Caught in Job Squeeze : Workplace: In the 1990s, Southern California will offer fewer job choices for the growing number of unskilled and uneducated workers.

For three hours each morning, Pearlie Mae Foots helps make lunch in a junior high cafeteria. The work isn’t exactly challenging--except those times when she’s asked to write down the menu.

After a quick rest in her South Central Los Angeles home, it’s on to her night job as a janitor. One concern: to keep from mixing the wrong cleaning chemicals, a tricky matter because she has trouble reading the labels.

“I can do math,” explained Foots, 40, a shy, churchgoing woman who completed grade school in Missouri. “But I just can’t get the reading like I want to.”

Her problem is not unique. Southern California long has profited from a labor force more skilled than that of most places. But a disturbing number of its workers now struggle by without the basic survival requirements of modern life: reading, writing, making change for a dollar.

As the economy evolves in the 1990s, their futures will be bleaker than ever, their choices few and unappealing.

Some call it the “Blade Runner” scenario, after a movie that presented a dark futuristic vision of Los Angeles. Will such frightening prophecies come to pass? Is the region splitting between a lucky elite and brooding masses of poor? Could its proud economy ink amid a nightmare of crumbling services and soaring crime?

The answers may depend on whether those at the economy’s bottom are able to step up to the middle in the coming years.

Otherwise, the risk is for “almost a re-creation of a Third World society, with explosive potential, it seems to me,” warns Allen J. Scott, a geography professor at UCLA, where some research has found Los Angeles increasingly divided between haves and have-nots.

Several trends, if ignored, could move Southern California in the wrong direction. High-paying union jobs in heavy industry--once a popular ticket to a better life for those without much education--are vanishing. Modern technology, meanwhile, is generating new middle-level and high-level jobs, but they require skill and training. Even many non-technical jobs have become more demanding as employers face keen competitive pressures.

Yet, many of those who seek employment can barely read instructions or do simple arithmetic.

When Kaiser Permanente offered its employees a one-time session on how to balance a checkbook, about 100 people asked to attend. “We couldn’t handle the people that needed to come,” recalls A. D. Bolden, a vice president of the big health-care company. “We were oversubscribed.”

Throughout the country, job applicants routinely flunk tests that require junior high school English and math. More than half of all 20-year-olds cannot add their lunch bills; almost three-fourths of high school students cannot write a letter seeking employment, Labor Secretary Elizabeth Hanford Dole said recently.

“The fact of the matter is we now find ourselves in a work force crisis, a crisis brought about by a significant and expanding skills gap,” Dole said in a speech to the Conference Board, a business research organization in New York.

The shortcomings will become more troublesome generally because the number of people entering the work force by the end of the century will be smaller than the baby boom generation that preceded it.

In Los Angeles, Orange and nearby counties, however, the problem is more complex than in other places. Immigration and a high birthrate will ensure a steady stream of young job-seekers in the coming years. Many will be skilled and enterprising. Others will be highly educated but lacking in English; others still will have just the barest of abilities.

“We’ll have the bodies,” said J. Gordon Palmer Jr., an expert on the area’s economy and planning manager for the Port of Long Beach. “But are they going to be able to do the sorts of work we need to have done?”

Certainly, there will be work for them. The modern economy continues to spawn a multitude of low-skill tasks. But they are usually dead-end and dreary.

Chrismann Dubuisson, a broad-shouldered immigrant from Haiti, knows first-hand what the prospects are for those with few marketable abilities.

Since coming to America in 1983, Dubuisson, 41, has labored as a cook’s helper, pizza deliveryman, fruit picker and security guard. Today he shares a one-room apartment with his Jamaican girlfriend, a secretary, and hopes one day to take his place behind a computerized word processor in a sleek, modern office.

“I see in the newspaper that they pay $1,400 to $1,500 a month,” said Dubuisson, who is learning typing at the Pacific Asian Consortium in Employment, a federally funded job-training program in Los Angeles. “It can be a start for me.”

Whether people like Dubuisson are able to get their start is a crucial question. Ultimately, it will determine whether a region storied for offering opportunity to those who have little will become more polarized socially and economically.

Even today, Southern California is a place of stark contrasts; more residents cruise around in luxury $80,000 Mercedes Benz autos than anywhere else in America. Yet, it’s a place where tens of thousands have no home and millions more struggle to stay above the poverty line.

Are such disparities the wave of the future? By some measures, the gulf between rich and poor has widened in recent years.

Los Angeles has changed from a place that had a lower-than-average poverty rate of 11% in the late 1960s to one that by 1987 had almost 16% of its population living in poverty, a higher share than the rest of the country, according to UCLA’s Research Group on the Los Angeles Economy.

The region’s high housing and other costs make it especially hard for the poor to scrape by. In October, for example, the median price of a home in Orange County was $253,034--second highest in the state (behind San Francisco) and among the highest in the nation, according to the California Assn. of Realtors.

Increasingly, the region’s poor are immigrants, especially Latinos with meager educations, the UCLA researchers found. In addition, children and women--often single mothers--are disproportionately represented among those in poverty. Their chances of attaining a comfortable, middle-class life are not good, due to economic realities.

“Things are getting worse--and they’re getting worse relative to the United States,” said Paul Ong, an assistant professor in UCLA’s graduate school of architecture and urban planning, who supervised the research.

Certain trends in the job market are not helping. The big growth in recent years has come at the top and bottom of the income ladder, according to the Los Angeles Economic Roundtable. The pattern has created new opportunity for professionals in such fields as architecture, engineering, and legal and financial services.

And it has meant thousands of new jobs at the bottom of the scale, in garment industry sweat shops, restaurant kitchens, security firms and other minimum-wage services. Meanwhile, traditional heavy industry--unionized jobs making autos, sheet metal and steel--have declined sharply.

“These are the industries that gave people a leg up with good wages--and they’re close to evaporating,” said Goetz Wolff, chief economist at the Economic Roundtable.

A similar downtrend is at work in Orange County. Moreover, because of housing costs, many low-wage jobs in the 1990s “will tend to be pushed out into the Inland Empire, other parts of the U.S., Mexico and the Pacific Rim,” according to James L. Doti, an economics professor at Chapman College in Orange County.

Such shifts may disrupt the lives of individuals, but the question of people and jobs goes to something bigger: Southern California’s future as a competitive economy. If employers cannot find enough prepared, entry level workers, they will lose ground to rivals here and overseas.

Ultimately, gains in the overall standard of living would come more slowly.

“It’s going to hurt everybody in the long run,” Ong warns. “In a global economy, it’s necessary to provide everybody with a quality education.”

Yet that is not happening. In 1987, almost half the applicants for basic, entry level jobs in Los Angeles County were turned away because they fell short in reading, writing and arithmetic, the county’s Commission on Human Relations reported. Dropout rates remain high: Of more than 125,000 students who started high school in Los Angeles three years ago, more than 30,000 have quit by now.

Moreover, “The largest single group of illiterates--over 43%--are white, native born Californians,” found a 1987 study conducted for the state Department of Education.

“We see people coming out of college who can barely read and write and do math,” said Lillian Gorman, a vice president and manager of human resources at First Interstate Bank.

Until now, private employers have let schools worry about teaching the basics. Pearlie Mae Foots, for example, enrolls in adult literacy programs each summer and has made progress in recent years. The rest of the year, she practices her ABCs reading the Bible.

“I filled out the application,” she recalled proudly of her quest to get the night janitorial job. “I didn’t think I could do it, but I did it.”

Increasingly, however, private employers are tackling the skills issue directly. First Interstate provides English language training for workers and may add mathematics in the future, Gorman said.

The students seem to appreciate it. “I couldn’t communicate my ideas to the people I was working with,” recalled Jorge Torres, 35, a former university student from El Salvador who came to Los Angeles in 1980 unable to speak English.

He got a job working the graveyard shift at First Interstate on a machine that encoded numbers on checks. But his frustrations were immense.

On one occasion, a bilingual colleague stole the credit for an idea that boosted productivity. Frustrated, Torres enrolled in the bank’s English course. Today, he supervises 17 employees, works the day shift and owns a house in San Bernardino County.

“I want to run the department I’m working for,” said Torres, a soft-spoken man in a conservative, dark gray suit. As his experience shows, the economy continues to create mid-level opportunities, even if growth at the top and bottom of the ladder is occurring more rapidly. The critical problem is that many job-seekers are not qualified for the new mid-level jobs.

“The real story is that the middle is changing--in ways that are going to be difficult for immigrants and certain minorities,” said Stephen Levy, economist at the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy.

Even though science makes some machines remarkably simple to operate, the decent-paying jobs require technical understanding, said Gaylord E. Nichols, director of the California Institute of Technology’s Industrial Relations Center.

“Even if you’re just pushing buttons,” he declared, “you have to know which ones to push.”

His words apply across a whole spectrum of technical fields, from computer repair to radiology. But perhaps none illustrate the story better than the changes that have gripped auto mechanics. Until a few years ago, the technology was stable and low-tech; today’s cars may come equipped with 10 or more computer chips for engines, digital dashboards, transmissions and other functions.

“In the old days, you could make a car run pretty good with a screwdriver,” said Ted D’Orazi, field service manager for Nissan Motor Corp. in Costa Mesa. “Today, the guy needs to be able to read electrical diagrams, to have some computer training.”

Nor is changing technology the only force keeping decent jobs out of reach for those who want them. In today’s competitive economy, firms increasingly seek workers who can take on added, service-related tasks.

For instance, “an assembly line worker may be expected to help in training programs; a retail apparel clerk may be expected to do wardrobe consulting in addition to ringing up a sale, and an engineer may be expected to assist in product marketing,” a recent Bank of America study found.

Not that such expectations will be easily met. “It appears that the education and training of the labor force will be one of the main economic issues in California in the coming decade,” economist Jeanette Garretty wrote in the bank report.

And that means teachers and employers may become increasingly familiar with each other in the coming decade. Already, Los Angeles public schools have begun to enter the workplace in a limited program that stresses the basic skills of work life: how to read forms, understand pay stubs and employee benefits, even how to interpret a bus schedule.

Teacher Pat Williams also provides pointers on proper workplace behavior, such as the importance of informing a supervisor when a worker decides to take a break. “A lot of people don’t know,” she explained.

The students are people like Portia Lopez, 38, a polite Filipino immigrant who applied for a job at the Marriott Hotel in Torrance after her marriage broke up in the early 1980s.

With limited English skills, Lopez started out as a housekeeper, tidying 18 rooms every day. The work was demanding and the pay little better than minimum, at $4.35 an hour. But earlier this year, she completed the eight-week training program--and in months was promoted to a new job paying $7.90 an hour and with the perk of her own office.

“Here, I use my brain,” Lopez said, pointing out the computer that helps her administer the payroll for 435 hotel workers. “I didn’t use my brain in the jobs for a long time.”

POVERTY: L.A.’S GROWING SHARE

Chart shows percentage of population living in poverty in Los Angeles versus the United States as a whole.

1969 United States: 12.1 1969 Los Angeles: 11.0 1979 United States: 11.7 1979 Los Angeles: 13.4 1987 United States: 13.5 1987 Los Angeles: 15.6

Source: Research Group on the Los Angeles Economy