Jobs: Political Cure Lifts Few From Grip of Gang Life

Politicians from here to Sacramento have waved the jobs banner this summer as the cure-all for black street gang violence and drug dealing in Los Angeles.

City Councilman Richard Alatorre said city departments should “marshal their resources to link gang members with jobs and job training.”

His plan was wrapped into another proposal by Councilman Robert Farrell to develop a $500,000 pilot training program for 100 jobs.

Supervisor Kenneth Hahn issued a press release which said “I have faith in America . . . (to) provide the kind of jobs that are needed to get these young people off the streets.”

In Sacramento, Republican Assemblyman Paul Zeltner of Lakewood proposed two bills to get gang members employed.

But none of this has put a paycheck in a gang member’s pocket.

The Alatorre-Farrell pilot program may start training its first gang member by this fall. County and business leaders still have not formed a task force that, three weeks ago, Hahn declared could solve the gang job problem. Both of Zeltner’s bills had practical as well as political problems and are dead for this year.

Nor has anyone from private industry come forward with large numbers of jobs, and even if someone did, no one knows how many would be enough or how many gang members would take them.

To some businessmen, such as Baxter Sinclair, who has been employing gang members for several years in his gas pipeline construction business, there has been far too much talk and far too little action on the part of business and government.

“It’s election year,” an impatient Sinclair said. “Every one of them (political figures) has seen it (gang jobs) as a probable sympathetic vote from the black community . . . proposing solutions without doing research on it.”

What’s needed, said Sinclair, is real training and real jobs in the business community. “These kids are a new breed. They don’t want anybody giving them a welfare check. . . . I cannot do it all. Every morning I have to go out (to waiting job applicants) and explain to them, ‘Come back tomorrow, I’ll do what I can.’ ”

What Sinclair does is take a chance with probably the most unemployable segment of today’s society--former gang members of limited education and skills. He realistically admits some are too crime hardened, drug addicted or unwilling to change life styles to join the labor force. Sinclair’s success has come with those who are willing to change.

His disappointment with the political and business community is echoed by Assemblywoman Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), one of the state’s more powerful black leaders. Waters also is the founder of Project BUILD, the only entirely government funded inner-city program aimed at preparing people with the least education, fewest skills and bleakest prospects to join the work force.

But when the normally high spirited Waters talks about jobs for her constituents--any jobs, not just gang jobs--she sounds uncharacteristically tired and admits “It’s such a struggle, just such a struggle, a disheartening one.”

The Nickerson Gardens housing project has a reputation as a gang haven. Yet, Waters said, when the city decided to rehabilitate it, workers were imported from out of the area and she had to fight to get a few of the residents included on the jobs.

The same is true of the Century Freeway project which runs through some of the toughest gang areas of Los Angeles, she said. There is a job-training program attached to the freeway project, but workers need a car to get to sites as far away as Orange County, where the training takes place.

The Long Beach to downtown Los Angeles light rail project also cuts through a major area of black unemployment. Same story, said Waters. Few jobs for the locally unemployed.

“It’s a struggle to say ‘Look, you’ve got to have affirmative action. You’ve got to have jobs where these projects are going through.’ ”

And yet, said Waters, jobs are “very key to helping to solve the gang problem.”

Twenty-three years ago, a state commission headed by John A. McCone listed jobs and education as the “highest priority and greatest importance” for blacks in the wake of the Watts riots.

“Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?” said a dispirited Waters. “Sounds very familiar.”

“The issues have been the same since the (McCone) commission,” said Farrell, the city councilman whose district includes areas of major unemployment and gang activity.

Goals Not Met

Although progress has been made, Farrell said, “society didn’t make the effort” to ensure that minority employment goals were reached.

Poor, young, black males still have by far the highest unemployment rates in the city. If the job seeker also is a gang member and a high school dropout, he becomes the most unemployable of the unemployable. Not even the military wants dropouts, yet more than half of inner-city youth fail to finish high school.

Andre (Mad Dog) Lynn is the kind of gang member who falls into two worlds. At 17, he has one drug-related arrest that was dropped for insufficient evidence by the district attorney’s office. But he still is going to high school and is looking for a job.

And employers don’t knowingly want gang members. “They get nervous and don’t want to hire you,” Lynn said, “(Employers) don’t want to be bothered with thugs. . . . they want to run their businesses.”

His solution?

Without in any way offending his gang associates, he quietly began moving in other circles, becoming too busy to hang out.

Looking to Graduation

Lynn described his current gang status as something like a high school cheerleader with a broken leg--”you’re still a cheerleader but you’re ineligible.”

It’s a balancing act that he needs to maintain at least until graduation next June. Can he do it?

“My father said, ‘I was in a gang before. I understand what you’re going through. Just try to protect yourself.’ ”

Even if Lynn does graduate from high school, the odds that he will find a job with a promising future are low.

In 1985, the last year for which there are any general statistics, the Los Angeles County unemployment rate for black youths--male and female--was 41.6%, almost twice the rate for young Latinos, the second largest unemployed group.

Jobless Figures

Jerry Hawbaker, area labor market analyst for the state Employment Development Department, said “nobody knows” exactly how high the black youth employment rate is today in South-Central Los Angeles because no government agency wants to spend the money to do that kind of expensive polling.

Youth unemployment usually is at least three times higher than the overall statewide rate, Hawbaker said. By that standard, the optimistic unemployment figures for all young people in the state now is about 15%, with Latino rates higher than that. Unemployment of young black males is even worse.

Local law enforcement agencies estimate that 25% of Los Angeles County’s 100,000 black males between 15 and 24 years old belong to gangs or are gang associates.

Even those who manage to graduate and avoid gang membership face formidable obstacles once they leave school. Young black men are in competition with adults well into their 30s for low-skilled work paying little more than the minimum wage with few if any health or other benefits.

When asked what kinds of jobs were available to them, young black men interviewed at random in South-Central Los Angeles most frequently cited “general laborer,” which usually meant moving furniture around a warehouse, fast-food restaurant worker, car buffer and janitor. All these jobs paid the minimum wage or only slightly more, none provided health or other benefits and none offered much room for advancement, the workers said.

But Councilman Farrell argued that the value of these jobs may be underrated. Even the most basic, entry-level work teaches an employee something--how to dress, how to act, the responsibility of coming to work on time, he said.

“How do they really know that a $4.25 (per hour) job doesn’t lead anywhere?” Farrell asked.

Even the military, which, at least before the Vietnam War, was seen as a way to “make a man” out of some wayward youth or offer career training for others, has little to offer dropouts.

“A high school diploma . . . is just a reality of the modern day military force,” said Defense Department spokesman Maj. David Super. He said the armed forces still will accept some high school dropouts, but they are only 8% of the military and are limited to the “harder to fill, lower-skilled jobs.”

For some public figures, such as Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, it’s pointless to worry about employing gang members.

Referring to them as “little SOBs,” Gates told a news conference this month that “there are plenty of jobs out there” for those who are willing to work. Efforts should be concentrated on “finding jobs for the good people,” Gates said, not “the bums. They ought to go to prison.”