COLUMN ONE : Buzzword With Bite: Work Ethic : Why do attitudes toward finding work--and toward working--vary so much? The questions gain importance as Los Angeles rebuilds in tough economic times.

Don’t use my name, the businessman says. He knows he’s playing with loaded words and he’s afraid they’ll backfire.

He’s a middle-aged black man who runs a downtown Los Angeles industrial company with three dozen workers, and he can count his black employees on one hand. That’s because he hires immigrants. They accept the minimum wage work and--here come the loaded words--”they have a higher work ethic.”

Olivia Fernandez treads gingerly, too. Fernandez is a lecturer for the National Assn. of Working Women. She visits job training classes at housing projects and pumps students full of tips about how to keep jobs once they get them: How to be prompt, assertive, cut wasted time, follow directions, set goals, take responsibility.

She is, in short, teaching the work ethic.

Except that Fernandez never uses those words.

“It’s a turn-off,” she says.

Work ethic, a phrase spoken with simple pride for generations, has become another American buzzword. Like the popular Republican Party campaign slogan, “family values,” it is freighted with so many social overtones, historical tensions and stereotypes that honest debate has become practically impossible.

And yet in the wake of the Los Angeles riots, that debate is inevitable.

Encouraging a purposefulness about work is a crucial, if abstract, part of Los Angeles’ recovery from the riots.

One of the prime goals of Rebuild L.A. is to create 60,000 jobs in “neglected” communities, in addition to restoring the jobs lost in the violence.

In many of those neighborhoods, more than half the residents are unemployed, due in part to the disappearance of industrial jobs during the past two decades. Many of the jobless have grown discouraged and stopped looking for work. Some have grown dependent on a welfare system that reduces or cuts off benefits to recipients who earn outside income. Others have entered a parallel work ethic--the drug culture--in which drug dealing and robbing are commonly described as “getting paid.”

In reaching out to the hard-core unemployed, traditional training must be expanded to teach concepts of conscientiousness, dedication and personal planning, job training specialists say.

“It’s not only teaching them how to use a computer, it’s teaching them how to act in the work environment. That’s a totally different culture,” said Yolanda Martinez-Weiss, a Long Beach adult school teacher who hires Olivia Fernandez as a supplemental lecturer.

For people who have never worked, or been unemployed for years, the transition to a daily job carries hidden difficulties.

“You get relaxed. You say, ‘Oh, well, I can sleep to 10, I can get up when I want,’ ” said Betty Bryant, 39, the mother of a 6-year-old son. Bryant is studying to be a pharmacy technician at a job training school, after spending the past eight years on welfare.

However, addressing these kinds of personal adjustments inevitably raises hackles because of the way work ethic has been bandied about.

Among minorities, there is widespread suspicion that employers who fret about the loss of the work ethic are using the phrase as a sanitized way of grousing about having to deal with people of color. Even in sports, syntax is suspect. Traditionally, sportswriters and broadcasters have been more likely to praise the “work ethic” of white stars, such as retired Boston Celtic Larry Bird, while applauding black standouts for their “natural ability.”

The debate transcends race.

U.S. business leaders, under stiff pressure from foreign competition to increase productivity, have complained for years that the American work force is growing more poorly educated, less able to adjust to rapid technological change and less devoted to company goals. Many employers believe, in the words of one industrial psychologist, that too many of these workers remain stuck in a “psychology of entitlement” that took hold in the less competitive 1950s and ‘60s as the economy expanded and wages soared.

A 1987 study by a team of researchers from eight nations, who surveyed nearly 15,000 workers, found that only 30% of Americans said they considered work “one of the most important things in my life,” third after the Japanese (44%) and the Yugoslavians (31%).

Some workplace analysts contend that American employers have inadvertently sabotaged the work ethic in their obsession to keep labor costs competitive. Fundamental changes in the overall economy, such as relentless corporate “downsizing,” the growth of low-paying service sector and part-time jobs and cuts in health benefits and pensions, have diminished employee loyalty and commitment to work, they suggest.

“The real killers of the work ethic are (minimum-wage) jobs that pay less than what one can live on,” said Elliot Liebow, a retired anthropologist who authored the landmark 1967 book “Tally’s Corner,” which chronicled the lives of a small group of urban “streetcorner men” in Washington, focusing on the attitudes that led poor, unemployed people to sometimes turn down jobs.

“If you can’t support yourself on the goddamned job, how can you value it?” Liebow said. “And yet we think the work ethic is something in people, something immutable, as though it were independent of the nature of work.”

Social scientists believe that a number of forces shape a person’s attitude toward work. As a result, attitudes sometimes differ sharply between different economic classes and cultures.

A detailed study of 2,490 poverty-level parents living in Chicago’s inner-city neighborhoods by University of Chicago sociologist William Julius Wilson and a team of colleagues, released last year, found Mexican immigrants were more successful in seeking and keeping jobs than African-Americans because of significantly stronger home and neighborhood “networks.”

Immigrants were far more likely to have family members and acquaintances who provided information about jobs and social support to assist working parents, the study said.

The study attempted to answer one of the most popular and sensitive social questions in America: Why have sharp ethnic differences in “labor force participation”--the proportion of a population working or actively looking for work--developed since the 1960s, when the participation rate in all groups was around 80%?

In South Los Angeles, for example, the 1990 Census found that 70% of the area’s 113,000 Latino men 16 or older were employed, with 9% unemployed and 18% not looking for work. By contrast, of 100,000 black men, only 45% were working, 12% were unemployed and a staggering 42% were not looking for work.

The Chicago study found that Mexican immigrants were better able to find jobs because they could plug into a tight subculture established by a chain of prior immigrants, some of whom came from the same villages. It also found that the larger families of Mexican immigrants created indirect advantages in looking for work.

Ghetto blacks, meanwhile, lived in more racially segregated neighborhoods with a much higher concentration of poor people than Mexican immigrants.

Black men were less likely than Mexican immigrants to have a close friend who was employed, and twice as likely to say that most of their friends had lost jobs due to companies moving or closing. Among working male parents, Mexican immigrants were far more likely than blacks to have found their job through a friend.

The Chicago study is part of an uneasy debate among social researchers about the degree to which personal responsibility versus “situational” dynamics should be blamed for problems such as joblessness.

Increasingly, however, attention is being paid to more complicated theories.

For example, to explain high black male joblessness, sociologist Wilson folds together several trends that occurred in the past two decades: the decline of manufacturing jobs, which disproportionately affected minorities; the fact that the service industries that replaced those jobs paid significantly less, required higher levels of education and were often located in the harder-to-reach suburbs, and the flight of the black middle class from the inner cities, leaving behind an isolated class of poor people without role models.

Libby Tracy, a black teen-ager who grew up in the Jordan Downs project in Watts, was recently reminded how isolated his neighborhood had become from the working world after he obtained a summer job as a counselor in a private dropout prevention program.

“I told my homeboys I was working, and the first thing they said is: ‘Are they taking applications?’ I bet 80 people asked me that. Ain’t nobody down here working,” said Tracy, who was a street gang member until he was shot in the leg last year. He now attends college.

Few of the people he knows read newspaper want ads because most of the jobs advertised there require experience, Tracy said.

However, he said few of those people would consider taking a job at the minimum wage of $4.25 an hour.

“People want something better than average,” he said. “If they get $6, $7 an hour, they can live on that.”

Immigrants are far more likely to pool their earnings from minimum-wage jobs and live together in more clustered surroundings.

“That’s how we pay the rent. We live 10 people to an apartment,” said Juan Gutierrez, an immigrant from Honduras who spends his days waiting for infrequent construction work at one of several dozen Los Angeles street corners where immigrant day laborers gather.

The black downtown business owner who hires primarily immigrants said he relies heavily on his immigrant workers for leads.

“The day after you put the word out,” he said, clapping his hands for emphasis, “someone is here: a brother, a nephew, a niece.”

The University of Chicago study found Mexican immigrants had fewer difficulties with child care because of the presence of a second adult in the house. (Eighty-four percent of Mexican immigrant mothers lived with at least one other adult, compared to only 29% of black mothers.) The extra adult also made it easier for one adult to take advantage of government surplus food giveaways or soup kitchens while the second worked, allowing minimal incomes to be stretched further.

“In the (housing) projects, it’s harder for both parents to work because you have kids at home,” said Tracy. “You can’t leave them alone or the (social) welfare people get on you. And to begin with, you don’t have many (poor black) families with two parents.”

As a result, black parents live closer to the edge than Mexican immigrants, the Chicago study said, making them “more susceptible to stressful, income-related disruptions” and making it “harder to be a reliable employee.”

Poor blacks were more likely than poor Mexican immigrants to suffer a telephone or electrical disconnection due to inability to pay, more likely to have been evicted and less likely to have a car that ran or a savings account.

The Chicago study shows that high joblessness among poor blacks “has become a well-institutionalized social fact that cannot easily be swept away with ‘workfare’ (requiring able-bodied welfare recipients to work) or other programs designed to enforce a proper work ethic,” university researcher Martha Van Haitsma said. “Even the most zealous worker requires certain social supports if he is to maintain a strong attachment to the work force.”

Van Haitsma emphasized that black and Mexican immigrant parents looked at work from dramatically different worlds.

Immigrants were likely to be highly motivated--having possessed the ambition to come here--while ghetto blacks were likely to be people who had not been successful enough to move to better neighborhoods. Immigrants had no welfare experience and were willing to work in minimum-wage jobs--which paid more than they earned in Mexico--while blacks said they could not survive on those wages.

More than 70% of black parents surveyed in the study thought that people have a right to public assistance without working. Only one-third of the Mexican immigrants thought that.

The Chicago study also surveyed 185 Chicago-area companies and found that employers viewed inner-city workers--particularly black men--as unstable, uncooperative, dishonest and uneducated.

The employers, whose names were not used in the study, spoke frankly and often about ethic differences.

“They’re not as wired to the clock in keeping time and being on time as someone else who was raised in a family where the father went to work everyday,” said the owner of a construction firm about minority workers. “It’s just cultural difference.”

Albert H. Yee, professor of educational psychology at Florida International University, said Americans suffer from the belief that a person’s work ethic is inherited.

“We perceive a lot of behavior in genes,” Yee said. “People think, ‘Why are you good in math and I’m not? Your genes are better.’ ”

The American work ethic secularized the Protestant Reformation’s view of work, which held that God had called everyone to some productive vocation. By the mid-19th Century, popular American morality held that in a hard, stern world full of material demands, it was everyone’s social duty to produce. Even the lowest form of work was not merely virtuous but necessary to ward off evil and idleness.

That romanticized notion of work was--and remains--at odds with European culture. After all, European folk legends describe “milk and honey Edens free from work,” writes Daniel T. Rogers, a Princeton University historian who has studied the evolution of the American work ethic. To Europeans, “to work was to do something wearisome and painful, scrabbling in the stubborn soil. It was the mark of men entrapped by necessity and thus men who were not wholly free.”

As work in America became industrialized and assembly line jobs replaced jobs that had offered independent expression, the idea that all work offered dignity became harder to maintain.

Allen Steinberg, a history professor at the University of Iowa, contends that American workers never bought into the notion of work as a socially redeeming activity.

“That idea was forced upon workers by the middle and upper classes,” Steinberg said “Workers have always been told that industrious activity would allow you to become a self-sufficient property-owning person, whether it meant owning a farm or a workshop in the 19th Century, or becoming a well-educated professional now.

“But that goal is not achievable by working hard at (low) wage labor and manual work. By that, all you do is get to keep your job; you don’t gain independence. That’s the contradiction.”

Adds Juliet Schor, an associate professor of economics at Harvard University and author of “The Overworked American,” which notes that the average working American puts in 163 more hours a year than 20 years ago: “The work ethic was transformed into an ethic of work-and-spend. The whole idea of the job became a paycheck.”

The depersonalizing computerization of many jobs since the 1970s, combined with a tendency of many Americans to work longer hours at stagnant wages, has strengthened the contrast between work as salvation and work as alienating drudgery.

“Jobs for many Americans are insignificant,” said Donna Schaper, pastor of a church in Riverhead, N.Y., and author of a forthcoming book, “Shelter for the Spiritually Homeless.” “The anxiety about keeping jobs that don’t feed our spirits is a cruel hoax. . . . That hoax is the work ethic in America today.”

Times staff writers Frank Clifford and Rich Connell and research librarian Tom Lutgen contributed to this story.