Future Workers--a Training Ground

This summer, Tyra Mason is spending her afternoons at the Los Angeles Public Library bindery putting plastic covers on the library’s new books. The job is tedious, the pay is $3.35 an hour--and it does not teach her much about her planned career in nursing. But she is not complaining.

Mason is 17, and with more than 45% of black teen-agers unemployed nationwide, according to the U.S. Labor Department, the South-Central Los Angeles resident is just grateful to have a job.

“It gives me a chance to learn what it’s like to have a real job. . . . It kind of gives you a little hope, too,” she said.

Mason is one of nearly 9,000 young workers placed in jobs by the city’s Summer Youth Employment Program, federally funded and designed to give work experience to low-income youths and young adults aged 14 to 21--experience that they have difficulty finding in the private sector.

The Washington High School senior said she applied for summer jobs at clothing stores in the Fox Hills Mall and at fast-food restaurants, but had not received a response from any of them.

If it had not been for the program, Mason said, she doubts that anyone would have hired her.

Wanted to Work

She said she wanted a job because she did not want to sit at home all summer and she needs the money to buy school clothes, save up for her senior prom and help her mother, a school bus driver, pay the bills.

Her supervisor, Juanita Davis, said she tries to teach summer workers self-discipline, habits such as not talking on the job and getting to work on time.

Mason said she is learning quickly.

“I’ve learned that it’s a must to get to work on time,” she said. “You’d better or you lose a couple of dollars. . . . And I don’t want that.”

More than 30,000 young Los Angeles residents applied to the program, acting director Manny Rico said. About 9,000 applicants were chosen at random for jobs with nonprofit organizations or government agencies. The positions range from receptionists and computer operators to gardeners at the zoo and trash collectors for Caltrans.

The workers, who are paid the minimum wage, are matched to their jobs by proximity to their homes rather than by skills required, Rico said.

Manuel Romo, 16, said he was a straight-A student last year at Arroyo Seco Alternative School, a magnet school near Highland Park. He wants to be a computer programmer, but this summer he is digging drainage ditches instead of solving computer glitches.

He and 11 fellow workers from the program clip hedges, pull weeds and dig ditches at the Los Angeles Zoo.

It’s hard work, and Romo said he would rather be working in an office, but he believes the experience is a good one. “It prepares me for future jobs--how to be more sociable, how to be more cooperative and responsible.”

Lack of Knowledge

When asked if it would be hard for him to get a job without the program, Romo replied matter-of-factly: “I wouldn’t know how to.”

Another Summer Youth worker, Jennifer Woods, 16, of East Los Angeles, said many of her friends are having a hard time finding jobs this summer.

“A lot of my friends who don’t qualify for the program, they’re out hunting on the streets,” she said. She works as a receptionist at the state police offices downtown. “McDonald’s only hires so many people and other places require that you be 18.”

A junior at Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights, Woods said work is helping her grow up. “You learn to be mature. You can’t act like a little kid,” she said. “When you come to work, it’s a place to work, not to fool around.”

The job will also help her pay for some expenses over the school year: a band letterman jacket, a class ring, clothes. “I don’t like to depend on my mother for everything,” she said.

No Specific Training

Rico said that despite its name, the Summer Youth Employment and Training Program, which was established in the mid-1960s as part of the Neighborhood Youth Corps, does not do any specific training. Instead, it concentrates on employing as many young people as possible.

Similar programs run by county and city consortiums employ about 10,000 workers.

The Los Angeles Unified School District’s First Break Program is placing about 11,000 teen-agers in private-sector summer jobs, director Eleanor Torguson said. But First Break is not designed specifically to help low-income youths.

According to the U.S. Labor Department, teen-age unemployment nationwide last month was 21.4%, up slightly from last summer. Despite the rise in teen-age joblessness, particularly among blacks, the budget for the summer youth program in Los Angeles was cut by more than $2 million this year, from nearly $13 million to about $10.5 million.

He said the program was forced to cut staffing and supplies to provide the same number of jobs as last summer.

And Rico said he expects the Reagan Administration’s policy of cutting domestic spending to continue. “The whole idea . . . is to have private industry take over where the government has been working,” he said.

Effect of Budget Cuts

But Rico, who has worked with the program since 1977, said he does not see private industry taking up the slack created by the budget cuts.

“We deal with the . . . kind of population that, in my experience, private industry does not want to deal with.”

Gang members are part of this population.

Frank Partida supervises a crew of nine summer youth program workers, some of them gang members, he said, who remove graffiti and clean the streets of Lincoln Heights.

Rival gangs use the neighborhood buildings and structures as spray-can bulletin boards and Partida’s crew, armed with brushes, rollers and paint, are hard-pressed to keep up.

Partida, who has lived in Lincoln Heights all of his life, said he asks the neighborhood gangs for permission before painting over any graffiti. “I don’t want anyone to get shot,” he said.

The retired painter said he tries to teach his young charges responsibility.

“I’m not so much interested in them learning how to paint,” he said. “I want them to know that their neighborhood should be kept clean.”

Pride in Neighborhood

Mike Mendoza, 17, said he likes the job because he believes it is important for him to do something for his neighborhood.

“We’re not getting paid a whole lot of money, but it’s getting something done in the city,” he said, as his co-workers stroked finishing touches on the Main Street bridge across the Los Angeles River.

Mendoza, who recently dropped out of Lincoln High School, said he was in a gang in junior high, but left when he saw how senseless the fighting was.

“It ain’t worth it, ain’t none of it worth it. You’re just going to get your throat slashed and it’s all over a word--Lincoln Heights, Avenues . . .” he said, rattling off names of local gangs.

He hopes to own an auto repair shop someday, and if he had not gotten the job, he said, he would be at home working on his truck.

The money he will earn has already been earmarked. “I’m saving up. I have a fiancee and a son, 7 months old. His name is Michael,” he said proudly. The wedding is planned for November.