Summer Job Search Bleak for L.A.’s Inner-City Youths : Employment: Riots, recession worsen the outlook, despite expected federal aid. Need for training is evident.

Allison Meadow, an 18-year-old student at Taft High School in Woodland Hills, keeps getting offers for summer jobs, even though she has a good one at a clothing store in the Topanga Plaza shopping center.

“Everywhere I go, people try to recruit me,” said the ebullient senior, who is saving for college. “People come in my store, (and) when I go into other clothing stores, people ask me if I want to work for them.”

But Xiomara Sandoval, a 17-year-old junior at Locke High School in South Los Angeles, has been looking unsuccessfully for a summer job for more than two months. She worries that she will not be able to earn any money for a class ring, the senior prom or college savings.

“I’ve been filling out applications left and right,” she said dejectedly. “And I haven’t got any response.”

Before the riots and before the recession, young people in affluent neighborhoods found it easier to find summer work than young people in poorer ones.

And now, despite congressional approval of a $500-million summer jobs package, the students who need work the most--minority youths in the inner city--still have the roughest time finding it.

The federal aid bill--which President Bush is expected to sign into law--will enable the city of Los Angeles to hire 4,000 young people this summer beyond the 9,000 who were to get summer jobs before the action in Washington.

But the additional help will not come close to meeting the overall need for jobs--particularly in riot-torn areas, said Susan Flores, the city’s director of Youth and Employment Services. “There is a tremendous youth population at all levels who are having a hard time accessing the labor market,” she said.

In depressed areas in parts of South Los Angeles, there are fewer private businesses of the types that typically hire young people: malls, fast-food restaurants and movie theaters. And many were damaged in the rioting. In addition, more adults--thrown out of work by the unrest or the slack economy--are competing with high school students for what entry-level or minimum-wage jobs exist.

“We had a few students who came to me because the store they were working at was burned down, . . . and when they’re put in other store locations, there are too many people on the job, or they have to travel farther,” said Margaret Medina, career adviser at Locke High School. “It’s made things a lot rougher for them.”

And, she added, “these are the kids that need the motivation and the experience. They want to work.”

By contrast, “the San Fernando Valley is a very lucrative place to find a job,” said Lynne Friedman, who coordinates the First Break summer jobs program of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce and the Los Angeles Unified School District. “We never have trouble finding jobs for kids, not even this year.”

For middle-class youngsters, summer jobs have been a staple of growing up. For disadvantaged young people, summer job programs long have been considered one of the most effective ways of giving youths dignity and a first step toward being part of the economic mainstream.

Even before the riots, the recession had made it more difficult for young people to find work. The unemployment rate among youths 16 to 19 grew statewide from an average of 13.9% in 1989 to 20.1% in 1991, according to the state Employment Development Department. In May, the rate was 22.3%. And in the inner city, youth unemployment may be as high as 40%, Flores said.

The riots only underscored the need for training and employment programs.

Adrian Jackson, 18, a black senior at Locke High School, was having trouble finding a job until he was granted one of three post-riot internships at b.d. systems, a Torrance-based aerospace engineering company owned by an African-American, Clarisa Howard.

“Most of the good jobs are taken,” said Jackson, who will attend UC Santa Barbara in the fall. It is difficult, he said, for his black friends to overcome the preconceptions of some employers: “They think if they hire one of those people, they could have been one of the people who participated in the riot.”

Since the unrest, several groups have come forward with programs to help out:

- Disneyland, working with the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in the Mid-City area, hired 200 inner-city youths 17 to 22 to work in the park and the Disneyland Hotel this summer. Six Flags Magic Mountain is in its fourth year of hiring 100 inner-city high school students for the summer.

- Pioneer North American said it will donate $600,000 to finance a new electronics job training program in Watts that will include six internships for high school students from Compton, Carson and Long Beach.

- Pepsico Inc. and the nonprofit Youth Jobs Awareness Project are holding job fairs this weekend for South Los Angeles youth to fill 300 full-time and part-time jobs in Pepsico operations, including Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell restaurants. In addition, the Youth Job Awareness Project is seeking financing for another 1,000 part-time jobs in public service agencies.

- Youth Entertainment Summer (Y.E.S. to Jobs), a private program founded by A & M Records and in its sixth year, offered 200 summer jobs in the entertainment industry to minority students in 10 cities.

And b.d. systems is not the only small company offering internships or jobs.

Fastener Innovation Technology, a Gardena aerospace contractor, has two jobs it offers to “kids who are having problems,” said special projects engineer Walter Parker.

One worker is Ronnie Allmond, 20, who is on probation for a felony conviction. After eight months as a machine operator, he said, “I feel they gave me a second chance. . . . I’m not out on the streets. I’m not kicking with no homeboys anymore. I’m just living, taking it day by day.”

Public programs also are continuing.

Perhaps the largest in Los Angeles is the federally funded Summer Youth Employment and Training Program, administered by the city. Before congressional approval of the urban aid package, the city was slated to spend about $11.3 million this summer to hire 9,000 young people to work in city departments, public agencies and nonprofit groups, said director Jane Dawson.

Federal officials said Friday that the city will receive another $9.7 million, enough to create an additional 4,000 part-time jobs paying $5.47 an hour.

Elsewhere in the Southland, the summer jobs bill will provide an additional $930,771 for Long Beach, $766,761 for Riverside, $476,409 for Santa Ana and $348,446 for Anaheim, the U.S. officials said.

Even so, the need exceeds the available assistance, employment officials say.

All young people who live in inner-city areas may not qualify for federal jobs programs, which are aimed at the poorest youth. Even if they qualify, “we know we only serve a very small portion of the eligible youth,” Flores said.

Joe Fox, a spokesman for First AME Church, said the church was swamped with 600 applications for the 200 Disneyland jobs. And at Locke High School, career counselor Medina said she received 50 applications for Magic Mountain jobs within 20 minutes of their posting.

“Anytime I mention anything on the job on the intercom, you see the kids pouring in here,” she said.

It was harder this year for youths to interview for the Magic Mountain jobs. In the past, interviewers for the amusement park trekked from Valencia to the inner city, stopping at Locke, Lincoln and two other high schools. After the riots, however, park officials decided to bus applicants up to Valencia.

Park spokeswoman Eileen Harrell said efficiency, not fear of crime, was the reason for the decision.

Meanwhile, some longstanding programs are cutting back. First Break is trying to find 1,000 summer jobs--a steep reduction from last year, when the goal was 5,000, and the year before that, when the goal was 10,000, Friedman said.

In part, that is because of the change to year-round schooling in Los Angeles, which has reduced the summer work period from three months to six weeks, she said. The new schedule also may be discouraging private employers from hiring high school students, job counselors say.

Demetrius Thompson, an 18-year-old senior at Locke, is one student who has had no luck finding a summer job.

“Jobs are scarce,” said the African-American student, who needs the money to get an apartment and attend junior college in the fall. “Most of the time you have to know someone to get a job. You can’t just put in an application anymore.”

That is how Samuel Gaitan, 18, a Guatemalan-born senior at Taft High School, got his job. A friend recommended him for a $6-an-hour job at a Unocal gas station near his home in Canoga Park, and he has been working full time as an attendant since December.

Even so, it is not easy. Gaitan, a soft-spoken and articulate young man, goes to school from 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., then heads to work at 2 p.m. He gets off work at 10 p.m., goes home for a quick shower, then hits the books. Sometime, he gets only five hours of sleep.

It took Gaitan two months to find that job--though his Anglo friends had no problems finding jobs, he said.

“It wasn’t hard for them to find jobs, because most of them are Americans. . . . They get preference by employers,” he said. As a Latino, he said, “in some places, they don’t look at you. They think you’re only coming to make problems.”

At one discount home improvement store, Gaitan said, “I filed an application. The guy just looked at it and said, ‘I’ll give you a call’. But when I turned around, he just threw the thing in the trash.”

Gaitan, who plans to attend Cal State Northridge in the fall, is glad for the chance to help out his family of seven. They live in a cramped two-bedroom apartment.

“My dad and my mom have enough problems trying to work themselves,” he said. “As old as I am, I should be working and helping them, since they already helped me.”