The Brief

Wilfredo Cruz went to the doctor in October of last year to have his brain scanned because he was experiencing vertigo — a dangerous condition when you’re a refinery worker like Cruz and your job entails climbing 200-foot towers and fixing heavy machinery.

While he waited at the doctor’s office, he picked up his phone and felt a moment of panic, seeing 100 unread text messages in the last hour.

The Phillips 66 refinery complex in Los Angeles had just said that it was going to close, and Cruz learned in that moment that he would eventually lose his job, along with nearly 1,000 other employees and contractors.

“It was a big shock, a gut punch,” said Cruz, who thinks his last day will be sometime in April. Workers say layoff notices will begin to go out in the next few months.

It’s just one of a handful of refineries that have closed or that intend to close in the coming months. For the workers — most of whom lack a college degree — it’s unlikely they’ll find another job that pays as well, despite recent efforts by the state to help. Though the Trump administration signed legislation creating billions of dollars in tax cuts for oil and gas companies, it’s not going to save these jobs or offer the workers any money to train for new ones.

“You have people earning between $80,000 to $200,000 a year, and almost everyone is a high school graduate and that’s it,” said Cruz. “To go out and look for another job that’s even somewhat comparable, it just doesn’t exist.”

When he isn’t at the refinery, Cruz is wearing a plain black shirt, shorts, and New Balance sneakers — anything that’s easy to clean if his 2-year old son throws food at him, he said. His vertigo is better these days, almost a year after the refinery said it would close, but he now has to find a job so he can support his family and pay his mortgage. The best bet, he said, is to go back to school and start a new career in cybersecurity.

Thousands of jobs lost

California has about 100,000 workers in the fossil fuel industry, according to an August report by the Public Policy Institute of California. That’s about the population of a small city, such as Merced or Redding. As the state continues its transition to renewable energy, many of those jobs may disappear — and some already have.

Refineries have been closing all across the U.S. in recent years, but California has been hit hard, especially in Contra Costa County, Solano County and parts of southern Los Angeles, near Long Beach. First it was the Marathon refinery in Contra Costa County in 2020, which put hundreds of people out of work before the plant converted to renewable fuels with a fraction of the former workforce. Then Phillips 66 began shifting one of its Contra Costa County refineries to renewables and closed an affiliated plant on the Central Coast. A Valero refinery in Solano County is also expected to close in the next few months, leading to more layoffs.

Publicly, oil companies have given vague justifications for the closures, though oil industry advocates, such as the Western States Petroleum Association, blame the state’s increased regulation and its renewable energy transition. Environmental groups point to the decrease in oil demand as more Californians turn to electric vehicles.

With thousands of jobs at stake, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Democratic-led state Legislature this summer tried to strike a deal with Valero to avoid the closure of its Solano County refinery. Those conversations are still “ongoing,” said Daniel Villaseñor, the deputy director of communications for the governor.

What the state has offered so far is a $30 million pot of money, which refinery workers can use to train for new jobs. The money went out to four different workforce organizations last February, and they have until 2027 to distribute it to workers in various ways, such as through scholarships.

Workers cross a street as smoke billows from a fire at the Martinez Refinery Company in Martinez in Contra Costa County on Feb. 1, 2025.

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Jose Carlos Fajardo

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Bay Area News Group

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A worker stands atop a tank car that carries liquefied petroleum gas at the Marathon Martinez Refinery on April 27, 2020.

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Jose Carlos Fajardo

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Bay Area News Group

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The United Steelworkers union, which represents many of the Phillips 66 refinery workers, received about a third of the money and recruited Cruz to help find eligible workers at his job. Some of his colleagues are trying to become truck drivers, emergency medical technicians, or radiologists, but the state money rarely covers all the training expenses, he said.

In his spare time, Cruz is enrolled in an online, year-long certificate program in cybersecurity at UC San Diego and is using the state money to cover the $4,000 tuition. He said he wants a remote job, something that would allow him to spend more time with his son.

The steelworkers union has pushed Newsom for much more, ideally “hundreds of millions of dollars per year” to help retrain the refinery workers it represents, said Mike Smith, the national bargaining chair for the union. The governor has yet to make any new promises.

Six-figure salary, no degree required

The average work day at a refinery might entail crawling into small spaces, withstanding searing heat, or operating heavy machinery with precision. And it can be dangerous: In 2006, the roof of a storage tank collapsed, killing one person and injuring four others at the Phillips 66 refinery complex in Los Angeles, which was then owned by an earlier iteration of the company.

Twelve-hour shifts are the norm, including many night shifts, and overtime is common. Nearby residents complain that the Phillips 66 facilities have a foul smell and that they pump cancer-causing chemicals into the air, creating health risks for the entire community. Workers are required to wear full-body fire retardant uniforms each day because fires are a constant risk, such as last week, when an explosion rocked a Chevron refinery in El Segundo. There was no major damage.

Flames and smoke from a large fire rises from the Chevron refinery in El Segundo on Oct. 2, 2025.

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Daniel Cole

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Reuters

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Though the work can be physically demanding, the rewards are plentiful. Union workers at the Phillips 66 refinery complex make about $115,000 a year, plus a pension and an 8% match on 401k contributions, said Smith.

Together, the Phillips 66 refineries in Los Angeles and the Valero refinery in Solano County produce about 17% of the state’s gas. Without these facilities, Californians could see higher prices at the pump, according to an independent analysis by the federal government.

Laurie Wallace, a self-described artist, never wanted to work in oil and gas, but the money was a big draw, she said. For years, she was working as many as three different jobs, saving up money for punk and ska concerts while flipping burgers at In-N-Out, helping customers at Ace Hardware, or working shifts at a local cafe. Her husband at the time learned about a training program for refinery workers. He said he was going to apply and when she said she was interested, he told her she would never get in.

“I took the test and got the better score,” Wallace said. “I don’t do well with people telling me not to do something.”

In the nearly 18 years since that exam, she’s worked at the Phillips 66 refinery complex in Los Angeles, handling the heavy machinery that transports California’s oil and gas. Wallace often earns over $100,000, especially with overtime, allowing her to achieve what many might consider the American Dream: a four-bedroom house in the Long Beach suburbs with an affordable mortgage and family vacations every year, including cruises to Mexico and trips to Las Vegas.

She’ll likely see a pay cut in any future job. In a 2023 study by the UC Berkeley Labor Center, UC Irvine professor Virginia Parks helped survey those who had been laid off by the Marathon oil refinery in Contra Costa County in 2020. She found that roughly a quarter were unemployed or no longer looking for work over a year after losing their jobs. Some workers found opportunities at other oil refineries, though they made less money because they lacked seniority or a union. Others found jobs at utility companies or chemical treatment plants, and a few started working in health care or retail.

“I don’t think (refinery workers) need long training programs but they do need some sort of reskilling,” said Parks, who wants the state to provide workers more financial help. She’s especially interested in state grants that give workers income support while they search for a skilled job. “Otherwise they’re just going to find whatever (job) they can.”

Her study found that workers who did find a job after getting laid off made about $38 an hour — $12 less than before.

Lots of experience but few ways to prove it

Since the layoffs at the Phillips 66 refinery complex will happen slowly over the next few months, Wallace still has a job for now. Her department is responsible for receiving and shipping the oil and gas that arrives at the Port of Los Angeles, work that is so essential that she thinks she’ll be one of the last people laid off, potentially in 2027.

Over the years, she’s driven the trains that transport tons of oil and gas, operated cranes to carry pieces of pipelines and climbed on top of the massive fuel storage tanks that line the 110 Freeway. Often, she said she worked six or even seven days in a row.

Laurie Wallace at the end of her overnight shift in front of the Phillips 66 refinery in Wilmington, Los Angeles, on Oct. 1, 2025.

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Stella Kalinina

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CalMatters

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In April, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and got a modified schedule. Now she works night shifts and only two or three days in a row. After finishing her radiation therapy around 2 p.m., she changes out of her usual attire, a punk T-shirt and jeans, and gets into her work uniform. She then has to get through Los Angeles traffic, bypass the plant’s two layers of security, and travel across the refinery, which takes up multiple city blocks, or about 650 acres. Her shift begins at 4:30 p.m., where she spends 12 hours in a room, alone, under fluorescent lights, actively monitoring 16 different computer screens for changes in pressure or chemistry.

After so many years, staying alert during a night shift is second nature, she said with a laugh. “I’m a little high strung. I have no problem staying awake.”

The stakes are high. If she isn’t paying attention and a machine fails or a tank has the wrong pressure, fuel leaks can occur. In 2014, a hole burst in an underground pipeline near the refinery, pouring 1,200 gallons of oil into a residential street.

Although Wallace has used many cranes over the years, she doesn’t have a crane operator’s license. In fact, all of the training that she’s done happens on-site, and her employer isn’t required to track it or give her any credential, such as a license or certificate, that could transfer to another job. After the Marathon refinery in Contra Costa County closed, former workers struggled to substantiate their skills when looking for new jobs, the UC Berkeley Labor survey found.

Drawing directly on the study, and with support from the steelworkers union, longtime labor activist and state Sen. María Elena Durazo, a Los Angeles Democrat, proposed a bill this year that would require employers to provide their workers with proof of any on-the-job training or education. The governor has until Oct. 12 to sign or veto the bill.

It’s only “a first step” though, said Parks, a co-author of the study. Long-term, she said refinery workers should have the option to acquire independent certificates or credentials, such as a crane operator license, that prove their skills and don't rely on an employer at all.

“It’s not ideal but it’s temporary” 

So far, only a fraction of the oil and gas workers who are eligible for state support have actually received it.

“We just started enrolling members,” said Rosi Romo, who coordinates the grant program on behalf of the steelworkers union.

Though the steelworkers union received the money last March, only about 100 people have participated so far, said Romo, most of them in Southern California. She said the program can fund 650 scholarships, offering up to $15,000 in tuition for each worker

In Kern County, where the oil industry is a major employer, the local job centers received over $11 million from the state, which they’ve used to help nearly 370 former oil and gas workers retrain in new careers, including trucking and nursing. The job centers have enough money to serve around 750 people, said Danette Williams, who works in marketing for the centers, known as the Employers’ Training Resource.

Unlike the steelworkers union, which is only giving out scholarships, Williams said the Employers’ Training Resource is also offering to reimburse 50% of wages during the first 480 hours of the workers’ new jobs. Romo said she wasn’t aware that was possible under the union’s contract with the state, but if it is, she said she’d try to offer the same benefit.

The other organizations who received the grant money did not respond to CalMatters' questions.

The Phillips 66 refinery in Wilmington, on Sept. 30, 2025.

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Stella Kalinina

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CalMatters

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Romo, along with other representatives from the steelworkers union, said the work schedule at the Phillips 66 refinery complex is one reason why workers have yet to use most of the money. As of August, about a quarter of union employees have already left the facility for other opportunities, said Smith, the national bargaining chair for the union. The remaining employees are left working overtime.

Once layoffs begin in the coming months, Romo and Smith said they expect an uptick in the number of workers taking advantage of the scholarship money.

Phillips 66 did not respond to multiple requests for comment about its overtime policies or other ways it may be supporting workers’ job transitions.

Cruz said he’s working six days a week now, 12 hours each day. To make progress on his cybersecurity course at UC San Diego, he tries to listen to lectures and audiobooks during his commute or while eating lunch or dinner during his two, 30-minute breaks. After he puts his son to sleep around 9 p.m., he has a few hours to study, though he has to wake up at 5 a.m. to make it to his shift on time. “It’s not ideal but it’s temporary,” he said.

Wallace has a slight advantage, since she started taking online classes in 2020 to complete her associate degree. She’s still one class short, but she hasn’t had the time to finish it. Between her radiation therapy and the 12-hour night shifts, she said it’s unlikely she’ll be able to study for at least another year while she works with the skeleton crew that’s closing the refinery.

If she had time, she said she would finish her associate degree and use the state training grant to help offset the cost of a bachelor’s degree. But because the state tuition grants expire in 2027, it’s quite possible she won't be able to use the tuition money at all.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Before they ever picked up a paintbrush, youth artists behind a new mural in MacArthur Park started by listening.

“We interviewed people in MacArthur Park about their experiences living in the community,” said Tania Castro, a recent high school graduate and one of 20 young artists who worked on the project. “Some stories were a little bit sad because they said they lost their jobs and they need more opportunities.”

Those conversations shaped “Roots of Our Labor,” a new mural unveiled this week by LA Commons across the street from MacArthur Park. The project, led by artists Luis Mateo and Shakir Manners, draws from stories collected in a yearlong process from more than 75 residents in and around MacArthur Park.

Castro says those stories were about more than struggle.

“They also said they loved the community. In the park, you can see a lot of vendors selling things like fruit and ice cream,” she said. “And the kids love it.”

Youth artists and members of LA Commons pose for a photo in front of the "Roots of our labor" mural during its unveiling event on Thursday, April 23, in MacArthur Park.

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Hanna Kang

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The LA Local

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The mural shows a tree bearing avocados and oranges, with a trunk made of intertwined hands and a farmer harvesting the fruit. On one side, a tamale vendor is depicted selling food, and on the other, an ice cream vendor pushes a cart as children gather around him. In the background, scenes from MacArthur Park play out. 

In a neighborhood where ongoing immigration raids have fueled fear and instability, and where MacArthur Park is often defined by visible homelessness and crime, organizers said the mural is intended to highlight the diverse communities who live there and to frame the park as a shared space of connection, culture and daily life.

“I enjoyed making it because it really teaches us about the importance of community and being more inclusive and kind to each other,” said high school artist Leslie Gonzalez. “Most of the people we talked to told us about their backgrounds and they weren’t that pleasant but they still pushed through and got together for each other.”

Painted in March at the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN), the mural is installed on the southeastern side of the UCLA James Lawson Jr. Worker Justice Center.

“Immigrants are critical to the community, especially here in MacArthur Park,” said Beth Peterson, community arts program director at LA Commons. “And I think the mural does a beautiful job of really sharing that story. It really shows how the hands of immigrants have really hung together to form this very beautiful community that we live in today.” 

Detail of "Roots of Our Labor" mural at UCLA James Lawson Jr. Worker Justice Center. The mural celebrates workers in the Westlake community.

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Courtesy LA Commons

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For the lead artists, working alongside youth was central to how the art took shape.

“This artwork honors both the neighborhood and the people who shape it,” Mateo said. “Working with youth was essential to the process, allowing the mural to emerge from shared reflection rather than a single perspective.”

The new mural builds on LA Commons’ ongoing work in the area, following another mural unveiled last September at MacArthur Park Elementary School. “Roots of Our Labor” is the organization’s second mural supported by Stop the Hate, a statewide initiative led by the Asian American and Pacific Islander community aimed at addressing hate incidents and promoting cross-cultural understanding.

LA Commons, a nonprofit arts organization that creates community-based public art projects through partnerships and a mix of public and private funding, has been in the MacArthur Park area for more than 20 years. Its first public art project in the neighborhood was in 2003. “Roots of Our Labor” is its 22nd public art project in MacArthur Park.

Detail of "Roots of Our Labor" mural at UCLA James Lawson Jr. Worker Justice Center. The mural celebrates workers in the Westlake community.

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Courtesy LA Commons)

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Manners, the artist, described the mural as a reflection of what he sees as the underlying spirit of MacArthur Park.

It represents “the unseen hands that sustain communities, emphasizing that true progress is built collectively through persistence, sacrifice and shared purpose,” he said.

For Gonzalez, the mural is personal as well as something tied closely to her community.

“I feel like a light has shone on me and I’m proud of it because I’ve never done anything this big before,” she said. 

The post New mural celebrates labor, multicultural community around MacArthur Park appeared first on LA Local.

The phone lines at the East L.A. Sheriff’s Station are back up after more than two months of outages caused by copper wire theft.  

The update comes just one week after Boyle Heights Beat reported on the issue, and residents raised concerns at a Maravilla Community Advisory Committee (MCAC) meeting on April 7 about difficulty reaching the station by phone for non-emergencies.

According to the East L.A. Sheriff’s Station, service was restored on Thursday, April 23. By Friday, all dispatchers were back working in the station after temporarily operating out of an off-site communications trailer connected via satellite. 

“This was made possible due to the concerted efforts of the East Los Angeles Sheriff Station Captains Hinchman and Kusayanagi, AT&T, and our Communications & Fleet Management Bureau,” the station said in a statement to the Beat. 

The station also thanked Assemblymember Jessica Caloza’s office and community stakeholders who contacted AT&T to express urgency.

Sheriff’s officials previously said they had called Caloza’s office to help speed up repairs by communicating with AT&T.

What went wrong

According to Sgt. Michael Mileski, the outage was caused by an incident on Feb. 13, where several thousand dollars’ worth of copper wiring was stolen from an electrical vault near the station. Fiber optic cables were damaged in the process, which affected a significant portion of the Eastern Avenue corridor in Boyle Heights and East L.A., disrupting phone lines for 100,000 residents for five days, Mileski said. 

AT&T said in a statement that copper cable outages generally take five times longer to repair on average than fiber outages. 

Copper wire theft has plagued the Eastside in recent years, leaving communities in the dark and disabling public facilities.  

LA Documenter Alex Medina contributed reporting for this story. LA Documenters trains and pays LA residents to take notes at local government meetings around Los Angeles. You can find meeting notes and audio at losangeles.documenters.org

The story Phone lines restored at East LA Sheriff’s Station after 2-month outage due to copper wire theft appeared first on LA Local.

Californians this fall will decide whether to require voters to show proof of citizenship before casting ballots.

A GOP-backed voter ID ballot initiative on Friday qualified for the Nov. 3 ballot, marking a significant win for San Diego Assemblymember Carl DeMaio, who led the signature-gathering campaign. DeMaio and other Republican operatives have pushed for tighter voter restrictions in deep-blue California for years.

If voters approve it, they would be required to show a government-issued ID each time they go to the polls, while mail-in ballots would need the last-four digits of an ID, such as a driver’s license. The secretary of state and county election offices would also be required to verify voters’ registration each time they vote.

Currently, voters only need to provide an ID and Social Security number when they register to vote. Thirty-six states require or recommend voters show some form of identification at the polls, according to a 2025 report by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“This is an initiative that’s incredibly popular amongst Democrats and Republicans,” GOP state Sen. Tony Strickland of Huntington Beach told CalMatters. “I think the only way we don’t get this passed is if we get [outspent]. So we’re working very hard with an on-the-ground campaign apparatus.”

Strickland and others who have helped lead the campaign attribute the initiative’s rapid certification to Julie Luckey, mother of tech billionaire Palmer Luckey who helped seed the majority of the $10 million the campaign committee has raised in the past year.

Voting rights groups say the initiative will suppress turnout among eligible voters who don’t have the documents on hand, many of whom are disproportionately poor and people of color.

Opponents, including the state’s most powerful labor unions, plan to campaign heavily against it.

Voter fraud is rare in California. However, claims of fraud and concerns about election integrity have risen since President Donald Trump touted false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Californians broadly support voter identification at the polls but are split along ideological lines when given specific details about the ballot measure, according to a 2026 poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Government Studies. When told the measure is meant to combat voter fraud and that it could suppress eligible votes, support dipped to 37%.

A hundred million years ago during the late Cretaceous period, the oceans were filled with giant predators, prowling for their next meal. There was the mosasaur — a giant toothy marine reptile (and a surprise hero in Jurassic World). There were large sharks.

And now, in the journal Science, researchers present evidence for ancient colossal octopuses — what they believe are the largest invertebrates ever described. Using innovative fossil reconstruction techniques, the researchers revealed remnants of two extinct species locked inside large rocks. They appear to have been up to 60 feet long — longer than a school bus — rivaling other apex predators of the time, and calling to mind the Kraken of legend.

"I wasn't expecting any octopus of this magnitude at all," says Fernando Ángel Fernández-Álvarez, a zoologist at the Spanish Institute of Oceanography who wasn't involved in the study. "And we now have the proof that they were living in the past."

The findings also reveal that these squishy leviathans likely feasted on crunchy prey items (think shrimp and lobster) and favored one side of their jaw over the other.

"I already thought octopuses were extraordinary animals," says Yasuhiro Iba, a paleontologist at Hokkaido University and lead author on the new publication. "But this study made me feel even more strongly that their uniqueness has deep evolutionary roots."

Jaws encased in ancient rocks

The findings are all the more remarkable because octopuses don't tend to preserve well.

Fossils usually form from bones and other hard materials. So a creature like an octopus — which is made up of almost entirely soft tissue — has been harder to come by in the fossil record.

"There are very few, very rare records about the octopus and their evolution," says Jörg Mutterlose, a paleontologist at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany and one of the researchers. This has limited our understanding of the development of these creatures and their habitats across time.

But more than a decade ago, Iba approached Mutterlose with an idea. He wanted to examine the fossilized contents of big rocks called concretions that had formed on the seafloor some 100 million years ago in what's now northern Japan.

"We thought there was a real possibility that octopus remains might also be hidden inside them," says Iba, "even if nothing was visible from the outside."

So he approached Mutterlose and they worked together, using a new technique that they call digital fossil-mining. They cut the concretions into thin slices, took pictures of any preserved fossils, and then created 3D reconstructions, a process facilitated by an AI model.

And there, locked inside, were octopus jaws, "which is very similar to the beak of a bird," says Mutterlose. They consist of a lower jaw, "which is like a shovel" and an upper jaw. Octopus jaws are hard, so they can fossilize.

And the animals use them like we do — to chomp down on food. The jaws aren't big enough to swallow a large animal, says Mutterlose, so the ancient octopuses would have used their long, strong arms to catch prey and "tear it apart into pieces."

A majestic view

The lower jaws were the biggest ones ever found for an octopus, and they offered a window into the lives of these animals. Considering work done in other species, Mutterlose says, "archaeologists reconstruct quite a lot about evolutionary history simply based on the size and form of teeth."

To that end, he and his colleagues used the jaws to estimate the body size of the octopuses. And that's when their calculations revealed that these animals were probably gargantuan — well larger than the giant Pacific octopus, today's biggest member of the family whose arm span often exceeds 13 feet.

Closer inspection of the specimens revealed numerous chips and scratches. "Obviously, something happened to the jaws," observes Mutterlose.

That something was likely the consumption of prey with hard exoskeletons, including shrimp, bivalves, lobsters and nautilus-like animals that would have worn away the jaw as they were crushed and eaten, leaving the marks behind.

These were active carnivores — and the researchers say they may have even hunted other large predators, but this remains speculative.

In addition, the right side of the jaws tended to be more worn down than the left side. "Single-sided usage might indicate that the brain was already fairly well developed," suggests Mutterlose. This means that these early octopuses may have already been displaying the advanced intelligence that they are known for today.

"Modern octopuses are intelligent, flexible and very unusual predators," says Iba. "Our results suggest that some of those remarkable traits may already have been emerging in early octopuses during the Cretaceous."

One can discern quite a lot from a few key specimens, says Mutterlose. "Just [a] few fossil findings may shed very new light on the evolution of the biosphere," he says.

Fernández-Álvarez says the results paint a vivid picture of the ocean ecosystem of the late Cretaceous — one that would have been filled with myriad large and hungry predators.

It must have been, he says, "a very majestic view."