Beyond 9-to-5 in L.A. : Hey, Forget the Myth That This City Is Laid Back. When It Comes to Hard Work, There Are Plenty of Stories to Be Told. . .

Working hard? Putting in longer hours at the grindstone? Feeling stressed and out of sync in the city where people are said not to exert themselves except when they’re playing Frisbee?

Well, you’re not alone. That 50- to 60-hour work week is something many Angelenos call normal--because of economic necessity or career choice. Indeed, in the real L.A., most people do work hard, although some Angelenos speculate that they may work at a different--more relaxed--pace than their fellow citizens across the country, especially those on the East Coast.

Two transplanted Easterners, public relations executive Tom Reed and urban planner Bessie Kong, find some truth to the “laid-back Los Angeles” myth. Reed observes that “New York is busier,” the pace more frenetic. He believes that hyper state means people are working harder, but is willing to concede that some of the hustle may be more style than substance, and adds: “Maybe there are just not as many Type A people out here.” Kong thinks more people here work for themselves and can set their own pace.

Statistics tend to support part of Kong’s observation: It seems that more people are self-employed here than in other parts of the country. The U.S. Census Bureau reported in 1988 that the number of businesses in California increased by more than one-third from 1982 to 1987, compared with a 28% rise nationally. And the state’s Employment Development Department reported that the largest percentage growth in business during the 1980s was a 51% rise in small new businesses with three or fewer employees.

According to Thomas Cummings, a professor of management and organization at USC who came here from Cleveland in 1976, “The sheer cost of living out here has got people working hard.” That, he said, and the global competition that hit the West Coast earlier and harder than some other areas of the country.

“You go back to some dinky place back East, and you won’t find that,” Cummings said of L.A.’s economic reality. “In terms of the work ethic, probably people are no different. But it’s an entirely different world here.”

People on the East Coast may not agree with Cummings. After all, they have been saying bad things about Los Angeles ever since the city was invented, and it does not take a congressionally funded investigation to know that the source of the Lotusland myth is not on the West Coast. But many people here seem to have bought into the myth and believe there must be something wrong with them because they are working so hard.

Rather than myth, Angelenos might try reality: In 1988 pollster Louis Harris released the results of his company’s survey of the national work week, and found it had increased from 40.6 hours in 1973 to 46.8 in 1987, and was headed nowhere but up in the future. But that is not all the researchers found. Broken down regionally, the hours were 45.6 a week for the East, 47.2 for the Midwest, 47.1 for the South and 47.3 for the West. We won, in other words, although it is not clear what the prizes in this contest are.

What follows is a look at some Angelenos who are hard at work, who are driven by any number of needs, who are in the contest regardless of the prizes.

“Public relations is a business that attracts and fully satisfies terrible workaholics, which I am, but I don’t do it quite as much as I used to,” Tom Reed said. “It’s a trap. There’s just no end to what you can do.”

In public relations for the last 20 years, Reed is a senior vice president at Braun Ketchum in the Mid-Wilshire area. He is responsible for “investor relations,” which he described as a sub-category of public relations, in which a client is represented to the investment community.

Over the past few years, he said, he has cut back to about 10 hours a day from 12, “including the reading I do at home, the telephone calls at home, everything. Before I could stay up, write a speech all night and kill myself, get away with two hours’ sleep, and be ready to go the next day. I can’t do it now. It makes me feel too beat up.”

Although he usually rises at 5:30 a.m. to monitor the stock market, he does not count that as “work time”; it is, rather, a “kind of hobby.” He gets to the office “not terribly early, around 8:30 or 9,” he said, “and tends to stay later. And I take work home.”

Reed is not in public relations for the money, and he laughed at the question: “There was a time in the beginning when money was very important. Public relations is not a business you get rich in. There are good salaries, but it’s not like corporate law where your earnings are in direct proportion to how many hours you work.”

He came to Los Angeles from New York 10 years ago, expecting that his industry would be more laid back here. But people were every bit as busy--as they were in many other professions.

Reed retained his New York work habits--staying at work until 10 or 11 p.m.--until about five years ago. Now he rarely works that late. On the day he was interviewed, for example, his 59th birthday, he said he would not be working late at all.

“I kind of wish it wasn’t my birthday,” he said, “I’ve got a lot to do.”

Hearing the pace of his own voice, and what he was saying, Tom Mosley halted for a moment and said, “This is awful. I sound like a runaway train. But I’m not.”

Maybe not runaway, but a high-speed locomotive nonetheless. Mosley has been program manager for the Hollywood-based AIDS Project Los Angeles hot line for five years and as of this week will be heading the APLA department that develops materials--videos, brochures--for minority communities.

He has been supervising the 135 volunteers who staff the hot line, keeping up with the literature on AIDS, doing most of his own clerical work, giving training and refresher courses. Being one of the few blacks on the staff adds to his workload, he said. “They wave me around like a black flag. But it’s good, because there are so few minorities.”

Mosley, who lives in West Hollywood, hates reading all the medical journals, he said, but the hot line’s “greatest pressure” is the need to know everything. “Most of those calls are motivated by fear. They have to have the answer right now. You can’t relax.”

He gets Tuesdays and Sundays off, “never two days in a row,” is compulsive about the gym, putting in two hours, six mornings a week. He works from about 11 a.m. to 8 or 9 p.m.

“We’re all compulsive here,” Mosley said of the 110 APLA staff members. “Being around all this death and dying is not the healthiest thing you can do. In order to survive this, you have to be compulsive.”

He sounds just as compulsive about shutting it off: “Anything I can do to get my mind off stuff. I live under headphones. At the gym, at home. I put them on and shut myself in my room at home and my roommate knows not to come near me. I play as hard as I work, and I would not go to Palm Springs and lay in the sun. My idea of relaxation is not to lay back. I’ve got to be committed to something--a project, a part, a nightclub where I can go dance all night.” As an “AIDS guru,” he said, what he cannot shut off, even at the parties, is “someone getting in my face and asking about AIDS.”

Mosley has learned to cry, and calls it a good release from all the stress. However, he said he is unable to grieve or mourn. He blocks the emotion he feels when he hears a friend has died of AIDS, and then finds himself weeping over an AT&T; “Reach Out and Touch Someone” commercial.

He was a professional dancer in Las Vegas--working similar hours and at the same pace--when a skiing accident put an end to that career. That, and the loss of a friend to “gay cancer” in the early days of AIDS, brought him to his present work six years ago. “There was a new urgency, a need for values . . . “

Having been tested three times for the HIV virus and coming up negative drives him even more. He calls it survivors’ guilt.

He would be turning 40 in a few days, he said, and planned “to party till I drop.”

For now he is where he wants to be, as a black, as a gay man, and as Tom Mosley. “It feeds my ego. It’s all about applause, not money.”

He was just as driven as a dancer, he admits, and wonders how much of his compulsion is related to the stress of working in a world of death and dying. Dancing and work at APLA demand the same high energy, and are equally as dynamic he said. “I don’t know where I’d go if not this. I can’t go through life being slowed up. Air traffic control? Broadcast news? I don’t know.”

As an independent painter, Richard Urquidez is not working as hard as he used to, when his jobs came through the Painters and Drywallers Union. He worked about a 40-hour week with the union, “plus an extra 16 hours a week on side jobs.”

His hours are about the same now. He has not had a weekend off since he went on his own six months ago. The money is about the same, but he says he is not working as hard.

“It’s slower paced. I can pick my jobs. I won’t take a job that’s going to kill me.” Often, with factory and construction work, he said, “you spray toxic stuff. You’re supposed to wear a respirator, but even if you never take it off, it takes an hour to come down from the high. You’re higher than a kite. Some guys hallucinate. You get red eyes. If you wore the goggles you’d be taking them off every two minutes to wipe the overspray off. You come home, and two or three hours later, you’re still spitting out these paint balls. This is not as hard.”

By working smaller jobs, rather than at large industrial projects, Urquidez said, he can avoid the worst aspects of painting.

Urquidez talked about his work while taking a break from a house painting job in Bel Air. He estimated he puts in a 60-hour week, “20% of it running around giving estimates, getting supplies, matching colors.” Several months out of the year, he averages closer to 75 hours a week.

“I don’t mind working these hours. Once you’re used to it, it’s nothing.” He often has to cancel weekend plans, like going to the L.A. County Fair recently, to do a job. That’s OK.

And when he’s not working? “If I’m not sleeping, I’m doing yard work at my mom’s or watching the games.”

Urquidez, 32, is a fifth-generation Angeleno who lives in Montebello and has been working as a painter ever since his uncles gave him summer jobs with their paint business during junior high. He’s been at it full time since age 19 when he left junior college.

Despite the care and pride he obviously puts into his work, if he had it to do over again, he said, “Oh no way I’d be in this business. I wish I would have been a carpenter. I wouldn’t advise anyone to be a painter. But if it’s your training, it’s your livelihood.”

Compared to other parts of the country, he said of Los Angeles: “You have to work harder out here. There’s so many people. Competition is bringing the price down. These guys who come in, put up one thick coat, sometimes they buy cheap paint for $4 a gallon and put it in brand-name cans. To do the job the way I want, I’d cost a little more but it takes a lot of time to prep up the house. You don’t just pay for what I do, but what I know.”

He attributes much of the competition to immigrant businesses with newcomers underbidding people like himself.

He sounds resigned to being a painter, unconcerned about the hours, but restless with the overall scheme of things: “Compared to other jobs, people in office jobs, executives, I can’t see how the pay scale figures--why this guy is worth $150,000-to-$200,000 a year, when the best possible year I could have is $50,000? I’m working just as hard.”

Bessie Kong is an urban planner. Earlier this year she left the consulting firm, in civil and land use planning, where she had worked for seven years and went on her own. The future was beginning to look stagnant to her, and besides, she and her husband wanted a family.

“I wanted more free time. I wanted to be in control of my hours.”

Born in Hong Kong, she came to New York with her family when she was 4, was educated on the East Coast and had most of her work experience in East Coast cities. She arrived in Los Angeles with her husband in 1982 well aware of the laid-back myth. Now she sees the myth as a matter of pace rather than hours or amount of work.

“There’s a great deal of difference having to work 9 to 5 or running your own company. The stresses are less even though you work longer hours.”

Her hours are longer than when she worked for a firm: “The day does tend to stretch out, but you can choose your own free time. It makes it seem like more free time.”

Typically, Kong said, she gets to her office, on Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles, around 9:30 a.m. and stays until “8, 9 or 10. Sometimes I can leave at 5:30 or 6,” which she terms a light day.

It’s a 10- to 12-hour day Kong describes, but she does not wish she was working fewer hours. She attributes her long days to L.A.’s size and traffic, which make it more difficult to schedule appointments in the field, and to the fact her husband puts in similar hours.

Being independent has its own pressures, she said, and worrying where the next contract is coming from is one of them. Nor is it as easy to take a vacation, she said, adding that she found herself making a lot of long-distance phone calls when she and her husband did get away for a week this summer.

She has chosen not to set up an office at her home in Silver Lake, does not take work home and tries to avoid coming in weekends by working later during the week.

Now in her late 30s, she is happy with her current situation, Kong said, but knows that if, for example, she got more involved in the community, something would have to give. She would have to cut back. And while she knows a baby would be an enormous change and “another large structure of time constraints,” she is not concerned. “Being on my own still gives me flexibility. I can bring the baby here.”

Peggy Moore probably puts 10 or 11 hours into the average work day, but who’s counting?

Vice president and manager of the Los Angeles branch (the downtown or corporate branch) of Home Savings for the last five years, she likes what she does, and said, “The job and what I enjoy doing are a perfect match. I hope it brings out the best in me. . . . I would imagine if one didn’t like it, one would spend a lot of time knowing what the hours were. But, I can’t turn on a clock and say this is how many hours I spend.”

Twelve years ago, Moore started out as a part-time teller at Home Savings. Her children were graduating from high school. She had totally immersed herself in the world of volunteer services and was looking for something to fill in the middle of the day. She found it.

The mother of three grown children and grandmother of one, all in the Southern California area, Moore, now divorced, talked about her job at her office, seated before a Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce poster of oranges, palm trees and the downtown skyline. She could have been an extension of the poster, talking as she did about being part of the community.

She moved downtown to the Bunker Hill area three years ago from Arcadia, explaining, “I wanted to become involved in the community in which I worked. In doing so I became a part of L.A. My job and being in downtown Los Angeles are one and the same.”

There is a public relations aspect to her job, building contacts with the business community, and Moore belongs to the downtown Rotary Club of Los Angeles and serves on several of its committees, is on the advisory board of the Sheriff Department’s drug abuse program, SANE, and has just finished a term as chairwoman of a corporate support group for the Girl Scouts.

Her days often start with a breakfast meeting. If not, she is in the office by 7:30 or 8 a.m., having avoided a commuting tantrum by walking to work. She tends to go out for lunch, “usually business related,” and averages two business-related dinners per week, hibernating on the other nights at home and not eating.

Usually Moore leaves the office around 6 p.m., but if there are memos or speeches to write or budgets to work out, she has no problem staying until 10 p.m. or bringing work home.

Recently, she completed a six-month weekend-and-evening “mini-MBA” course at USC, getting a certificate in management effectiveness, paid for by Home Savings. Now she is taking a 14-credit class on Tuesday nights, part of Beverly Hills High School’s adult education program, in “other financial vehicles.”

She does not consider herself a workaholic, she said, defining those people as ones who cannot stop. She can. She plays golf one day a week, will take time off to travel, and said, “I do not feel restricted. Maybe it’s because of where I am in my life at this point in time,” a point she “would just as soon” not specify in numbers.

“I’m responsible for me. I love my family, visit them, but the decisions I make regarding time only affect me.”

Colleen Miller is involved in a classic hard-work situation. She is director of catering for a new restaurant, Lunaria, just down the road from Century City on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Lunaria, a French bistro started by Bernard Jacoby, formerly of the Biltmore’s Bernard’s, opened its doors in July. Miller came on board in February, and got on the phone, targeting businesses, setting up appointments with meeting planners, soliciting private parties--”small business meetings, fund-raisers, birthdays, special events, anywhere from 10 to 130 people.”

She is still on the phone and knocking on doors she said, and it makes for a busy day. She works, she said, “on an average of 10 to 16 hours a day, depending on whether or not there’s a function. I run the event, doing everything it takes to make it run smoothly, from the initial contact to the bill and thank-you letter. If it’s an evening event, I’m still here all day.” And, she added later, she is still there afterwards, “through the cleanup operation.”

Those are her average hours for a six-day week, she said. The restaurant is closed Mondays, but she works then, taking Sundays off instead.

Even for someone as young as 24, that’s an exhausting schedule, but she is not complaining and not surprised.

She has been in the business for five years, first at the Biltmore, then the Meridian Hotel in Long Beach, both times working with Jacoby. And while those more established situations allowed for a more normal work schedule, they also prepared her for what was ahead.

“I love it. I’ve chosen this as a career. In the hospitality industry if you accept a position like this and take on the responsibility, you know you’re going to do more than your hours (technically a 40-hour week), and you don’t mind.”

Besides, she said, most of her friends in her age group are working just as hard. Many of them are in the hotel and restaurant industry, and in general, she said, “the 9-to-5 people that I know are getting rarer and rarer.” She has a boyfriend, an understanding one, she said, who is in sales and works similar hours. She does not feel she is missing out.

That does not mean her schedule does not take its toll. Take her social life for example.

“Forget over a week in advance. Everything’s contingent. It’s always, ‘Fine, if I don’t have a banquet, I’ll do it.’ And, while she lives a few doors from the beach in Venice, she sighed, she does not take an early morning run or swim.

“I keep saying I will, but I just value sleep so much I can never do it.”

It is not economics that has propelled her to take on such a demanding job, she said, but ambition, love of the type of work, and an ingrained-from-birth belief in the work ethic.

“This is not an extremely high paying industry, but I was raised with the belief that in the long run, work is worth it, the sense of self-esteem, the personal reward is worth it, if you love your job, which I do. Here, sending somebody off who’s given a party--they’ve put their trust in you--the reward you get when they leave happy, it’s great.”

It is not the only reward she wants.

“I want to get married, do the whole baby thing, have a family and not work for while. But only people who are very fortunate get to do that. Especially in L.A.”

She did not even mention owning a house someday.

“That would probably be pushing it,” she smiled. “Maybe if I work hard enough, I’ll be able to get it.”