SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET : A SPECIAL REPORT ON EMPLOYMENT TRENDS : WORKPLACE ISSUES : SOME JOBS GO BEGGING
Want to be the Los Angeles stand-in for Gumby, that mushy green cartoon character? It pays $45 for a 45-minute appearance. The job is open and not that easy to fill.
Then there’s a California sprout grower who is looking for a district sales representative. Or how about being a fish reporter who gathers radio information three hours a night for the 976-TUNA call-in line.
Job Bank, a Los Angeles area employment firm, keeps track of such unusual jobs. But these days it is not just odd jobs that are available.
In Long Beach, the need is for hotel workers. The state employment service has openings right now for six waiters and waitresses, four front-desk clerks, four room cleaners, three hosts or hostesses, three bellhops and three people to bus tables.
Throughout much of metropolitan Los Angeles, there are openings for highly skilled clerical personnel who can take dictation, type at least 60 to 80 words per minute and perform other tasks, says Steve Dimitroff, a research manager for the California Employment Development Department. “We are on the verge of a clerical crisis.”
And at the massive TRW space and defense plant in Redondo Beach, they are looking for trained machinists. In the next year, the manufacturing division hopes to hire 130 assemblers, machinists and electronic technicians, and it is scouring the United States to find them.
“The population in the machining area is aging,” explains TRW spokeswoman Barbara Burke. “The average age of our most experienced machinists is 56. . . . People just aren’t going into the vocational fields anymore.”
With unemployment at its lowest level in a decade and with the age, skills and opportunities of the nation’s work force changing, some jobs are no longer classified hard-to-find. In fact, more and more jobs fall into the hard-to-fill category. And matching willing workers with available jobs is not always an easy task.
A booming economy in the Northeast, for instance, has pushed fast-food restaurants and other service establishments to boost their pay levels to find and keep workers. In Los Angeles, the crackdown on illegal immigrants is squeezing the labor supply for the apparel industry and for California agriculture. Temporary employment firms, on the other hand, often thrive in trying to help employers cope with shortages.
Why are positions hard to fill? Ray Marcy, senior vice president of Adia Personnel Services in Menlo Park, Calif., offers six of the most common reasons: The position is unique and only a handful of people can do the job. It’s specialized and requires certain kinds of experience or advanced education. The pay scale is lower than the market value. The opening is in a remote location. The working conditions are unattractive. Or, the hours are irregular or unusual.
Pay, job skills and working conditions aren’t the only factors that create hard-to-fill jobs. “The cost of living in Los Angeles can be a problem,” TRW’s Burke says. “Not so much the cost of living as the cost of housing.” That can be a factor in trying to woo engineers from other locations, she notes. “In Texas, you can buy a house for $45,000 that might cost you $240,000 here.”
The cost of downtown parking is a major problem for employers in every major metropolitan area, notes Richard E. Lewis, president of Accountants Overload.
“It’s a big, big problem today,” he says. It is very difficult “getting any kind of employee with any kind of skill to come downtown because of the cost of parking.” Workers are increasingly reluctant to commute long distances and, “more and more, most working people in all disciplines at the senior level want positions close to home,” he said.
Robert O. Snelling Sr., chairman of Snelling & Snelling, a large employment firm based in Sarasota, Fla., ticks off eight employment areas with hard-to-fill jobs.
1. Handling the sick or the disturbed: physical therapists, nurses, nurse’s aides, paramedics and police. “The work is hard, it’s demanding and it’s dangerous,” he says through a spokesman. “We have people here faced with physical violence, worries about getting AIDS and communicable diseases and, of course, the hours and work schedules are devastating to normal family life.”
Nurses seem to top the demand list right now, employment experts say, as women find a wider variety of job opportunities in health care at a time when the work of nurses in hospitals is increasingly intense and stressful.
2. Sales. “There is a vast shortage of salespeople of all kinds,” Snelling says. “We have been brought up in an age which puts down salesmanship as a profession, especially if one is paid a commission. It is considered demeaning to have your income tied to selling something to someone. That’s why companies work hard to disguise sales jobs. They call them marketing or service or consulting jobs.”
3. Crafts: sewing machine operators, furniture makers, reupholsterers. At the Nordstrom department store chain, “we’re always looking for good skilled tailors and seamstresses,” says spokeswoman Theresa Clark. “It seems to be an almost lost art.”
4. Lawn-care and related services.
5. Doctors and teachers--in certain areas of the country. “There are jobs that appear that many want--such as teachers and doctors--but many such jobs go begging. Just try to get qualified teachers in center city Baltimore, Philadelphia, L.A., North Dakota or Montana,” he says. “Family doctors are in such short supply that some towns and cities build beautiful . . . hospitals with all the latest equipment just to entice one doctor to come to their town to practice.”
6. Waiters and waitresses. “In the good old days, you could depend on seeing your favorite waiter. He knew your name, your kids and even your likes and dislikes. He actually made a living out of this,” he says, but not any more. “Today, the papers are full of ads looking for that type of person.”
“We’re looking for a lot of people in the service industry,” says an official at the Long Beach office of the state employment service. With the demands of many hotels in the Long Beach area, the employment office has set up a “hotel desk” just to pre-screen and in some cases select workers.
7. Secretarial. Mainly, he says, “because most secretaries are looking for administrative or management” jobs. Job Bank co-owner Nancy Marks notes that “we have a lot of secretarial jobs” available. “It has always been a stereotypically female job, and women are looking to do other things.”
Dimitroff, who sees a “clerical crisis” approaching, added that not all clerical help is in high demand in the Los Angeles area. “There is an overabundance of people with limited clerical skills,” he noted. His advice to employers in the past has been either to pay more or do a more aggressive job of training workers.
8. Agriculture. Because of immigration laws, there is a great shortage of citrus pickers and other farm workers.
The immigration law also has been tough on the garment business in Los Angeles. At a time when apparel firms are moving more production back to the United States from overseas, “we’re having a lot of difficulty getting people to fill jobs,” notes sewing contractor Roland de Aenlle, president of Yoko Fashions.
“We’re competing with China, with Taiwan, with India and everyone else,” he points out. Because of currency changes and quotas, more garments are being made in the United States. But the supply of labor seems to be dwindling. “We’ve had to turn down some of that work because we can’t get any help. . . . What do you call that? A Catch-22.”
