley Law counters, however, that in the first few decades of the NLRB’s functioning, state labor agencies had much more leeway to enforce federal labor rights.

She said the law “simply proposes going back to the system that existed for three decades.”

The bill’s author, Assemblymember Tina McKinnor (D-Hawthorne) said the bill will ensure California workers can continue to unionize and bargain.

“The current President is attempting to take a wrecking ball to public and private sector employees’ fundamental right to join a union,”McKinnor said in a statement. “This is unacceptable and frankly, un-American. California will not sit idly as its workers are systematically denied the right to organize.”

Sept. 10 (UPI) — The U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of the Inspector General announced Wednesday that it will conduct a review of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ collection and reporting activities for the Consumer Price Index and the Producer Price Index.

In a letter to the BLS’s acting director, William Wiatrowski, the OIG announced the intent to review the department.

“Our focus will be on the challenges and related mitigating strategies for (1) collecting PPI and CPI data, and (2) collecting and reporting, including revising, monthly employment data,” said the letter from Laura Nicolosi, assistant inspector general for audit.

The announcement arrives just weeks after President Donald Trump fired the BLS administrator Erika McEntarfer in August after a weak monthly jobs report. He has nominated conservative economist E.J. Antoni to replace her, but the nomination hasn’t yet been confirmed by the Senate.

The letter said that the BLS recently issued “a large downward revision of its estimate of new jobs in the monthly Employment Situation Report.”

The Labor Department in a preliminary report Tuesday revised jobs data sharply downward for the year ending March 2025 — a drop of 911,000 from initial estimates. The revisions were the largest in more than 20 years.

The BLS has long said that lower survey response rates and other trends have made it harder to measure the state of the U.S. economy, the New York Times reported. But experts inside and outside the agency say a lack of resources slows its efforts to mitigate those challenges.

As the Labor Day holidays get under way, tens of thousands of protesters have gathered at rallies across the United States to call for stronger worker protections and attack a range of policies undertaken by the administration of US President Donald Trump.

More than 1,000 demonstrations are expected on Monday to span all 50 states, under the banner “Workers Over Billionaires.”

Protesters are demanding stronger worker protections, fully funded schools, healthcare and housing for all, and an end to corporate corruption, attacks on marginalised communities, and federal overreach under the Trump administration.

In New York, hundreds of people gathered outside the Trump Tower, chanting for Trump to step down and calling the president a fascist. As a brass band played, workers held up signs demanding a living wage and universal healthcare.

‘Subminimum’ wage

Giovanni Uribe, with the restaurant worker advocacy organisation One Fair Wage, told Al Jazeera’s Kristen Saloomey he had come out to protest against billionaires whittling away the rights of workers.

“Service workers in New York City are the backbone of this city,” he said. “The National Restaurant Association is our number one opponent that’s fighting to keep subminimum wage intact so they don’t have to pay their workers their full minimum wage to survive. So we’re just asking for a livable wage.”

The federally set minimum wage in the US is $7.25 an hour – a figure that has not been raised since 2009 due in part to the successful lobbying of industry groups. Tipped workers, like wait staff, have a federally mandated “subminimum” wage of $2.13, a figure set in 1991 that is legally required to be offset to reach the $7.25 minimum – but which advocates say often results in wage theft.

While some states have higher minimum wages – New York City’s currently stands at $16.50 – the figure is often far below a living wage.

According to the MIT Living Wage Calculator, a single adult without children would need an hourly wage of nearly $33 in NYC to cover average basic expenses. Mississippi, which has one of the lowest costs of living in the country and has no state minimum wage, has a living wage of $20.75 – nearly three times the minimum wage.

Chicago protests target National Guard

In downtown Chicago, thousands turned out to demonstrate against Trump’s promise to target Chicago next in a deployment similar to those under way in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, two other Democrat-run cities.

Mayor Brandon Johnson, speaking to the crowd, vowed that Chicago would resist federal encroachment.

“This is the city that will defend the country,” he said, receiving loud cheers from protesters waving blue-striped Chicago flags.

As the crowd wove through the city, some marchers walking dogs and carrying children on their shoulders, diners sitting outside at local restaurants and cafes pumped their fists and cars honked in support.

Protesters said they were concerned by Trump’s threat to send out the National Guard and additional agents from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Filiberto Ramirez, 72, feared violence if additional ICE agents came to the city. “Do we feel there’s gonna be trouble? Yes,” Ramirez said. “I hope nobody gets hurt.”

Trump has singled out Chicago in recent weeks over violent crime, calling the city “a mess”, “a hellhole”, and a “killing field”. But on Monday, Chicagoans at the protest said they did not feel the National Guard was a solution to crime in the city.

“There is a crime problem,” said Yvonne Spears, 67, “but the National Guard is supposed to fight for us, not against us.”

Homicide rates in the nation’s third-largest city have plunged in recent years, according to city crime data. And though a 2025 University of Chicago survey reported roughly half of Chicagoans feel unsafe in their neighbourhoods at night, many protesters said on Monday that they felt largely safe in the city.

City and state leaders have already readied measures to shield Chicago from federal troops and would likely launch a slew of lawsuits challenging a deployment, which legal experts said would violate the US Constitution and a 19th-century law prohibiting the military from enforcing domestic laws.

‘Workers Over Billionaires’

Matt Duss, executive vice-president at the Center for International Policy and a former adviser to US Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, told Al Jazeera that while protesters in different locales may be attending rallies for a range of reasons, many of their financial concerns are likely to overlap.

“I think there are a set of shared concerns: the cost of living, the cost of housing, the cost of basic goods, groceries, the cost of education, the overall sense that people in the United States have lost control of their economic and political lives and their futures,” he said.

Trump, a real estate scion who came to power on a platform that in part tapped into popular economic frustration, is a billionaire himself and has loaded his administration with billionaires.

The most famous of them – Elon Musk – served as Trump’s top adviser before stepping down amid a falling-out.

In the name of improving government efficiency, Musk oversaw the gutting of a number of federal agencies, at a cost of nearly $22bn, according to a congressional investigation carried out by Democratic US Senator Richard Blumenthal in July.

Welcome to Bunker Talk and have a great Labor Day weekend for our U.S. readers!

This is a weekend open discussion post for the best commenting crew on the net, in which we can chat about all the stuff that went on this week that we didn’t cover. We can also talk about the stuff we did or whatever else grabs your interest. In other words, it’s an off-topic thread.

The caption to this week’s top shot reads:

Also, a reminder:

An informational brochure titled “Protect Your Family from Atomic Bomb Fallout” features an abstract illustration insinuation an explosion on the cover, circa 1961. (Jim Heimann Collection/Getty Images)

Prime Directives!

• If you want to talk politics, do so respectfully and know that there’s always somebody that isn’t going to agree with you. 
• If you have political differences, hash it out respectfully, stick to the facts, and no childish name-calling or personal attacks of any kind. If you can’t handle yourself in that manner, then please, discuss virtually anything else.
• No drive-by garbage political memes. No conspiracy theory rants. Links to crackpot sites will be axed, too. Trolling and shitposting will not be tolerated. No obsessive behavior about other users. Just don’t interact with folks you don’t like. 
• Do not be a sucker and feed trolls! That’s as much on you as on them. Use the mute button if you don’t like what you see.  
• So unless you have something of quality to say, know how to treat people with respect, understand that everyone isn’t going to subscribe to your exact same worldview, and have come to terms with the reality that there is no perfect solution when it comes to moderation of a community like this, it’s probably best to just move on. 
• Finally, as always, report offenders, please. This doesn’t mean reporting people who don’t share your political views, but we really need your help in this regard.

The Bunker is open!

Welcome to Bunker Talk and have a great Labor Day weekend for our U.S. readers!

This is a weekend open discussion post for the best commenting crew on the net, in which we can chat about all the stuff that went on this week that we didn’t cover. We can also talk about the stuff we did or whatever else grabs your interest. In other words, it’s an off-topic thread.

The caption to this week’s top shot reads:

Also, a reminder:

Prime Directives!

• If you want to talk politics, do so respectfully and know that there’s always somebody that isn’t going to agree with you. 
• If you have political differences, hash it out respectfully, stick to the facts, and no childish name-calling or personal attacks of any kind. If you can’t handle yourself in that manner, then please, discuss virtually anything else.
• No drive-by garbage political memes. No conspiracy theory rants. Links to crackpot sites will be axed, too. Trolling and shitposting will not be tolerated. No obsessive behavior about other users. Just don’t interact with folks you don’t like. 
• Do not be a sucker and feed trolls! That’s as much on you as on them. Use the mute button if you don’t like what you see.  
• So unless you have something of quality to say, know how to treat people with respect, understand that everyone isn’t going to subscribe to your exact same worldview, and have come to terms with the reality that there is no perfect solution when it comes to moderation of a community like this, it’s probably best to just move on. 
• Finally, as always, report offenders, please. This doesn’t mean reporting people who don’t share your political views, but we really need your help in this regard.

The Bunker is open!

A three-day weekend is approaching, and you’d like to escape to the mountains. But you didn’t plan ahead. What’s an L.A. outdoorsy resident to do?

Don’t fret, my dear Wilder, for there are about 30 first-come, first-served campgrounds around L.A. County, and I’m here to suggest a few where I think even the worst of planners could snag a spot this weekend.

Let’s start with the popular first-come, first-served spots near L.A.

Chilao’s Little Pines loop is aptly named, as it features several sizes of pine trees that provide nice shade and good smells.

(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)

If you leave right now, meaning Thursday late morning when this newsletter publishes, you might get lucky enough to snag a spot at Buckhorn, a 38-site first-come, first-served campground in Angeles National Forest. This pine-dappled paradise is just over an hour’s drive from L.A. and sits at around 6,500 feet elevation, offering a cool reprieve from your steamy apartment. (That window unit can only do so much!)

Or you could try Chilao, an 84-site campground about 10 miles southwest of Buckhorn. It is also first-come, first-served. My wife and I once snagged the last campsite available on a Memorial Day weekend trip (in which we undoubtedly set up our tent in the dark).

The view from a campsite in Chilao campground in Angeles National Forest.

(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)

Buckhorn is very popular and fills up quickly. Chilao is also popular but larger, so again, perhaps you’d get lucky! Make sure to check both the Manzanita and Little Pines loops for spots. If you left Friday morning, I think you’d snag a spot at Chilao.

Crystal Lake — not to be confused with Crystal Cove — is a 120-site campground north of Azusa in Angeles National Forest. If you forget anything, the charming Crystal Lake Cafe is on-site, selling burgers, sandwiches and an array of camping supplies and treats. It is also a popular spot, but given its size, hopefully you could find a spot on Friday.

Coldbrook Creek at Coldbrook Campground.

(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)

On your way to Crystal Lake, you’d pass Coldbrook Campground, which has 22 sites, including some spots next to the creek where the campground gets its name. If it were me and I had enough time, I’d swing by Coldbrook on Friday morning to see whether any spots were still open before heading up to Crystal Lake. That said, Crystal Lake provides stunning views of the night sky. My friends recently camped there around the peak of the Perseid meteor shower and saw shooting stars.

I am too nervous to try this, but resort Mountain High manages five campgrounds near Wrightwood, and some sites are first-come, first-served. Wrightwood is a charming mountain town, and hikes in the surrounding area offer stunning panoramic views. That said, the campgrounds are popular too, so I wouldn’t leave late Friday evening expecting to find a spot.

Several of the sites at Coldbrook Campground sit at the creek the campground was named after. The campground is also nestled among the San Gabriel Mountains and provides great views of nearby peaks.

(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)

For those of you who are stuck at work until 5 p.m. Friday, I want to provide options for you too.

Here are some less popular but still great spots to consider.

• Horse Flat: A 26-site campground in Angeles National Forest shaded by tall pine trees and near the scenic Silver Moccasin Trail. No potable water available.
• Mt. Pacifico: Ten tent-only sites; no potable water; reached by driving a narrow dirt road for about 4.4 miles — an experience that gave me the vapors because of its steep drop-offs — and then another mile on a rougher road recommended only for high-clearance vehicles. It can also be reached by backpacking.
• Sawmill: A remote eight-site campground with striking views of the Antelope Valley and more that’s about a two-hour drive from L.A. There is no potable water, but thanks to recent renovations funded by federal Great American Outdoors money, the campground has bear boxes and campfire rings. The Pacific Crest Trail is nearby and great for day hikes! You must travel a steep dirt road to reach the campground, so consider a vehicle with good clearance.

Lastly, if you have gear handy, you could consider a quick backpacking trip. I wrote this guide on backpacking near L.A., highlighting great spots to check out. I’m personally itching to get back to Valley Forge.

Regardless of where you end up for Labor Day weekend, I hope you have a safe and serene time in our public lands. Feel free to let me know how it goes! I love hearing about your adventures in the wild.

3 things to do

Hikers trek in the Turtle Rock area in Irvine.

(William Vazquez)

1. Clean up a trail with new pals in Irvine
We Explore Earth will host a hike and trail cleanup as well as post-hike yoga and a journaling session from 5 to 8 p.m. Saturday in Irvine. Participants will meet at the Turtle Rock trailhead, hiking 1.7 miles round-trip and picking up trash along the way. Afterward, the group will be led in yoga and nature journaling. Register at eventbrite.com.

2. Gaze at the stars in Silver Lake
The Los Angeles Astronomical Society will host a star party from 8 to 10:30 p.m. Thursday at Sunset Triangle Plaza (3700 Sunset Blvd.). Participants are encouraged to have dinner at nearby local restaurants while they look at the cosmos through provided telescopes. Learn more at nightsky.jpl.nasa.gov.

3. Learn about queer ecology in L.A.
Local naturalist Jason Wise and biological anthropologist Natalia Reagan will host a queer ecology-focused walk at 6 p.m. next Thursday near the Elysian Park Arboretum. Participants will learn about native Californian animals that scientists have documented engaging in homosexual behavior. Tickets on a sliding scale from free to $33.85. Register at eventbrite.com.

The must-read

(Maggie Chiang / For The Times)

Any hiker knows that going outside is restorative, but I was intrigued to learn in my conversation with environmental neuroscientist Marc G. Berman that a person benefits from being in nature even if they don’t enjoy it. I recently spoke to Berman about his new book, “Nature and the Mind: The Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social Well-Being.” Berman told me scientists believe nature can restore our attention spans in part because it is “softly fascinating,” like when we gaze at a waterfall. “The kind of stimulation that gives you this restful, restorative experience has to be softly fascinating and not harshly fascinating,” Berman said. The thing that will stay with me most, though, is what Berman told me about the humanizing effects nature can have on our psyche — a crucial bit of data in the midst of so much dehumanizing rhetoric in the news.

Happy adventuring,

P.S.

Back in June, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins rescinded the 2001 “Roadless Rule,” a landmark environmental law that established significant protections — namely from road construction and logging — for 58.5 million acres of national forestland, including 4.4 million acres in California. The Trump administration says the rule must be revoked to decrease wildfire risk, a claim that environmental advocates found dubious, arguing this is yet another public land grab. Friends of the Inyo recently flagged that the public comment period, which is part of the formal rulemaking process, is expected to start soon on what should be done next regarding the Roadless Rule. You should be able to check this U.S. Forest Service page to stay apprised of the process. I will also keep you posted!

For more insider tips on Southern California’s beaches, trails and parks, check out past editions of The Wild. And to view this newsletter in your browser, click here.

I sank into Randy Carter’s comfy couch, excited to see the Hollywood veteran’s magnum opus.

Around the first floor of his Glendale home were framed photos and posters of films the 77-year-old had worked on during his career. “Apocalypse Now.” “The Godfather II.” “The Conversation.”

What we were about to watch was nowhere near the caliber of those classics — and Carter didn’t care.

Footage of a school bus driving through dusty farmland began to play. The title of the nine-minute sizzle reel Carter produced in 1991 soon flashed: “Boy Wonders.”

The plot: White teenage boys in the 1960s gave up a summer of surfing to heed the federal government’s call. Their assignment: Pick crops in the California desert, replacing Mexican farmworkers.

“That’s the stupidest, dumbest, most harebrained scheme I’ve heard in my life,” a farmer complained to a government official in one scene, a sentiment studio executives echoed as they rejected Carter’s project as too far-fetched.

But it wasn’t: “Boy Wonders” was based on Carter’s life.

Randy Carter’s collection of historical photos and other memorabilia of A-TEAM, a 1965 program that sought to recruit high school athletes to pick crops during the summer.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

In 1965, the U.S. Department of Labor launched A-TEAM — Athletes in Temporary Employment as Agricultural Manpower — with the goal of recruiting 20,000 high school athletes to harvest summer crops. The country was facing a dire farmworker shortage because the bracero program, which provided cheap legal labor from Mexico for decades, had ended the year before.

Sports legends such as Sandy Koufax, Rafer Johnson and Jim Brown urged teen jocks to join A-TEAM because “Farm Work Builds Men!” as one ad stated. But only about 3,000 made it to the fields. One of them was a 17-year-old Carter.

He and about 18 classmates from University of San Diego High spent six weeks picking cantaloupes in Blythe. The fine hairs on the fruits ripped through their gloves within hours. It was so hot that the bologna sandwiches the farmers fed their young workers for lunch toasted in the shade. They slept in rickety shacks, used communal bathrooms and showered in water that “was a very nice shade of brown,” Carter remembered with a laugh.

They were the rare crew that stuck it out. Teens quit or went on strike across the country to protest abysmal work conditions. A-TEAM was such a disaster that the federal government never tried it again, and the program was considered so ludicrous that it rarely made it into history books.

Then came MAGA.

Now, legislators in some red-leaning states are thinking about making it easier for teenagers to work in agricultural jobs, in anticipation of Trump’s deportation deluge.

“I used to joke that I’ve written a story for the ages, because we’ll never solve the problem of labor,” Carter said. “I could be dead, and my great-grandkids could easily shop it around.”

I wrote about Carter’s experience in 2018 for an NPR article that went viral. It still bubbles up on social media any time a politician suggests that farm laborers are easily replaceable — like last month, when Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said that “able-bodied adults on Medicaid” could pick crops, instead of immigrants.

From journalists to teachers, people are reaching out to Carter anew to hear his picaresque stories from 50 years ago — like the time he and his friends made a wrong turn in Blythe and drove into the barrio, where “everyone looked at us like we were specimens” but was nice about it.

“They are dying to see white kids tortured,” Carter cracked when I asked him why the saga fascinates the public. “They want to see these privileged teens work their asses off. Wouldn’t you?”

But he doesn’t see the A-TEAM as one giant joke — it’s one of the defining moments of his life.

An old photo belonging to Randy Carter shows, seated at bottom right, his boss at the time, Francis Ford Coppola. “Everyone in this photo won an Academy Award except me,” Carter said.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Carter moved to San Diego his sophomore year of high school. He always took summer jobs at the insistence of his working-class Irish mother. When the feds made their pitch in the spring of 1965, “there wasn’t exactly a rush to the sign-up table,” Carter recalled. What’s more, coaches at his school, known at University High, forbade their athletes to join. But he and his pals thought it would be the domestic version of the Peace Corps.

“You’re a teenager and think, ‘What the hell are we going to do this summer?’” he said. “Then, ‘What the hell. If nothing else, we’ll go into town every night. We’ll meet some girls. We’ll get cowboys to buy us beer.’” “

Carter paused for dramatic effect. “No.”

The University High crew was trained by a Mexican foreman “who in retrospect must have hated us because we were taking the jobs of his family.” They worked six days a week for minimum wage — $1.40 an hour at the time — and earned a nickel for every crate filled with about 30 to 36 cantaloupes.

“Within two days, we thought, ‘This is insane,’” he said. “By the third day, we wanted to leave. But we stayed, because it became a thing of honor.”

Nearly everyone returned to San Diego after the six-week stint, although a couple of guys went to Fresno and “became legendary in our group because they could stand to do some more. For the rest of us, we did it, and we vowed never to do anything like that as long as we live. Somehow, the beach seemed a little nicer that summer.”

Carter’s wife, Janice, walked in. I asked how important A-TEAM was to her husband.

She rolled her eyes the way only a wife of 53 years could.

“He talks about it almost every week,” she said as Randy beamed. “It’s like an endless loop.”

University High’s A-TEAM squad went on to successful careers as doctors, lawyers, businessmen. They regularly meet for reunions and talk about those tough days in Blythe, which Carter describes “as the intersection of hell and Earth.”

As the issue of immigrant labor became more heated in American politics, the guys realized they had inadvertently absorbed an important lesson all those decades ago.

Before A-TEAM, Carter said, his idea of how crops were picked was that “somehow it got done, and they [Mexican farmworkers] somehow disappeared.”

“But when we now thought about Mexicans, we realized we only had to do it for six weeks,” he continued. “These guys do it every day, and they support a family. We became sympathetic, to a man. When people say bad things about Mexicans, we always say, ‘Don’t even go there, because you don’t know what you’re talking about.’”

Carter’s experience picking cantaloupes solidified his liberal leanings. So did the time he tried to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in 1969 during Operation Intercept, a Nixon administration initiative that required the Border Patrol to search nearly every car.

The stated purpose was to crack down on marijuana smuggling. Instead, Carter said, it created an hours-long wait and “businesses on both sides of the border were furious.”

In college, Carter cheered the efforts of United Farm Workers and kept tabs on the fight to ban el cortito, the short-handled hoes that wore down the bodies of California farmworkers for generations until a state bill banned them in 1975.

By then, he was working as a “junior, junior, junior” assistant to Francis Ford Coppola. Once he built enough of a resume in Hollywood — where he would become a longtime first assistant director on “Seinfeld,” among many credits — Carter wrote his “Boy Wonders” script, which he described as “‘Dead Poets Society’ meets ‘Cool Hand Luke.’”

It was optioned twice. Henry Winkler’s production company was interested for a bit. So was Rhino Records’ film division, which explains why the soundtrack features boomer classics from the Byrds, Bob Dylan and Motown. But no one thought audiences would buy Carter’s straightforward premise.

One executive suggested it would be more believable if the high schoolers ran over someone on prom night and became crop pickers to hide from the cops. Another suggested exploding toilets to funny up the action.

“The mantra in Hollywood is, ‘Do something you know about,’” he said. “But that was the curse of it not getting made — because no one else knew about it!”

Colorado River water irrigates a farm field in Blythe in 2021.

(Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)

Carter continues to share his experience, because “as a weak-kneed progressive, I always fancied we could change the situation … and that some sense of fair play could bubble up. I’m still walking up that road, but it seems more distant.”

A few weeks ago, federal immigration agents raided the car wash he frequents.

“You don’t even have to rewrite stories from years ago,” he said. “You could just reprint them, because nothing changes.”

I asked what he thought about MAGA’s push to replace migrant farmworkers with American citizens.

“It’s like saying, ‘I’m going to go to Dodger Stadium, grab someone from the third row of the mezzanine section, and they can play the violin at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.’ OK, you can do that, but it’s not going to work,” he said. “I don’t get why they don’t try to solve the problem of fair conditions and inadequate pay — why is that never an option?”

What about a reboot of A-TEAM?

“It could work,” Carter replied. “I was with a group of guys that did it!”

Then he considered how it might play out today.

“If Taylor Swift said it was great, you’d get people. Would they last? If they had decent accommodations and pay, maybe. But it would never happen with Trump. His solution is, ‘You don’t pay decent wages, you get desperate people.’”

He laughed again.

“Here’s a crazy program from the 1960s that’s not off the map in 2025. We’re still debating the issue. Am I crazy, or is the world crazy?”

WASHINGTON — The director of the agency that produces the nation’s jobs and inflation data is typically a mild-mannered technocrat, often with extensive experience in statistical agencies, with little public profile.

But like so much in President Trump’s second administration, this time is different.

Trump has selected E.J. Antoni, chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, to be the next commissioner at the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. Antoni’s nomination was quickly met with a cascade of criticism from other economists, from across the political spectrum.

His selection threatens to bring a new level of politicization to what for decades has been a nonpartisan agency widely accepted as a producer of reliable measures of the nation’s economic health. Although many former Labor Department officials say it is unlikely Antoni will be able to distort or alter the data, particularly in the short run, he could change the currently dry-as-dust way it is presented.

Antoni was nominated by Trump after the BLS released a jobs report Aug. 1 that showed that hiring had weakened in July and was much lower in May and June than the agency had previously reported. Trump, without evidence, charged that the data had been “rigged” for political reasons and fired the then-BLS chair, Erika McEntarfer, much to the dismay of many within the agency.

Antoni has been a vocal critic of the government’s jobs data in frequent appearances on podcasts and cable TV. His partisan commentary is unusual for someone who may end up leading the BLS.

For instance, on Aug. 4 — a week before he was nominated — Antoni said in an interview on Fox News Digital that the Labor Department should stop publishing the monthly jobs reports until its data collection processes improve, and rely on quarterly data based on actual employment filings with state unemployment offices.

The monthly employment reports are probably the closest-watched economic data on Wall Street, and can frequently cause swings in stock prices.

When asked at Tuesday’s White House briefing whether the jobs report would continue to be released, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the administration hoped it would be.

“I believe that is the plan and that’s the hope,” Leavitt said.

Leavitt also defended Antoni’s nomination, calling him an “economic expert” who has testified before Congress and adding that “the president trusts him to lead this important department.”

Yet Antoni’s TV and podcast appearances have created more of a portrait of a conservative ideologue than a careful economist who considers trade-offs and prioritizes getting the math correct.

“There’s just nothing in his writing or his resume to suggest that he’s qualified for the position, besides that he is always manipulating the data to favor Trump in some way,” said Brian Albrecht, chief economist at the International Center for Law and Economics.

Antoni wrongly claimed in the last year of Biden’s presidency that the economy had been in recession since 2022; called on the entire Federal Reserve board to be fired for not earning a profit on its Treasury securities holdings; and posted a chart on social media that conflated timelines to suggest inflation was headed to 15%.

His argument that the U.S. was in a recession rested on a vastly exaggerated measure of housing inflation, based on newly purchased home prices, to artificially make the nation’s gross domestic product appear smaller than it was.

“This is actually maybe the worst Antoni content I’ve seen yet,” Alan Cole of the center-right Tax Foundation said on social media, referring to his recession claim.

On a 2024 podcast, Antoni wanted to sunset Social Security payments for workers paying into the system, saying that “you’ll need a generation of people who pay Social Security taxes but never actually receive any of those benefits.” As head of the BLS, Antoni would oversee the release of the consumer price index by which Social Security payments are adjusted for inflation.

Many economists share, to some degree, Antoni’s concerns that the government’s jobs data have flaws and are threatened by trends such as declining response rates to its surveys. The drop has made the jobs figures more volatile, though not necessarily less accurate over time.

“The stock market moves clearly based on these job numbers, and so people with skin in the game think it’s telling them something about the future of their investments,” Albrecht said. “Could it be improved? Absolutely.”

Katharine Abraham, an economist at the University of Maryland who was BLS commissioner under President Clinton, said updating the jobs report’s methods would require at least some initial investment.

The government could use more modern data sources, she said, such as figures from payroll processing companies, and fill in gaps with surveys.

“There’s an inconsistency between saying you want higher response rates and you want to spend less money,” she said, referring to the administration’s proposals to cut BLS funding.

Still, Abraham and other former BLS commissioners don’t think Antoni, if confirmed, would be able to alter the figures. But he could push for changes in the monthly news release and seek to portray the numbers in a more positive light.

William Beach, who was appointed BLS commissioner by Trump in his first term and also served under Biden, said he is confident that BLS procedures are strong enough to prevent political meddling. He said he didn’t see the figures himself until two days before publication when he served as commissioner.

“The commissioner does not affect the numbers,’’ Beach said. “They don’t collect the data. They don’t massage the data. They don’t organize it.”

Regarding the odds of rigging the numbers, Beach said, “I wouldn’t put it at complete zero, but I’d put it pretty close to zero.’’

It took about six months after McEntarfer was nominated in July 2023 for her to be approved. Antoni will probably face stiff opposition from Democrats, but that may not be enough to derail his appointment.

Sen. Patty Murray, a senior Democrat from Washington, on Tuesday slammed Antoni as “an unqualified right-wing extremist” and demanded that the Republican chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, hold a confirmation hearing for him.

Rugaber and Boak write for the Associated Press. AP writers Paul Wiseman and Stephen Groves contributed to this report.

Aug. 11 (UPI) — President Donald Trump on Monday nominated economist E.J. Antoni as commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a non-partisan agency he has criticized.

If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, the chief economist with the conservative Heritage Foundation would replace Erika McEntarfer, who was fired by Trump on Aug. 1, alleging that she had manipulated the jobs reports for three months.

“I am pleased to announce that I am nominating Highly Respected Economist, Dr. E.J. Antoni, as the next Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Our Economy is booming, and E.J. will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE. I know E.J. Antoni will do an incredible job in this new role. Congratulations E.J.!”

Before the Heritage Foundation, he worked for the Texas Public Policy Commission. He holds master’s and doctorate degrees in economics from Northern Illinois University.

Last week, Antoni posted on X: “There are better ways to collect, process, and disseminate data — that is the task for the next BLS commissioner, and only consistent delivery of accurate data in a timely manner will rebuild the trust that has been lost over the last several years.”

On Nov. 13, one week after Trump was elected again, he wrote on X: “DOGE needs to take a chainsaw to the BLS.”

Antoni had called for the firing of McEntarfer on Steve Bannon‘s podcast after the July jobs report was released. Later that day, she lost her job.

“Last weeks Job’s Report was RIGGED,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, three days after the report came out. “Those big adjustments were made to cover up, and level out, the FAKE political numbers that were CONCOCTED in order to make a great Republican Success look less stellar!!!”

Bannon, who was Trump’s chief strategist for a portion of his first term, had advocated for hiring Antoni, who interviewed for the post, The Wall Street Journal on Sunday reported.

Senate Republicans hold a 53-47 advantage and confirmation only requires 50 votes. In January 2024, McEntarfer was confirmed 86-8.

“I don’t think there’s any grounds at all for this, for this firing, and it really hurts the statistical system,” William Beach, who was nominated by Trump during his first term, said on CNN earlier this month. “Suppose that they get a new commissioner … And they do a bad number. Well, everybody’s going to think, ‘well, it’s not as bad as it probably really is,’ because they’re going to suspect political influence. So, this is damaging.”

The BLS distributes data that is used by agencies, including the Federal Reserve, and companies. Besides monthly jobs reports, BLS also provides data on occupations, including wages and job outlook. Consumer spending is also analyzed.

The report showed 73,000 new jobs in July and unemployment rose to 4.2% from 4.1%, which was predicted and still historically low.

But the previous two months were adjusted downward. May was revised from 144,000 jobs added to 19,000 jobs added, and June’s revision went from 147,000 jobs added to 14,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Employment Situation Summary.

The BLS said that monthly revisions “result from additional reports received from businesses and government agencies since the last published estimates and from the recalculation of seasonal factors.”

One of California’s most influential labor organizations endorsed redrawing the state’s congressional maps to counter President Trump’s effort to push Republican states, notably Texas, to increase his party’s numbers in Congress in next year’s midterm election.

The California Federation of Labor Unions voted unanimously Tuesday to support putting a measure on the ballot in November. The proposal, backed by Gov. Gavin Newsom and many of the state’s Democratic leaders, would ask voters to temporarily change congressional district boundaries that were drawn by an independent redistricting commission four years ago, with some conditions.

Republicans could potentially lose up to a half dozen seats in California’s 52-member delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives. After it returns for its summer recess on Aug. 18, the California Legislature is expected to vote to place the measure on the statewide ballot in a special election.

“President Trump has said that Republicans are ‘entitled’ to five more congressional votes in Texas. Well, they aren’t entitled to steal the 2026 election. California’s unions refuse to stand by as democracy is tested,” Lorena Gonzalez, president of the federation, said in a statement. “California Labor is unified in our resolve to fight back against President Trump’s anti-worker agenda.”

Redistricting — the esoteric redrawing of the nation’s 435 congressional districts — typically occurs once every decade after the U.S. census tallies the population across the nation. Population shifts can result in changes in a state’s allocation of congressional seats, such as when California lost a seat after the 2020 census the first time in the state’s history.

The political redistricting process had long been crafted by elected officials to give their political parties an edge or to protect incumbents — sometimes in brazen, bizarrely shaped districts. Californians voted in 2010 to create an independent commission to draw congressional maps based on communities of interest, logical geography and ensuring representation of minority communities.

The ballot measure being pushed by Newsom and others would allow state lawmakers to help determine district boundaries for the next three election cycles if Texas approves a pending measure to reconfigure districts to increase Republican-held congressional seats in that state. Line-drawing would return to the independent commission after the 2030 census.

The California Federation of Labor is committed to spending several million dollars supporting a mid-decade redistricting ballot measure, on top of what it already planned to spend on competitive congressional races next year, according to a person familiar with the plans who asked for anonymity to speak candidly about the strategy.

A spokesperson for several organizations devoted to fighting any effort to change the state’s redistricting process said that Charles Munger Jr., the son of a billionaire, and who bankrolled the ballot measure to create the independent commission, is committed to making sure it is not weakened.

“While Charles Munger has been out of politics since 2016, he has said he will vigorously defend the reforms he helped pass, including nonpartisan redistricting,” said Amy Thoma, spokesperson for the Voters First Coalition. “His previous success in passing ballot measures in California means he knows exactly what is needed to be successful. We will have the resources necessary to make our coalition heard.”

One of California’s largest legal cannabis companies announced Monday that it would radically revamp its labor practices in the wake of a massive immigration raid at two company facilities last month. The raid led to the death of one worker and the detention of more than 360 people, including, according to government officials, 14 minors.

Glass House Brands announced it had “terminated its relationship” with the two farm labor contractors who had provided workers to the cannabis green house operations in Camarillo and Carpinteria. It also announced that it has “made significant changes to labor practices that are above and beyond legal requirements.”

Those include hiring experts to scrutinize workers’ documents as well as hiring the consulting firm Guidepost Services to advise the company on best practices for determining employment eligibility. The firm is led by Julie Myers Wood, a former ICE director under President George W. Bush.

The company also said it has signed a new “labor peace” agreement with the International Brotherhood of the Teamsters.

Glass House officials declined to comment publicly beyond what was in a press release, but a source close to the company said that officials wanted to “make sure we never have a situation that we had on July 10. We can’t have this ever happen again.”

On that day, federal agents in masks and riot gear stormed across Glass House operations in Ventura and Santa Barbara county in the state’s largest ICE workplace raid in recent memory. Agents chased panicked workers through vast green houses and deployed tear gas and less-than-lethal projectiles at protesters and employees.

One worker, Jaime Alanis Garcia, died after he fell three stories from the roof of a greenhouse trying to evade capture. Others were bloodied from shards of glass broken or hid for hours on the roofs or beneath the leaves and plastic shrouding. More than 360 people — a mixture of workers, family members of workers, protesters and passerby—were ultimately detained, including at least two American citizens including a U.S. Army veteran.

In the wake of the raid, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that Glass House had been targeted because “we knew, specifically from casework we had built for weeks and weeks and weeks, that there was children there that could be trafficked, being exploited, that there was individuals there involved in criminal activity.”

To date, neither Homeland Security nor the U.S. Department of Justice have announced any legal action regardlng the alleged trafficking and exploitation of juveniles.

In its press release, Glass House said that just nine of its direct employees were detained; all others picked up were either employees of its labor contractors or were “unassociated with the company.”

With regards to the government’s contention that it had found children working in cannabis, the company said: “while the identities of the alleged minors have not been disclosed, the company has been able to determine that, if those reports are true, none of them were Glass House employees.” California labor law allows children as young as 12 to work in agriculture, but workers must be 21 to work in cannabis.

The raid devastated Glass House and its workforce. Numerous workers were detained or disappeared, terrified to return. Those that remained were so distraught the company called in grief counselors.

Across the wider world of legal cannabis, people were also shaken. Glass House, which is backed by wealthy investors and presents a sleek corporate image in the wild world of cannabis in California, has long been known as the “Walmart of Weed.” Many in California’s cannabis industry feared the raid on Glass House was a signal that the federal government’s ceasefire against cannabis —which is legal in California but still not federally—had come to an end.

In the wake of the raid, the United Farm Workers and other organizations warned farm laborers who were not citizens — even those with legal status — to avoid working in cannabis because “cannabis remains criminalized under federal law.”

In its statement, Glass House said the search warrant served on the company the day of the raid was seeking “evidence of possible immigration violations.” A source close to the company said officials have had no further contact with the federal government since the raid.

Some farm labor advocates were unimpressed by the company’s announcement of revamped labor practices, saying it was farm workers who would pay the price.

Lucas Zucker, co-executive director of Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy, or CAUSE, said Glass House was using farm labor contractors to avoid responsibility “while their workers are torn away from their families in handcuffs.”

“This shows the double standards of our legal system, where corporations can profit from the immigrant workers their businesses depend on, yet wipe their hands clean when it becomes inconvenient,” he said. He added that “many farmworkers are still struggling to navigate this mess of labor contractors and have not been paid for the work they did at Glass House.”

A source close to Glass House said company officials want to make sure everyone who was at work on the day of the raid receives all the wages they are owed.

Company officials authorized all workers to be paid through 11:30 pm on the day of the raid, because workers who had finished their shifts couldn’t get out because immigration agents were blocking the doors. The source said the farm labor contractors had been paid and should have released wages to all the workers.

“We don’t want anyone to be shorted,” the source said.

Aug. 3 (UPI) — Economists are lining up to defend Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner Erika McEntarfer, who was fired by President Donald Trump on Friday over his allegations that the agency manipulated a report showing low job growth for July.

“It has been the honor of my life to serve as Commissioner of BLS alongside the many dedicated civil servants tasked with measuring a vast and dynamic economy. It is vital and important work and I thank them for their service to this nation,” McEntarfer said on social media Friday.

Her firing came after the July report had shown that jobs growth was slower than expected as the unemployment rose, with the United States only adding 73,000 new jobs for the month — down from 147,000 new jobs added in June.

“Today’s jobs numbers were rigged in order to make Republicans and me look bad,” Trump had said Friday afternoon in a Truth Social post.

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers called Trump’s accusations a “preposterous charge” in an interview with ABC News’ “This Week” program Sunday.

“These numbers are put together by teams of literally hundreds of people following detailed procedures that are in manuals. There’s no conceivable way that the head of the BLS could have manipulated this number,” Summers said.

Summers said that the numbers in the job report were “in line” with data and information being reviewed in the private sector and criticized Trump for his “authoritarian” removal of McEntarfer.

“Firing statisticians goes with threatening the heads of newspapers. It goes with launching assaults on universities. It goes with launching assaults on law firms that defend clients that the elected boss finds uncongenial,” he said. “This is really scary stuff.”

Bill Beach, McEntarfer’s predecessor, appeared in an interview with CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday where he likewise called the move by Trump “totally groundless” and dangerous.

“The commissioner doesn’t see the numbers until Wednesday before they’re published. By the time the commissioner sees the numbers, they’re all prepared. They’re locked into the computer system,” Beach said.

Beach said that the only thing the commissioner can do before the jobs report is published is review the text accompanying the data, as he explained part of the process of how they’re compiled.

“What I think really upset the president on Friday were the revisions to May and June, big revisions. But that’s because, like every time we publish on Friday, there are revisions to the previous two months,” he said. “This is a survey. And a survey has sample returns.”

Beach said the jobs reports are compiled from surveys that are sent out to Americans and hundreds of thousands of businesses each month. But the BLS doesn’t receive all the returns in time, keeping the window for responses open an extra two months.

“What you saw on Friday was the effect of trying to do a better job, getting more information,” Beach said.

During his interview, Beach was asked if he would believe future report numbers compiled by the BLS after a successor for McEntarfer is found.

“I will, because I know the people who work there. They are some of the most loyal Americans you can imagine. They have worked in every kind of political circumstance. They are completely devoted to producing the very best gold standard data possible,” he said. “And that’s why BLS is the finest statistical agency in the entire world. Its numbers are trusted all over the world. So, I will trust those numbers.”

Still, White House officials aimed Sunday to double down on the president’s claim that the data was being manipulated, without evidence.

White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett was interviewed on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” on Sunday and said that the BLS needs a “fresh set of eyes.”

“There have been a bunch of patterns that could make people wonder,” he said. “And I think the most important thing for people to know is that it’s the president’s highest priority that the data be trusted and that people get to the bottom of why these revisions are so unreliable.”

The far-right political activist Laura Loomer, who is not an official member of the Trump administration but has positioned herself as an informal chief adviser on personnel matters, called the BLS situation a “vetting crisis.”

“Great job by President Trump who just announced he is firing Biden holdover Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics,” she said on social media. “Every single Biden holdover must be FIRED.”