COLUMN LEFT/ JAMES ZELLERS : Third World Wages Won’t Rebuild L.A. : Reject the self-serving corporate offers of more crippling poverty-level jobs.

For most people, Los Angeles is not a good place to live or work. Wages are declining, many benefits have been eliminated and most corporations treat this area as an extension of the Third World. Conscious decisions by employers have led to deindustrialization, subcontracting and union-busting of well-paid private-sector jobs and the privatization of well-paid public sector jobs, which in turn have caused the economic and social crisis facing our community.

Los Angeles is in dire need of a renaissance--one that requires corporate social responsibility leading to long-term investment and a commitment to creating an economy based on high-wage jobs.

Since the disturbances last spring, there have been volumes of rhetoric about the future of Los Angeles. Much of the attention has been focused on Peter Ueberroth and Rebuild L.A., with numerous high-profile announcements of job-training projects sponsored by major corporations like Hughes, Toyota, Vons and Marriott. In fact, to date, the primary focus for rebuilding L.A. has been on “job training” and “job creation” in the inner city.

Training people for low-wage jobs and creating more of them will only exacerbate L.A.’s problems, rather than solving them. Failure to address the staggering problem of the city’s working poor will doom any effort to rebuild our community.

In 1989, Paul Ong, a UCLA urban studies professor, produced the “Widening Divide,” a monumental study on income inequality and poverty in Los Angeles. It showed that although Los Angeles experienced tremendous economic growth in the 1980s, the number of people in poverty grew both numerically and as a percentage of the population. The study found that because our local economy is increasingly based on low-wage jobs, working full-time in Los Angeles often means still living in poverty.

Hundreds of thousands of Los Angeles workers live in poverty despite full-time jobs. Garment workers, janitors, hotel and restaurant workers and numerous others earn wages below the poverty level. Over the past decade we have seen an increasing trend among corporations and government to avoid responsibility for working conditions through subcontracting. Low-wage subcontractors are used by major companies like Toyota, Hughes, Lucky Stores, Vons and other prominent firms to cut costs, impoverish workers and thus hurt our community. For example, by attacking and nearly destroying the janitors union in the 1980s, Los Angeles’ real-estate industry cut janitors’ earnings by about 50%, thereby removing nearly $1 billion from inner-city neighborhoods in the form of lost wages and benefits.

Ueberroth has stated that minimum-wage jobs bring dignity to those who have them. The minimum hourly wage translates to an annual salary of $8,840 in gross earnings, less than what it costs to rent the average two-bedroom apartment. After taxes, workers earning the minimum wage take home less than $7,000 per year. What does it mean to Los Angeles’ economy and our workers if we expect them to live on less than $10,000 per year?

Nor is government free from responsibility. Many city and county service-sector jobs are routinely contracted out at wages and benefits that are a fraction of those paid to the public employees. The result has been layoffs in African-American neighborhoods and poverty wages in immigrant neighborhoods, thus increasing tension between those communities and in the end undermining our entire city.

Rebuild L.A. and others who aim to reinvigorate Los Angeles must make the fundamental issues of wages, benefits and working conditions a cornerstone of their work. At present, not one of the 22 points on Rebuild L.A.’s list of what companies can do for the city addresses these issues.

Fundamental to a Los Angeles renaissance must be a social contract between corporations, workers and government. That contract must extend to all workers affected by the policies of a corporation--not just those it technically employs. Companies should use their power to ensure that subcontracted workers enjoy working conditions equal to those of their own employees.

Los Angeles needs a workers’ bill of rights that makes explicit corporate respect for workers’ rights, including improved wages, health insurance for all workers and their families, and recognizing the right of workers to organize, join and belong to unions. Without these basic commitments, we are doomed to a vicious cycle of masking problems only to have them reappear later with more force and more destruction.