VIEWPOINTS : Civic Leaders Size Up the Issues
The threat of recession. Improving the quality of the work force. Achieving growth without harming the environment. These are among the biggest issues facing business and the economy in 1991.
Sharon Bernstein asked six local community leaders for their views on the issues of greatest concern as the Southern California economy enters the new year.
Jane Pisano, president, 2000 Partnership, a coalition of civic and business leaders working to implement recommendations in the city’s LA 2000 report.
The central issue over the next year and all through the 1990s is the question, “How can we accommodate growth and achieve environmental standards?”
The answer implies that we must do a balancing act. We must make some compromises. If we want to grow, we must take the environment and quality of life into account. If we want to improve the environment, we have to realize that there are economic costs in doing that.
What we are seeing in Southern California is a shrinkage of jobs in our manufacturing sector. It is a result of the current recession and defense cutbacks. But it’s also the result of air quality regulations, workers compensation and other factors. As we make public policy with regard to environmental quality, we have to understand that there are short- and long-range economic costs associated with environmental decisions.
Ray Remy, president, Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce:
A longer-term set of concerns for the business community would be in education, both from the standpoint of our population being able to effectively compete and in the need to have knowledgeable and capable employees.
Business has been doing a lot. There are different public-private partnerships. The frustration is that there doesn’t seem to be any particular key that would enable us to get a better handle on the dropout rate and some of those areas of real distress in the school system. It isn’t because the people in the school system are not good or dedicated. It’s just a system that has to work and has to work better than it is.
We’re going to see some increasing stress just based on the budget issues in Sacramento. It’s going to be a major point of debate.
Walter Zelman, consumer specialist with state Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi and soon to be first executive officer of Los Angeles City Ethics Commission:
I am concerned with declining public participation in politics and declining public confidence in governmental institutions. When public confidence in government institutions erodes, people stop participating in government. And when people stop participating in government, then private interests and special interests tend to be strengthened because they will always participate. So the current crisis in public confidence and in public participation erodes the capacity of the general public to have its voice heard in political and governmental decision-making.
In terms of a business impact, I was always concerned that while special interests were always well represented, public interests were generally under-represented. There are very few lobbying groups that represent consumers and the general public, yet doctors and realtors and developers and oil companies are always represented. And as public confidence erodes and as the public participates even less, power shifts even more to those organized economic interests, because they are still there, and the public is even less participatory and weaker.
John Mack, director, Los Angeles Urban League:
The threat of the recession and all of its ramifications pose the most serious potential problem for our city. If indeed Los Angeles and Southern California are as hard hit as other parts of the country, that could represent an additional disaster, particularly for African-Americans and other minorities who already face major employment problems as well as minority businesses just holding on by their fingernails.
It could spell disaster, because unemployment is always two to three times higher among blacks than it is among whites. We really cannot afford to lose any more jobs and employment opportunities in South-Central Los Angeles, because we’ve always been behind the eight ball.
I would hope that corporate executives and employers as well as leaders in organized labor would not remain locked into the rigid practice and notion of the “last hired being the first fired” syndrome because that has always been devastating to blacks. In those instances where employers have begun to make some progress and we’ve been able to get a few African-Americans in the door, when it reaches crunch time and it boils down to layoffs, I would hope merit would be a consideration as well.
Further, when middle-management layoffs are considered, again I would hope that we would not find that (minorities) would be the ones who would take it through the neck. We’ve made limited and spotty progress here and there over the years in getting more minorities and women in various professional and middle-management roles, and it would be devastating to lay them off and kick them out the door and get us back to square one.
John E. Bryson, chairman and chief executive, Southern California Edison:
The most pressing issues are the region’s transportation and air quality requirements. The current economic slowdown is principally a short-term phenomenon that we can work our way through, given the tremendous diversity and dynamism of the economy in this region. But that vitality can be eroded over time if the pressing transportation needs of the area and the need for dealing with the area’s air quality problems in a cost-effective manner aren’t met.
We have increasingly stringent requirements applied to not just the traditional large industrial sources of emissions, but now to transportation and to smaller industrial, commercial and even residential sources of emissions. And for many--particularly small- and medium-sized businesses--unless some means can be found to limit the costs, businesses will begin to leave the area.
In the transportation area, the challenge is a potentially significant change in technology for an area that is uniquely dependent on the use of individual vehicles. Some of the responsibility we think lies in forms of mass transit, such as electric buses. Electric vehicles reduce by 97% the emissions associated with current conventional gas-fired vehicles.
William Robertson, executive secretary-treasurer, Los Angeles County Federation of Labor:
On both a national and local level, government should concentrate on getting manufacturing jobs back. In Los Angeles County in aerospace alone, labor lost close to 20,000 jobs last year. The best estimate for unemployment in Los Angeles County in the coming year is that it will climb to 7.2%, the highest we have had since 1985. We’ve lost jobs in manufacturing, which traditionally have been decent-paying jobs. People have lost their buying power, and it’s only going to get worse.
We have to invest in people again, in retooling, in research, in our infrastructure, and make an investment in education. We must talk about an industrial policy that completely restructures the economy to compete internationally. We see our role in labor as being the major institution for redirecting our domestic economic policy and the continuation of the fight to redistribute some of this wealth and income that the super-rich are benefitting from. We’ve got to get the money back into working families’ pockets, to make a viable marketplace out there where people can purchase goods--goods that are once again mostly manufactured in this country.
