UNDERSTANDING THE RIOTS--SIX MONTHS LATER : Money and Power/Making It in the Inner City : JOBS: TALES FROM THE STREET : The search for work has become a full-time job.
They’ve heard the spiel before: “Be on time. Be cheery. Be confident.”
For the 30 unemployed men and women gathered at First African Methodist Episcopal Church, com peting for two jobs with the Walt Disney Co., the pep talk is a painful reminder of the daily struggle they face to land work.
Many have been jobless for more than a year. They’ve had to give up their homes and move in with relatives. Cars have been repossessed. Savings accounts--for those who managed to set aside a little--have been depleted.
These are desperate people--and many have felt degraded by what the search for work has become: a full-time job. They baby-sit job banks, attend job fairs, mail countless resumes, track down leads and wait for phone calls.
And they constantly wonder why there are so few jobs, why they can’t get hired.
Patricia Hicks is among the pavement pounders.
“It is very discouraging,” said Hicks, 36, a single mother with two boys. “If you keep getting rejected day after day, it is tough to pull up that pantyhose and put on that darn suit. Month after month you’re asked the same question: ‘So tell me about yourself.’
“ ‘I want a job!’ is what I want to say.”
So many in Los Angeles share her plaint. Downsizing, layoffs, company closings and capital flight have all contributed to an 11.9% unemployment rate in the city.
Many of the unemployed realize that they lack skills or higher education. Or that they just live too far from where the jobs are--and can’t afford to move closer. Some say they are the victims of discrimination and that racism is widespread. Some have no transportation, no money for child care and no connections.
But, mostly, they say there are no jobs. And with the 20-year decline in unionized, high-wage manufacturing employment and more recent cutbacks in aerospace, they’re basically right.
“Inner-city communities have become isolated, geographically and economically, from the mainstream of society,” said James H. Johnson Jr., director of UCLA’s Center for the Study of Urban Poverty. “As a result, there has been a disinvestment in those communities by employers.”
Johnson ticks off the familiar litany of companies that have closed inner-city plants: Firestone. Goodyear. Uniroyal. Since 1972, he said, 70,000 jobs have disappeared from the area once known as the Alameda industrial core; many of the firms relocated overseas.
The Los Angeles-based manufacturers that did grow in the late 1970s and early 1980s--aerospace firms such as Hughes Aircraft, Northrop and Rockwell--built their plants long bus rides from the inner city. And in any event, these high-tech manufacturers offered few opportunities for the unskilled and the undereducated.
“Those jobs, too, have disappeared, because they were tied to the defense industry,” Johnson said.
None of this is news to Raymond Amerson, a 33-year-old bachelor who was laid off in September from his job in El Segundo as an electronics technician at an aerospace subcontractor.
Laid off twice before, he knows only too well what he has to do to find a job. But, often, he wonders if anyone is paying attention.
“Why am I not getting a job?” he asks after meeting with a job counselor at the Los Angeles Urban League. “I’ve thought about that. I feel strong about my qualifications. I’m not going for something out of my league. I have roughly 15 years experience in my field.”
Six weeks into his latest job search, Amerson had sent out 35 resumes and followed up on 40 leads. “Out of those contacts, I’ve received eight callbacks that someone else got the job,” he said. He had been to three job interviews, but hadn’t been offered a job.
If a job or a couple of part-time jobs fail to materialize by the end of the year, Amerson might move in with a sister in Los Angeles or return to Charleston, W.Va., to live with his mother and get an electrician’s license.
“I’ll work for $6 and $7 an hour if I have to,” Amerson said. “But even those jobs are tough to get because there are too many of us out of work.”
Amerson is African-American. Genaro Marquez Cruz is Latino, a Mexican immigrant with temporary resident status. Many say their communities are at odds, fighting for economic scraps in what Johnson calls “Los Angeles’ labor-surplus environment.”
Ever since spring, when rioters torched the restaurant where he was a full-time cook, Cruz, 33, has found it increasingly difficult to make ends meet.
He has taken to street corners in search of day labor that pays as little as $20. He has turned to churches and food banks to feed his four children, including a 6-month-old son. All born in Los Angeles, they are eligible for welfare benefits--a last, but very real, option for the Cruz family.
Cruz owes family members almost $5,000--money he has borrowed for rent and the basic necessities of life since he became jobless.
“Look. I don’t have anything,” he said, opening an empty billfold. His 3-year-old son, Bartolo, marvels at the rice, peanut butter and canned juices stuffed inside bags his father has picked up from a food program.
Cruz immigrated to Los Angeles from Oaxaca, Mexico, in 1979. He married Herlinda, 28, three years later. He used to be a working poor man. Now, Cruz said, “I am an out-of-work poor man.”
He doesn’t want to return to Mexico, where the minimum wage is $4 a day and his children would not get a free lunch at school. When approached about selling drugs, he has refused. “I want to do honest work,” Cruz said. “Ever since I came to this country I have worked. I have contributed to this city’s economy.”
Cruz is here legally. But because so many undocumented workers are willing to work for low wages, Johnson said, “the major casualties in this economic restructuring process are young black males.”
Research indicates that many employers have negative images of African-American men. Among those stereotypes, Johnson said, are “that they are lazy, inarticulate, ineducable and, most of all, dangerous. Young black males find it extremely difficult to get a handle on the labor market.
“They become the jobless poor,” he said.
Amerson says he doesn’t want to believe that racism has been at the core of his current job woes.
“But I sometimes think that it is geographical,” he said. “I think when an employer outside of South-Central sees a ZIP code of 90008, they may look at that and think, ‘It’s the ‘hood.’ I do believe that is a possibility.” Johnson said that “there is empirical evidence that employers discriminate by address and school--and particularly if you live in a public housing project.”
Mark Whitlock, executive director of the Los Angeles Renaissance Program, an economic development project at First AME Church, said: “We in the inner city have been painted with a black brush, a brush that is perceived as being ignorant. No talent.
“Unfortunately, when you think of gangbanging, drugs, dope smoking, woman abusing, you think of an African-American, you think of a Latino. The long-term effect of that (occurs) when it comes down to making a decision on who you are going to hire, because in many cases you hire an image.”
Whitlock often tells companies to “forget about those perceived images. Sit down at the table with us and tell us what you need. We will provide you with talent that will bring a profit to your company, not a liability.”
Betty (Pickles) Sanders, 38, jobless for almost a year, knows she has turned many a profit for employers in the retail industry. She’s worked since high school--from fast-food restaurants to being a bank deposit clerk to her last job, supervisor of a retail store.
Sanders can’t understand why she’s struggling to get a job.
“This is the third place I hit today,” she said, sitting outside the Renaissance Program’s offices, where she has pored over job listings and jotted down leads.
Sanders is down to her last disability check from a job she left last year, citing stress she blames on discrimination. The money is enough to handle her rent, utilities and car payment; sometimes she relies on friends for food. She would rather hold on to her cash for job-hunting expenses: gas, parking and stamps to mail resumes.
“Being without a job is like part of my life is at a standstill,” Sanders said. “Last night I had a good cry. I had a pity party for myself. Most of my thoughts were about money--the lack of. I looked around my apartment, and I thought, ‘Well, is it coming to the point where I am going to have to start selling my stuff?’ ”
She figures that a lack of experience and qualifications may be contributing to her joblessness.
“I’m angry,” she said. “I see jobs that interest me, but I’m not necessarily qualified for them. They want experience. But if no one gives you the opportunity to get the experience, how else will you get it?”
Munzel Johnson, director of training and employment for the Los Angeles Urban League, says high-tech experience--including computer literacy--is and will continue to be essential for many jobs.
So is entrepreneurship, she says, because minority employers may be in the best position to create jobs in the inner city.
About 100,000 small businesses in Los Angeles County are Latino-owned and operated, said David Hayes-Bautista, co-author of “Redefining California,” a study of the state’s Latino population.
“If each one grew a little bit, they would create a good number of jobs,” said Bautista, director of UCLA’s Center for the Study of Latino Health and a professor at the UCLA School of Medicine.
James Diego Vigil, a USC professor of anthropology and a research fellow at the Center for Multiethnic and Transnational Studies, says corporate America is buying into the view of politicians who say that poor people are irresponsible and have low motivation because they lack family values.
“It is corporate America who is irresponsible, and that irresponsibility is like piracy,” Vigil said. “People want to work. They want to make a living. It is part of being human.”
And if people can’t find jobs, they create their own, he says.
Patricia Hicks did.
After she was laid off from her job as a teacher’s assistant and office aide more than a year ago, she worked the swap meet circuit for three months because she couldn’t get work elsewhere. She brought in $100 every two weeks and never worked harder in her life. Three months ago, she moved in with her retired father because she couldn’t afford an apartment.
While she has gotten occasional work through secretarial agencies, Hicks has been unable to find full-time employment. But her unsuccessful job search has made her look to the future. She plans to attend college at night; she wants to become a schoolteacher and a coach. During the day, she’ll look for work.
“I needed to go back to college five years ago,” Hicks said. “But because the economy was better then, I could get a job whenever I wanted. Now, nobody is hiring me, and I have to do something about it.”
Education, says John E. Huerta, an attorney for the Western Center on Law and Poverty, is the key to employment and upward mobility. Inner-city communities such as South, South-Central and East Los Angeles have always had fewer educational opportunities than other parts of the city, Huerta said.
“I don’t believe that has really changed over the last 25 years,” he said. “Our economy is changing dramatically, and the nature of jobs that will be available will be changing, too.
“The seeds for what we harvested this last May with the riots were planted in the early ‘80s,” Huerta said. “And if we don’t start doing investment planning in the inner city through skills training, more educational opportunities and infrastructure rebuilding--all of which are tied to employment--we are going to pay for it again.”
