The Workers Paradise of California

In just the last week and a half the Sacramento area has been hit with devastating job news:

Campbell Soup shutting down its plant in Sacramento

“We employ about 700 people at the Sacramento plant and unfortunately those jobs will be eliminated,” said Campbell Soup Company spokesperson Anthony Sanzio. “This is a tough day for the company, for the employees. No one likes to do this.”

The company says the Sacramento plant, built in 1947, is the oldest in its network and has the highest production costs on a per-case basis...

Most of Sacramento’s production of soup, sauces and beverages will be shifted to Campbell’s three remaining thermal plants in North Carolina, Ohio and Texas.

The company is also closing a spice plant in South Plainfield, New Jersey...

Campbell does have several other facilities in California that will remain open. There are about 450 full-time and seasonal employees at its tomato processing plants in Dixon and Stockton. They also own Bolthouse Farms in Bakersfield.

Comcast closing call centers

The Comcast call center in Natomas will be closing Nov. 30, along with two other northern California call centers.

Three hundred employees in Natomas are affected by the closure. Two other centers, in Livermore and Morgan Hill, are also closing. One thousand jobs in total are leaving the state.

Comcast will be opening new centers in Seattle, Portland and Denver.

VSP (the provider of my school district's optical insurance) threatens to leave:

California's rollout of the federal health care overhaul, still in its infancy, has prompted one of Sacramento's most important companies to threaten to leave the state.

Vision Service Plan of Rancho Cordova is protesting a decision last month by the agency that is building California's online insurance market, a key piece of President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act. The decision by the California Health Benefit Exchange would keep VSP from competing for a big chunk of consumers.

The exchange said it would not allow stand-alone vision plans, like those sold by VSP, to be offered through the exchange to individual customers. Such a provision would greatly limit vision services available through the exchange, since most are offered through stand-alone plans.

VSP, which employs 2,100 Sacramentans, has suggested that the exclusion could prompt the company to move its headquarters to another state.

These follow other big news from last December:

Waste Connections, Inc., is moving their headquarters out of California.

The company announced Monday morning they are relocating their corporate headquarters to The Woodlands, Texas because the Houston suburb “offers our employees an attractive, lower cost, and more centrally located community…” said Waste Connections’ Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Ronald J. Mittelstaedt.

In an interview with FOX40, Mittelstaedt also cited a bad business climate in California, depressed housing market and a lack of good schools for employees’ kids as reason for the move.

I don't know where the liberals expect the jobs to come from if we keep  pushing jobs out of this state.  Instapundit always quotes the song, and it seems true: They’ll turn us all into beggars ’cause they’re easier to please.

Update:  Crazifornia:

It’s probably too late to save California. Laer tries to inject some optimism at the end of each chapter and in the conclusion to his book he notes that voter patterns might finally be changing (although recent polling data makes me less optimistic). As cities go bankrupt, gas and food prices rise, businesses bail, and the California middle class becomes poor, some of the voters might finally be growing up. Whether they can reverse California’s downward trend remains questionable. Laer has some excellent suggestions for getting the political pendulum unstuck from its far Left position, but it will be ugly, and it will have to be carried out by people who have been subjected to one hundred years of California’s Progressive propaganda.