The Value of a Quick Fix While L.A. Rebuilds

Riot recovery boss Peter V. Ueberroth’s five-year rebuilding L.A. organization might satisfy more patient Angelenos--those who take the long view and want to tackle the root causes of last spring’s violence.

But it’s a bit slow for someone like me, who craves action now. Ueberroth wants to reform workers’ compensation and change other state and city laws he says are driving employers out of the state. And he promises to get bankers to loan money to under-financed minority businesses.

This is an agenda for a miracle worker. Men and women now in exhausted retirement have spent frustrated careers failing to accomplish such reforms. Having covered many of their noble efforts, I know that the powerful lobbyists who defeated their efforts are still in charge in Sacramento and city halls all over.

Dissatisfied with the idea that we have to reinvent the system from the ground up, I started looking around for something that could be done immediately. Last week, I discovered a project that finds jobs for substantial numbers of people thrown out of work by the riots--now. While everyone else has been talking about recovery, state Employment Development Department Director Tom Nagle, area administrator Al Dave and office manager Kay Everett have actually been putting people to work.

Nagle says that more than 4,000 will have temporary jobs in the next 12 months. These jobs also will train the workers for permanent, non-government work that will come if Ueberroth and others succeed in recruiting more employers.

I talked to the department officials in the EDD (more commonly known as the unemployment office) on Broadway in a one-story building on the southern fringe of downtown L.A. It was midafternoon and the lines of unemployed seeking jobs and benefits had thinned. Two men sat in folding chairs on the hot pavement, helping--for a price--non-English- speaking applicants fill out their forms. Nearby were garment industry factories, offering piecework jobs at sweatshop pay.

The gloomy scene evoked many of the city’s troubles. The officials inside had been living with them for a long time. After the riot, they were prepared to act.

Director Nagle told me that the effort began when Gov. Pete Wilson requested U.S. Labor Department emergency funds to provide jobs for riot victims and budgeted another $20 million from a special job training fund. Washington came through with $15 million, which the EDD began to use immediately. The state funds are tied up in the current budget fight, but Nagle says his allotment won’t be a victim of the cuts.

The money is paying for a variety of jobs. More than 150 young men and women are already working for the California Conservation Corps. About 1,000 county and city jobs are being created. Money is being given to nonprofit service organizations that provide work for the unemployed. Funds are also set aside for temporary work for young men and women in neighborhoods dominated by gangs and the drug trade.

With thousands unemployed, how do people find their way into these jobs?

Tambus Green, who is African-American, became unemployed when the Winchell’s doughnut shop where she worked was burned. “My manager called me the next morning and told me,” she said. Green went to a state employment office to apply for unemployment benefits and to find a job. An interviewer called her at 6 a.m. the next day and told her to report for an interview two hours later.

She’s got an office job for the next nine months, where she’ll be taught the skills for a job that pays more than working behind the counter at Winchell’s.

Kathy Oh and Anna Yum, who are Korean-Americans, sought help from the EDD when their family businesses were destroyed in the riot. Yum and her husband ran shops in a swap meet. Oh’s husband is a contractor.

Oh said that after the riot, her husband tried to get contracting jobs but couldn’t find any. “It’s been a couple of months and he still can’t get a job,” Oh said. She also said that “it seems impossible to get a loan, an SBA (Small Business Administration) loan.”

Yum and Oh are also working in office jobs, picking up new skills.

It’s important to remember that these jobs are a quick but temporary fix. “People are getting a paycheck,” said department director Nagle. “That’s tangible. But the department is not going to make a significant impact on the economic conditions of Los Angeles. We can’t create (permanent) jobs.”

It’s a start, however, a bright spot in the gloomy post-riot picture. Ueberroth and L.A.’s political leaders should consider the value of such a quick fix while they toil away on their five-year plan.