SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET : ESSAY : WHAT MAKES AMERICA WORK?

He works in a forest, where the trees are high and the pay is low, but glories in the tranquility of open space.

No amount of money, prestige or fringe benefit will ever lure him back to the city.

She works before the television cameras, where egos clash and sensitivities are trampled, but endures the emotional strife of acting for the moment she can touch a viewer’s soul.

No bottom-line studio mentality, callous producer or director’s temperament will ever drive her from the career she loves.

He works in a factory that repairs airplane parts, where precision, not chance, is the commanding element of his day.

No bolt slips through, no strut goes by, no wheel assembly passes without his personal approval, because safety in the air flies on his unfaltering judgment.

An outdoor worker, an actress and an airplane mechanic, proud of their work, eager to do it, anxious to share it.

This is America singing.

Walt Whitman heard it 135 years ago, the songs of carpenters and shoemakers, of wood cutters and mechanics, “the varied carols” of people at work that give a nation its drive and substance.

I went in search of them specifically for this essay, asking the same question of each: Are there rewards beyond money in what they do to make a living?

I studied polls that framed my quest, but polls are bereft of humanity, however impressive their often contradictory results.

They told me that most people would keep working even if they didn’t have to. They told me that Americans ranked occupation low on a satisfaction scale, behind family, friends, love and health.

They told me that challenge and a sense of accomplishment are at least as important as status, and pride and appreciation as important as money.

Questions asked, numbers compiled, results analyzed. But do the people still sing?

Some do, some don’t.

Whitman ignored slavery and sweatshops in his verse, and the strife of inequality that characterized 19th-Century America. Those who moaned didn’t sing.

Today, slavery is history. But thousands of Southern Californians still labor in sweatshops. And the modern workplace has spawned dilemmas that Whitman could not have envisioned.

Electronics have altered the nature of our world, creating new burdens for the employee even as they create new profits for the employer.

Computers conflict with quiet human needs. The old ways aren’t always best, but a stampede toward progress tramples experience and instinct as though they never mattered.

As the search goes on for new solutions, old problems persist: the soaring costs of education and training, the agonizing necessity to choose between money and personal satisfaction, the ferocity of competition, the pain of failure and the evils of discrimination in many guises.

But still the people sing.

Allen Armand, 26, working in a state forest, sings of nature as Whitman himself did, “aplomb in the midst of irrational things.”

Armand left the hectic pace of varied jobs in Los Angeles two years ago for the serenity of the north coast redwoods. Today, he draws from his job as park aide the satisfaction that he is working to protect an environment that, even in its majesty, is at risk.

“If we don’t preserve it now,” he asks, “who will? And when?”

Dorothy Dells, an actress in her middle years, sings of the pleasures that emerge from the creation of a role and the psychic link that connects her with an audience she can’t see.

Hers is a quest for pride through perfection that has honed her career on and off for 15 years, both as an actress and a student of acting. She works steadily in a business that suffers the majority of its practitioners to long periods of unemployment, and she bears with equanimity the pain of failure.

“You have to take personal pride in what you do,” she says during a quiet day on the set of an upcoming ABC movie on the Beach Boys, “because so often that’s all you have.”

“Most of the time you’re going out on auditions, giving your all for two minutes . . . and never hearing back. That hurts. But you keep at it because every once in a while you get a hug from a director who says, ‘You were great!’ And that counts a lot.”

Joe Kanke, chief inspector and boss of the overhaul division for Sun Valley’s Time Aviation, sings of responsibility and the pieces of history that surround him in the workplace where he prevails. Parts of DC-3s, the early wonder of modern flight, and Boeing 767s, the newest work

horse of the jet age, assume new life in the repair division that Kanke oversees.

He’s been an airplane mechanic for 25 of his 47 years. He earned his licenses by attending night schools even as he worked during the day. In 1970, he was named the FAA’s Western Region Mechanic of the Year.

A deep sense of contributing is part of why Kanke loves his job. He means something. He counts. It’s a rare feeling of individual worth in an arena of collective achievement.

“One cracked bolt,” he says, holding up a defective part, “can mean anything from nothing to disaster. It’s as critical as the part it holds together.” He pauses, then adds with a mixture of pride and commitment, “I won’t let it get by.”

Armand, Dells, Kanke. Luck and effort have produced the joy in their music. They have adapted to problems of low pay, uncertainty and the relentless strains of precision to come to peace with their careers.

Not everyone has.

A millwright at General Motors who trained four years for his journeyman card despises the uncertainty that haunts America’s auto industry, specifically GM’s Van Nuys plant.

“I like what I do and I like the people,” he says, “but there’s so much stress in not knowing what’s going to happen tomorrow. There’s no peace in the job. We don’t even know if this plant is going to be open a month from now.”

A young sales clerk in an electronics store longs for something different.

“Selling isn’t what I want to do,” she says, looking up from the sketch of a dress she has designed in her spare moments.

She is sketching when I walk in and is deliberately slow in tearing away from it. She’s proud of the drawing. She wants me to see it.

“Fashion is what I want to do, but my parents don’t like the idea and won’t pay for the training. I can’t afford it on my own. I work here, but it’s a second choice.”

She sighs. “Maybe someday. . . .”

I heard America singing.

I heard a highway worker laugh at the rain. I heard a policeman lecture on safety. I heard a taco maker sing his own songs in the back room of a fast-food restaurant.

I sing this essay and the wonder of the worker who sings of himself, however brutal his task and impossible his goal.

Their voices rise across the land.

Editor: Jonathan Peterson * News Editor: Conrad de Aenlle * Art Director: Matt Moody