Obama leads heads of state atop Forbes 2012 power list

NEW YORK (Reuters) – When it comes to power, politics trumps business, according to a new Forbes ranking on Wednesday that found heads of state occupying six of the top 10 spots among the world’s most powerful people, led by President Barack Obama.

The annual list selected what Forbes said were the world’s 71 most-powerful people from among the roughly 7.1 billion global populace, based on factors ranging from wealth to global influence.

Obama was joined in the top 10 by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Russian President Vladimir Putin, King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al Saud of Saudi Arabia and British Prime Minister David Cameron.

The list’s highest-ranked businessman was Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates at No. 4. U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, both public officials, also made the top 10.

“This year’s list reflects the changing of the guard in the world’s two most powerful countries: the United States and China,” Michael Noer, Forbes‘ executive editor, told Reuters in an email.

Noer noted that China’s President Hu Jintao, last year’s third most-powerful person, fell off the list as he is leaving power, and his successor, Xi Jinping, ranked ninth instead.

Both U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who have stated they will not be serving in Obama’s second term, were not in this year’s rankings.

While elected and appointed officials and business people made up the vast majority of Forbes’ most powerful, Pope Benedict XVI placed fifth in the rankings.

Among the oddities was Joaquin Guzman Loera at No. 63.

Loera, far from a household name, is a billionaire nicknamed “El Chapo” who as head of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel is the world’s most powerful drug trafficker, according to Forbes.

Age was also not a barrier, with two of the youngest and oldest of this year’s most powerful — 28-year-old Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and 81-year-old News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch — back-to-back at numbers 25 and 26, respectively.

Forbes noted that Zuckerberg fell out of last year’s top 10 after Facebook’s IPO disappointed. A gainer, meanwhile, was Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who moved up four spots to No. 18 despite being only halfway into her first term of office.

To create the rankings, which Forbes readily concedes bore a measure of subjectivity, editors graded candidates on four criteria for power and averaged the four grades:

– Power over many people

– Control over financial and other valuable resources

– Power in multiple spheres or arenas

– Active use of power

Some measures, such as power over many people, favored leaders such as the Pope, while the world’s richest man — Mexican telecom magnate Carlos Slim Hula, worth a reported $ 72 billion — placed 11th on the strength of his wealth.

Others, such as New York’s billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, scored high in all areas, placing him at No. 16.

Noer said that Elon Musk, one of the co-founders of Paypal and Tesla Motors, was “one of the more interesting newcomers” on the list due to his SpaceX company, a private space exploration venture.

“With NASA retiring the space shuttle fleet, private companies like SpaceX have been awarded huge contracts to do things like resupply the International Space Station. The commercialization of space is just beginning, but we expect it to be big business,” Noer said.

Former President Bill Clinton placed 50th, with editors noting that by hitting the campaign trail for Obama, Clinton “cemented his status as a kingmaker”, along with his nonpartisan Global Initiative raising more than $ 71 billion in commitments to fund charitable action worldwide.

Other high-ranking heads of state included French President Francois Hollande at No. 14, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at No. 19 and Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Hoseini-Khamenei at No. 21.

Among businessmen in the top 20 were Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett at No. 15, Wal-Mart CEO Michael Duke at No. 17 and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at No. 20.

The entire list can be found at www.forbes.com/power as well as the December 24 issue of the magazine.

(Reporting by Chris Michaud, Editing by Piya Sinha-Roy and Andrew Hay)

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Extended Use of Breast Cancer Drug Suggested

The widely prescribed drug tamoxifen already plays a major role in reducing the risk of death from breast cancer. But a new study suggests that women should be taking the drug for twice as long as is now customary, a finding that could upend the standard that has been in place for about 15 years.

In the study, patients who continued taking tamoxifen for 10 years were less likely to have the cancer come back or to die from the disease than women who took the drug for only five years, the current standard of care.

“Certainly, the advice to stop in five years should not stand,” said Prof. Richard Peto, a medical statistician at Oxford University and senior author of the study, which was published in The Lancet on Wednesday and presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

Breast cancer specialists not involved in the study said the results could have the biggest impact on premenopausal women, who account for a fifth to a quarter of new breast cancer cases. Postmenopausal women tend to take different drugs, but some experts said the results suggest that those drugs might be taken for a longer duration as well.

“We’ve been waiting for this result,” said Dr. Robert W. Carlson, a professor of medicine at Stanford University. “I think it is especially practice-changing in premenopausal women because the results do favor a 10-year regimen.”

Dr. Eric P. Winer, chief of women’s cancers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, said that even women who completed their five years of tamoxifen months or years ago might consider starting on the drug again.

Tamoxifen blocks the effect of the hormone estrogen, which fuels tumor growth in estrogen receptor-positive cancers that account for about 65 percent of cases in premenopausal women. Some small studies in the 1990s suggested that there was no benefit to using tamoxifen longer than five years, so that has been the standard.

About 227,000 cases of breast cancer are diagnosed each year in the United States, and an estimated 30,000 of them are in premenopausal women with estrogen receptor-positive cancer and prime candidates for tamoxifen. But postmenopausal women also take tamoxifen if they cannot tolerate the alternative drugs, known as aromatase inhibitors.

The new study, known as Atlas, included nearly 7,000 women with ER-positive disease who had completed five years of tamoxifen. They came from about three dozen countries. Half were chosen at random to take the drug another five years, while the others were told to stop.

In the group assigned to take tamoxifen for 10 years, 21.4 percent had a recurrence of breast cancer in the ensuing 10 years, meaning the period 5 to 14 years after their diagnoses. The recurrence rate for those who took only five years of tamoxifen was 25.1 percent.

About 12.2 percent of those in the 10-year treatment group died from breast cancer, compared with 15 percent for those in the control group.

There was virtually no difference in death and recurrence between the two groups during the five years of extra tamoxifen. The difference came in later years, suggesting that tamoxifen has a carry-over effect that lasts long after women stop taking it.

Whether these differences are big enough to cause women to take the drug for twice as long remains to be seen.

“The treatment effect is real, but it’s modest,” said Dr. Paul E. Goss, director of breast cancer research at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Tamoxifen has side effects, including endometrial cancer, blood clots and hot flashes, which cause many women to stop taking the drug. In the Atlas trial, it appears that roughly 40 percent of the patients assigned to take tamoxifen for the additional five years stopped prematurely.

Some 3.1 percent of those taking the extra five years of tamoxifen got endometrial cancer versus 1.6 percent in the control group. However, only 0.6 percent of those in the longer treatment group died from endometrial cancer or pulmonary blood clots, compared with 0.4 percent in the control group.

“Over all, the benefits of extended tamoxifen seemed to outweigh the risks substantially,” Trevor J. Powles of the Cancer Center London, said in a commentary published by The Lancet.

Dr. Judy E. Garber, director of the Center for Cancer Genetics and Prevention at Dana-Farber, said many women have a love-hate relationship with hormone therapies.

“They don’t feel well on them, but it’s their safety net,” said Dr. Garber, who added that the news would be welcomed by many patients who would like to stay on the drug. “I have patients who agonize about this, people who are coming to the end of their tamoxifen.”

Emily Behrend, who is a few months from finishing her five years on tamoxifen, said she would definitely consider another five years. “If it can keep the cancer away, I’m all for it,” said Ms. Behrend, 39, a single mother in Tomball, Tex. She is taking the antidepressant Effexor to help control the night sweats and hot flashes caused by tamoxifen.

Cost is not considered a huge barrier to taking tamoxifen longer because the drug can be obtained for less than $200 a year.

The results, while answering one question, raise many new ones, including whether even more than 10 years of treatment would be better still.

Perhaps the most important question is what the results mean for postmenopausal women. Even many women who are premenopausal at the time of diagnosis will pass through menopause by the time they finish their first five years of tamoxifen, or will have been pushed into menopause by chemotherapy.

Postmenopausal patients tend to take aromatase inhibitors like anastrozole or letrozole, which are more effective than tamoxifen at preventing breast cancer recurrence, though they do not work for premenopausal women.

Mr. Peto said he thought the results of the Atlas study would “apply to endocrine therapy in general,” meaning that 10 years of an aromatase inhibitor would be better than five years. Other doctors were not so sure.

The Atlas study was paid for by various organizations including the United States Army, the British government and AstraZeneca, which makes the brand-name version of tamoxifen.

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Europe Fines Electronics Makers $1.92 Billion

BRUSSELS — For a decade, senior managers at some of the world’s largest electronics companies met at golf courses, mostly in Asia, for what they called “greens meetings.”

Besides golf, the business at hand was a price-fixing scheme that affected millions of consumers, the top European antitrust regulator said on Wednesday.

Joaquín Almunia, the European competition commissioner, imposed fines totaling almost 1.5 billion euros, or $1.96 billion, on seven companies involved in two cartels that fixed the price of picture and display tubes for televisions and computer screens.

Combined, the fines amount to the largest single penalty for price fixing ever imposed by the commission, which said the cartels had engaged in the most organized market manipulation it had ever investigated. In addition to price fixing, the cartels’ conspiracies included market sharing, customer allocation and exchanges of important commercial information.

The action follows a spate of similar cases in the glass and display sectors, where bulky cathode ray tubes have been supplanted by technologies like liquid-crystal display and plasma that allow manufacturers to build far more compact monitors and screens.

But starting in the late 1990s, when the market was still strong for cathode ray tubes, and lasting until 2006, the conspirators’ scheme allowed them to continue generating strong returns for a technology that was rapidly becoming outmoded.

“The companies were trying to manage through collusion the decline in the market for these kinds of tubes,” Mr. Almunia said at a news conference. “The undue profits that the companies derived from the collusion may even have artificially slowed down the transition to the more modern products like LCD and plasma displays.”

Excerpts from minutes from meetings held by the cartel members obtained during the investigation showed the efforts they made to fix the market for the older technologies, according to commission officials.

“Producers need to avoid price competition through controlling their production capacity (of flat types in particular),” one excerpt read. Another noted that “mutual cooperation is required to deal with an expected economic downturn” in the second half of 2002.

In addition to the “greens meetings,” there were “glass meetings” for lower-level managers. The name probably related to the glass structure of the cathode ray tubes, officials said. They were held in Asia and in European cities including Glasgow, Paris, Rome, Amsterdam and Budapest, commission officials said.

The cartels “feature all the worst kinds of anticompetitive behavior that are strictly forbidden to companies doing business in Europe,” Mr. Almunia said. Producers in Europe and consumers suffered serious harm, he said, because the cathode ray tubes accounted for as much as 70 percent of the price of screens.

During his news conference, Mr. Almunia read from one of the documents obtained by the commission to show that cartel members were aware they were breaking the law. “Everybody is requested to keep it a secret,” the document read, “as it would be serious damage if it is open to customers or to the European Commission.”

The commission’s antitrust division can fine offenders as much as 10 percent of their annual worldwide sales, and the fine on Wednesday exceeded the previous record of almost 1.4 billion euros, which was imposed upon an auto-glass cartel in 2008.

But unlike regulators in the United States, the commission has no criminal enforcement powers and cannot prosecute or seek to jail participants for anticompetitive offenses. Many lawyers say this lack remains a shortcoming of the European system.

“There is a deterrent effect as these fines get higher, but there are always going to be some companies with wayward commercial personnel and some companies where some people say, ‘Let’s take the risk as might be worth it in the long run,’ ” said Caroline Hobson, a competition law partner at CMS Cameron McKenna in London. “An even greater enforcement power is the power to jail offenders, because that really makes people wake up.”

She said she did not represent any of the companies involved in the case.

Mr. Almunia imposed the harshest penalties on Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands and LG Electronics of South Korea. Philips was fined 313.4 million euros and LG Electronics 295.6 million euros. Philips and LG also were also part of a joint venture that received an additional fine of 391.9 million euros for which both companies were liable.

The commission also fined Panasonic 157.5 million euros, Samsung 150.8 million euros, Toshiba 28 million euros and Technicolor 38.6 million euros.

In a statement, Philips said it would appeal the fines to the General Court of the European Union, the bloc’s second-highest tribunal. Philips described the fine relating to its involvement in the joint venture as “disproportionate and unjustified.” Philips said it had divested that business in 2001.

LG did not respond to an e-mail request for comment.

The sanctions announced on Wednesday were the latest handed down by the commission over activity in the sector. It levied a fine of 128.7 million euros last year against four producers of the glass that is used in cathode ray tubes, and it imposed a 649 million euro fine in 2010 against members of a cartel that fixed prices on flat-panel displays based on LCD technology. One of the companies involved in that case, Chunghwa from Taiwan, reported the picture tubes case to the commission. As a result, Chunghwa received full immunity from fines.

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Mediators may spur a quick resolution in port strike

Standing with a picket sign in hand, clerical worker Manny Garcia gestured his thanks to motorists honking in support as they drove past a Port of Los Angeles cargo terminal.

Garcia has manned the picket lines at the L.A. and Long Beach ports in shifts since last week, when the 800-member International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 63 Office Clerical Unit went on strike.

The issue pitting the clerical workers union against their shipping line employers is concern over outsourcing jobs, a charge the Harbor Employers Assn. has denied.

"We'd like to be working" rather than on strike, Garcia said Tuesday. "But we're trying to get a fair agreement."

A solution may come soon.

On Tuesday, after Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa intervened in the negotiations, the clerical workers union relented and agreed to mediation — a decision the employers had pushed for since last week.

"We've got to get a deal and get a deal as soon as possible," Villaraigosa told reporters after working with both sides Monday night and well into the morning Tuesday following his return from a South American trade mission.

The workers have been striking since Nov. 27 against the 14-member group of shipping lines and terminal owners. Though small, their strike has been magnified as 10,000 regional members of the ILWU honor the picket lines.

The dispute isn't about wages or benefits. It centers on the charge by the union that employers have steadily outsourced jobs through attrition. The union says the employers have transferred work from higher-paid union members to lower-paid employees in other states and countries.

Their employers dispute that contention, saying they've offered the workers full job security. Their proposal also includes wage and pension increases.

The workers don't have ordinary clerk and secretarial jobs. They are logistics experts who process a massive flow of information on the content of ships' cargo containers and their destinations.

The clerical workers, among the highest-paid in the country, are responsible for booking cargo, filing customs documentation, and monitoring and tracking cargo movements.

For example, any hazardous cargo, such as chemicals, that arrives or leaves through the ports requires appropriate documentation. The clerical workers ensure that containers flagged by customs or the U.S. Department of Agriculture are held for inspection and cleared before they exit the ports.

According to union officials and the Harbor Employers Assn., the average hourly rate for clerical workers is $40.50 per hour — which amounts to about $84,000 a year. In comparison, the median annual wage for cargo and freight agents was $37,150 in May 2010, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

As talks have dragged on, employers have offered to raise the union workers' total compensation package. The employers say total compensation currently averages $165,000, but that amount includes healthcare, pension contributions, time off and other benefits in addition to salary.

The latest proposal would raise that average to $195,000, and include a $1-an-hour increase in pay each year for the next two years.

The union, however, is pushing for a contract that will prevent employers from outsourcing jobs in the future, said Craig Merrilees, a spokesman for the clerical workers union.

Both sides expect that two mediators — high-profile negotiators with experience in past labor disputes — will speed along negotiations.

Director George H. Cohen and Deputy Director Scot L. Beckenbaugh of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service were expected to meet with both sides beginning Tuesday evening. Between them, they have mediated labor disputes involving the National Hockey League, Major League Soccer and grocery chains.

At his news conference Tuesday, Villaraigosa said it was clear to him the rift between the two sides was too large to be resolved without an experienced mediator guiding the talks.

"There's a lot at stake here," Villaraigosa said, adding that the talks needed a greater "sense of urgency."

Steve Getzug, a spokesman for the Harbor Employers Assn., said the mediators' involvement would be helpful, "but what this doesn't do is get the clerks to drop their picket."

Union officials said they had no plans to stop picketing during negotiations.

The strike has shut down 10 of the 14 cargo container terminals at the nation's busiest seaport complex. Since the strike began, 20 ships have been diverted to other ports, including Oakland and Ensenada. Other cargo ships have sat anchored outside the L.A. and Long Beach ports, waiting for a resolution to the labor dispute.

Garcia, for his part, said he feels the strike is a way to stand up to large corporations to protect well-paying jobs in the community.

"We want to see this resolved," said Garcia, who retired more than a decade ago but still works as a temporary employee. "And we don't want an agreement to be rammed down someone's throat. After all, we have to work with these people later."

ricardo.lopez2@latimes.com

Times staff writers Stuart Pfeifer and Scott Wilson contributed to this report.

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The Coolest Vertigo Comics, From <em>Sandman</em> to <em>Swamp Thing</em>

DC Comics has lost one of its most influential tastemakers with the news that executive editor Karen Berger will be stepping down from Vertigo Comics, the DC Comics imprint she founded and ran since its inception in 1993. In her nearly 20 years running Vertigo, Berger helped birth numerous legendary comics, like Neil Gaiman's Sandman and Alan Moore's V for Vendetta, which often reached beyond the usual superhero audience of DC Comics and left a lasting mark on pop culture.

And now that Vertigo characters like Sandman, John Constantine, Animal Man and writers like Scott Snyder (American Vampire) have been absorbed into the regular DC Comics superhero universe, thanks to its sprawling but uneven New 52 reboots, who knows long it may be before Vertigo itself follows Berger into the storied comics' sunset?

One could argue that its credibility just did.

We've collected a gallery of some of Vertigo's greatest hits launched under Berger's forward-looking watch, alongside some testimonials from their creators and artists. Let us know your favorite Vertigo comics and thoughts on Berger's legacy in the comments section below.

Above:

Comics' greatest working writer today, Grant Morrison was already a budding star thanks to astounding runs on DC's Animal Man and especially Doom Patrol. But from old-school stunners like The Invisibles (above) to newer mind-wipers like We3, Seaguy and Joe the Barbarian, Morrison blossomed into a legend while working with Berger at Vertigo.

"Karen Berger gave me my first DC Comics job on Wonder Woman," The Invisibles artist and comics' favorite Scary Godmother Jill Thompson tweeted. "I'm happy to say I penciled the first Vertigo issue of Sandman."

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‘Dr. Phil”s stolen classic Chevy recovered

BURBANK, Calif. (AP) — Los Angeles police say they’ve recovered a stolen 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air Convertible that belongs to talk-show host Phil McGraw.

Detective Jess Corral said Tuesday that investigators recovered McGraw’s classic car, along with 13 others, after law enforcement began targeting auto theft rings.

McGraw is known as television’s “Dr. Phil. His car was stolen from the RODZ shop in Burbank in August, and was found with minor damage.

The car is worth at least $ 80,000.

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Generic Drug Makers Facing Squeeze on Revenue

They call it the patent cliff.

Brand-name drug makers have feared it for years. And now the makers of generic drugs fear it, too.

This year, more than 40 brand-name drugs — valued at $35 billion in annual sales — lost their patent protection, meaning that generic companies were permitted to make their own lower-priced versions of well-known drugs like Plavix, Lexapro and Seroquel — and share in the profits that had exclusively belonged to the brands.

Next year, the value of drugs scheduled to lose their patents and be sold as generics is expected to decline by more than half, to about $17 billion, according to an analysis by Crédit Agricole Securities.“The patent cliff is over,” said Kim Vukhac, an analyst for Crédit Agricole. “That’s great for large pharma, but that also means the opportunities theoretically have dried up for generics.”

In response, many generic drug makers are scrambling to redefine themselves, whether by specializing in hard-to-make drugs, selling branded products or making large acquisitions. The large generics company Watson acquired a European competitor, Actavis, in October, vaulting it from the fifth- to the third-largest generic drug maker worldwide.

“They are certainly saying either I need to get bigger, or I need to get ‘specialer,’ ” said Michael Kleinrock, director of research development at the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics, a health industry research group. “They all want to be special.”

As one consequence of the approaching cliff, executives for generic drug companies say, they will no longer be able to rely as much on the lucrative six-month exclusivity periods that follow the patent expirations of many drugs. During those periods, companies that are the first to file an application with the Food and Drug Administration, successfully challenge a patent and show they can make the drug win the right to sell their version exclusively or with limited competition.

The exclusivity windows can give a quick jolt to companies. During the first nine months of 2012, sales of generic drugs increased by 19 percent over the same period in 2011, to $39.1 billion from $32.8 billion, according to Michael Faerm, an analyst for Credit Suisse. Sales of branded drugs, by contrast, fell 4 percent during the same period, to $174.2 billion from $181.3 billion.

But those exclusive periods also make generic drug makers vulnerable to the fickle cycle of patent expiration. “The only issue is it’s a bubble, too,” said Mr. Kleinrock. He said next year, the generic industry would enter a drought that was expected to last about two years.  Of the drugs that are becoming generic, fewer have exclusivity periods dedicated to a single drug maker.

In 2013, for example, the antidepressant Cymbalta, sold by Eli Lilly, is scheduled to be available in generic form. But more than five companies are expected to share in sales during the first six months, according to a report by Ms. Vukhac.

Heather Bresch, the chief executive of Mylan, the second-largest generics company in the United States, said Wall Street analysts were obsessed with the issue. “I can’t go anywhere without being asked about the patent cliff, the patent cliff, the patent cliff,” she said. “The patent cliff is one aspect of a complex, multilayered landscape, and I think each company is going to face it differently.”

Jeremy M. Levin, the chief executive of Teva Pharmaceuticals, the largest global maker of generic drugs, agreed. “The concept of exclusivity — where only one generic player could actually make money out of the unique moment — has diminished,” he said. “In the absence of that, many companies have had to really ask the question, ‘How do I really play in the generics world?’ ”

For Teva, Mr. Levin said, he believes the answer will be both its reach  — it sells 1,400 products, and one in six generic prescriptions in the United States is filled with a Teva product  — and what he says is a reputation for making quality products. That focus will be increasingly important, he said, given recent statements by the F.D.A. that it intends to take a closer look at the quality of generic drugs. Mr. Levin also said he planned to cut costs, announcing last week that he intended to trim from $1.5 to $2 billion in expenses over the next five years.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 5, 2012

An article on Tuesday about business strategies of generic drug makers in the face of fewer drug patent expirations misidentified the country in which the pharmaceutical company Endo is based. It is in the United States, not Japan.

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Economic Scene: Unionizing at the Low End of the Pay Scale

Andrew Kelly/Reuters

A protester held up a sign at a demonstration outside McDonald’s in Times Square last week.

Other than poverty, José Carrillo and Joshua Williams have little in common. The austere life of Mr. Carrillo, a 79-year-old Peruvian immigrant from Washington Heights, is a universe apart from the hardscrabble reality of Mr. Williams, a 28-year-old single father from Atlanta staying at his aunt’s place in Brooklyn to save on rent.

Bret Hartman/Reuters

Striking Walmart workers and supporters on Black Friday outside a store in Paramount, Calif.

But their lives are connected. They both work in the fast-food industry — Mr. Carrillo at a McDonald’s in Midtown Manhattan and Mr. Williams at a Wendy’s in Brooklyn. They both earn a little more than $7 an hour. And they both need food stamps to survive. Last Thursday, both did something they had never done before: they went on strike.

Their activism, part of a flash strike of some 200 workers from fast-food restaurants around New York City, caps a string of unorthodox actions sponsored by organized labor, including worker protests outside Walmart stores, which, like most fast-food chains, are opposed to being unionized, and union drives at carwashes in New York and Los Angeles.

Labor unions are hoping that the unusual tactics, often in collaboration with social justice activists and other community groups, will offer them a new opportunity to get back on the offensive, helping to raise the floor for wages and working conditions in the harsh, ultracompetitive economy of the 21st century.

Mr. Carrillo’s and Mr. Williams’s meager salaries also underscore the straightforward choice we face as a nation: either we build an economy in which most workers can earn enough to adequately support their families or we build a government with the wherewithal to subsidize the existence of a lower class that can’t survive on its own. We are doing neither.

More than two million workers toil in food preparation jobs at limited-service restaurants like McDonald’s, according to government statistics. They are the lowest-paid workers in the country, government figures show, typically earning $8.69 an hour. A study by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning research organization, concluded that almost three-quarters of them live in poverty. And they are unlikely to have ever contemplated joining a union.

On a full-time schedule, they could make a little over $18,000 a year, just about enough to keep a family of two parents and one child at the threshold of poverty. But full-time work is hard to come by. With fast-food restaurants increasingly using scheduling software to adjust staffing levels, workers can no longer count on a steady stream of work. Their hours can be cut sharply from one week to the next based on the business outlook or even the weather.

Orley Ashenfelter, a labor economist at Princeton, published a study earlier this year that captured the plight of workers under the Golden Arches in a novel way: measuring pay by the burgers a worker could buy for an hour of work, he calculated that the real wages of McDonald’s workers in the United States hit about 2.2 Big Macs an hour last year. That’s 15 percent less than in 2000.

Many economists will argue that concern about the lowly McJob is misplaced. These jobs offer a wage to people with no training or education. Mr. Carrillo, for instance, doesn’t speak English. “To get a better job at my age, you need a profession,” he says. To improve the lives of American workers, most economists argue, we might do better by focusing on education to equip them with the skills to perform more productive, better-paid jobs.

But this argument overlooks the fact that the McJob is hardly a niche of the labor market reserved for the uneducated few. Rather, it might be the biggest job of our future.

The American labor market has been hollowing out for decades — losing many of the middle-skilled, relatively well-paid jobs in manufacturing that can be performed more cheaply by machines or workers overseas. It has split between a high end of well-educated workers, and a low end of less-educated workers performing jobs, mostly in the service sector, that cannot be outsourced or mechanized.

This process is not expected to reverse any time soon. According to government statistics, personal care aides will make up the fastest-growing occupation this decade. The Economic Policy Institute study found that some 57 percent of them live in poverty.

This poses an existential question for labor unions, which are struggling because of the loss of union jobs to automation and stiff competition, both from cheaper labor in the mostly union-free South and developing nations around the world: can they do something to improve workers’ lot?

They have in the past. A recent study by the International Labor Organization concluded that low-wage work was rare where unionization rates were high. In countries where more than half of workers belong to a union, only 12 percent of jobs pay less than two-thirds of the middle wage, on average.

Still, there is little reason to believe that American labor unions can do much to lift the floor on wages in the future. Fewer than 7 percent of workers in the private sector are in a union. We have the largest share of low-paid jobs in the industrial world, amounting to almost one in four full-time workers, according to the International Labor Organization. And our rates of unionization continue to fall.

E-mail: eporter@nytimes.com; Twitter: @portereduardo

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Santa Monica Nativity scenes to move to private property

Santa Monica's much-debated Nativity scenes will be staged after all — on private property. The decision was hailed by advocates for the separation of church and state, but there was little indication the acrimony would subside on the other side, where an attorney pledged to continue to fight for religious displays on public land.

Less than a week after a federal judge finalized a ruling that Santa Monica has the right to ban seasonal displays in public spaces, Nativity scene organizers announced that they would move to a new location.

The display — 14 scenes of life-size figures depicting the birth of Jesus Christ — will open Sunday in the 2700 block of Ocean Park Boulevard, between Clover Park and 28th Street, said Nativity Scenes Committee Chairman Hunter Jameson. The scenes are scheduled to remain on display until early January.

"We are deeply grateful for the use of this new site to allow all of Santa Monica's distinctive Christmas story to continue spreading the message of joy, hope and peace found in the Christ child's birth," Jameson said in a statement.

When told of the development, Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation, responded: "Well, hallelujah — praise secularism."

"This move is great," she said. "But it does undercut any argument they have that they don't have free expression. Obviously, they do."

For nearly six decades, scenes celebrating Jesus' birth were a seasonal fixture in Palisades Park, which runs along the coastal bluffs on Ocean Avenue. In recent years, debate over the displays had become rancorous, with activists submitting applications to establish their own displays, including a satirical homage to "Pastafarianism."

Earlier this year, the Santa Monica City Council — seeking to head off clashes between atheists and Christian organizations, as well as legal disputes that could become costly to taxpayers — barred private, unattended displays in the park.

At the time, city officials pointed out that those wishing to celebrate the Nativity, or anything else for that matter, could erect displays on private property. But Nativity scene proponents filed suit in U.S. District Court seeking to restore the Palisades Park tradition. The case drew national attention.

Last month, Judge Audrey B. Collins of the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles denied the church coalition's request to require the city to allow the Nativity scenes in the park.

William J. Becker Jr., an attorney for the Santa Monica Nativity Scenes Committee — who has compared the campaign against the nativity displays to Pontius Pilates' judgment against Jesus, — lashed out at the decision anew Monday and pledged to appeal.

"Judges are fallible," Becker said. "They are often motivated by their own ideological dispositions, whether they want to admit it or not."

The move to private land is "not a resolution," Becker said.

"Everybody has the right to use private property to express themselves," he said. "It's still no substitute for 1st Amendment protections that we are guaranteed to express our viewpoints in a public forum."

Gaylor, of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, said she is untroubled by the prospect of prolonged appeal.

"Santa Monica is going to win — should win, ultimately," she said. "This judge obviously did the right thing."

scott.gold@latimes.com

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Microsoft's Motorola Patent Violation Won't Stop Xbox Sales

A federal judge in Seattle has told Motorola Mobility that he will not grant its request to ban the sale of Microsoft’s Xbox 360, and the two need to stop bickering and broker a licensing deal to end their patent suit.

The ruling by Judge James Robart follows a finding by an International Trade Commission administrative law judge that the Xbox has violated four Motorola patents that pertain to the H.264 video compression codec and wireless technologies used in the console and its controllers. The ICT judge recommended in May that sales of the Xbox be banned in the United States.

Not so fast, Robart said. There’s no need for that.

“At this stage in the litigation, and based on this court’s prior rulings, the court concludes that Motorola cannot demonstrate irreparable harm,” Robart said in a ruling issued Friday (.pdf). “The Motorola asserted patents, at issue in this litigation, are standard essential patents of the H.264 Standard and are included in Motorola’s H.264 standard essential patent portfolio. Thus, Microsoft is entitled to a license to the Motorola asserted patents on RAND terms.”

Robart essentially said the two sides need to sit down and hammer out some fair patent licensing terms — RAND meaning “reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.” There really isn’t another option since the patents at the heart of the dispute are fundamental to any device using Wi-Fi or playing digital video. But there is disagreement over how much Microsoft should pay up in the inevitable agreement.

Previously, Motorola has proposed a licensing fee of 2.25 percent of the retail price of each Xbox, according to Bloomberg But Microsoft declined, arguing that was too high. Now Robart and the U.S. District Court are tasked with figuring out what a fair licensing fee would be. That won’t happen until sometime next year.

Motorola and Microsoft officials were unavailable for comment.

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