Workers Adjust in Leaner, Evolving Market for Jobs

Wylen Won has a good job as director of a blood-bank medical laboratory, a career for which he studied hard in a field expected to grow.

He supervises a staff of 15, holds a position that can pay as much as $70,000 a year, has health insurance and thoroughly enjoys his work at HemaCare in Sherman Oaks.

Yet Won’s good fortune is tempered by caution. The 42-year-old medical technologist recently began selling Amway housecleaning products on the side and keeps a plastic tray of samples on his desk. He figures it will supplement his income for now and offer an alternative if he falls victim to corporate downsizing.

“I guess it’s just not safe these days to put all your eggs into one basket,” said Won, the son of a retired aerospace engineer and a married father of two.

That sort of wariness is common among workers today, even those with the sorts of jobs expected to proliferate into the next century.

In the San Fernando Valley, studies show that smaller firms such as HemaCare are thriving. The healthiest fields include not only the biomedical industry, but entertainment, computer hardware and software, general industrial machinery, and even aerospace subcontracting.

But employees are keenly aware that they are the most vulnerable in a time of leaner operating budgets and changing markets.

Indeed, more low-paying jobs and a small supply of high-paying positions are forecast into the 21st Century. Of the 50 occupations expected to grow the fastest in the next six years, 29 will pay minimum wage, according to the state Employment Development Department. And economists predict that more employers will rely on part-time workers and independent contractors.

In a series of interviews with Valley workers from both ends of the wage spectrum in a variety of growing business sectors, younger employees generally seemed happier and more optimistic. That was also true for unskilled immigrants, or the children of working-class immigrants.

But for baby boomers raised in middle- and upper-middle-class American homes, there was an underlying anxiety, and several questioned whether they will ever match their parents’ standard of living.

“I don’t buy books anymore, or CDs. I don’t go out to eat very much; I don’t go to concerts like I used to,” said Paula Berinstein, a former librarian and computer programmer who became a self-employed researcher.

“Now my money is going to things like health care, insurance, taxes, earthquake repairs, keeping up the house, plumbing, all that kind of stuff,” said the owner of Berinstein Research in Woodland Hills. “And I don’t travel very much and I don’t buy a lot of clothes and all that.”

Nonetheless, Berinstein, 44 and single, relishes her independence and considers herself lucky to be her own boss. She gave up secure, corporate jobs to do so, joining a growing legion of home-based consultants.

She works mainly from her two-bedroom house, dressing in jeans, setting her own schedule, and telecommuting via phone, fax and e-mail. A couple times a week, she might drive down to her alma mater, UCLA, and use one of its well-stocked libraries.

Once she becomes an instant expert on subjects ranging from political campaigns to citrus distribution, she’ll write up the information for clients including screenwriters, attorneys and businesses.

“I find now when I work, I really work,” Berinstein said. “I don’t fool around, whereas when I worked for somebody else, I had a whole other perspective on it. Now, I have a reputation to uphold.”

She has yet to get rich and supplements her $35,000 in annual revenues by working part-time for her father’s investment firm. She hopes “all this hoopla about the information superhighway will help.”

Independent filmmaker Bill Morgan also hopes to capitalize on technology’s rapidly expanding ways of storing and conveying information.

Like Berinstein, Morgan has a liberal arts background but has become increasingly immersed in computers. Now he is throwing himself into the realm of CD-ROMs, the compact discs that can project images, text and sound through the user’s stereo and computer, and which have been touted as the future of information and entertainment.

For Morgan, they offer a perfect marriage of technology with the art of storytelling. He cited an example from a CD-ROM/laser-disc project called “Columbus: Encounter, Discovery and Beyond,” which recounts Columbus’ arrival in America from several perspectives. A window on Renaissance art draws fine parallels between Da Vinci’s studies of perspective and the navigation advances that enabled Columbus to cross the Atlantic.

“I think it’s really exciting. It’s like we really are in a new era,” said Morgan, who clearly seems enthusiastic about what he does. “A lot of people are fearful of the Brave New World. This is actually a very inviting, human technology.”

But while his Burbank-based company, Mass Productions, grosses in the “low six figures,” Morgan says overhead eats away at the money he would like to spend on a home. He and his wife, recently married with no children, are renting a house in Pacific Palisades.

“Even though I’m doing well relative to what I’ve done in the past, I would say just in general, the whole American dream of buying a house and all that is almost impossible in Los Angeles,” said Morgan, 41, the son of a highly successful, self-made businessman.

“Even though I make fairly good money I still can’t afford to buy a house in the part of L. A. I want to live in.”

Equally enthralled with his work, and not particularly concerned about financial security, is software engineer Moshe Kirsh, who believes his employer, Perceptronics of Woodland Hills, is on the cutting edge of its field.

The defense contractor specializes in virtual reality-style simulations that have been used for weapons training and military exercises, or war games. Now it is planning to convert its technology to commercial uses and one of Kirsh’s missions is to create a simulation framework applicable in a variety of situations.

“You can simulate any decision,” said Kirsh, 34. “Like with medical decisions, you can simulate a surgery in advance,” to see how it might turn out without jeopardizing a patient.

He is among a six software engineers--the brains behind computer programs--at his company, was culled from hundreds of applicants, and earns between $60,000 and $70,000 a year plus benefits. He, his software-designer wife, and their two young children live in Encino in a house they own. Kirsh, a native of Israel and a veteran of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, exudes confidence.

“I think it’s a reflection of my optimism about Perceptronics and companies like it. I think we’re in the right direction,” said Kirsh, who joined the firm a year ago.

For now, he is working on a way to expand existing simulations’ networking capabilities--such as enabling thousands of soldiers in different locations to participate in a simulated battle instead of 200, the current capacity.

His is a highly abstract world involving line after line of Roman numerals and Greek symbols, of knowing where he wants to go with his scribbles and then unraveling the mathematical obstacles along the way. Ideas often come to him as he commutes home and, unable to wait until morning, he’ll log onto his PC and bounce them off similarly driven colleagues.

“We don’t want to wait until the next day or even Monday to find out if it works,” Kirsh said.

Far less absorbing but not unpleasant is the job of Hoang Vuong, who works for the Chatsworth-based Zinnanti Surgical, a maker of gynecological and obstetrical instruments.

Vuong, 22, is paid roughly $7 an hour to assemble cervical dilators and endometrial tissue-samplers that are disposable. Sitting on a crate in Zinnanti’s cavernous warehouse and assembly room, he prints numbers on the instruments’ needle-like, plastic tubes, drills the holes needed to connect the various parts, then packages them.

Though the job is dull, the atmosphere is relaxed, and while he works Vuong can chat with co-workers--virtually all of them Southeast Asian or Central American immigrants in their 20s.

For Vuong, a native of Vietnam who grew up in Hawaii, it’s a way to save money for Pierce College, where he hopes to enroll next year after he officially gains his California residency. He wants to study radiology technology.

Vuong meets his expenses by sharing a rented Reseda house with four other Vietnamese immigrants--his aunt, his friend, his friend’s father, and another man. Four of the five house mates work at Zinnanti, so they all car-pool together in Vuong’s aunt’s car. He gives her $250 each month for room and board and still has money left over for coffeehouses and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, his favorite pastimes.

Coming to the mainland United States from Hawaii was a youthful adventure as much as anything else. “If you’re Vietnamese and living in Hawaii’s Vietnamese community, you know everybody,” Vuong said.

Dene Mathews says she is also content, despite the fact that she holds a degree in electrical engineering but is working primarily as a customer-service representative.

Unable to find an engineering job after she graduated two years ago from Howard University in Washington, D. C., Mathews settled for a foot in the door at Voice Powered Technology. The small, consumer-electronics firm in Canoga Park is known for voice-activated VCR programmers and a gadget called the Organizer, a pocket-sized, voice-programmed alarm that reminds users of personal tasks.

She is an administrative assistant and also handles what are euphemistically called “customer inquiries.” Blunter colleagues say that means fielding calls from irate customers who can’t figure out how to make their VCR programmers and Organizers work, even though they are designed for easy operation.

Still, it’s her first job out of college and Mathews, 25 and newly wed to an aspiring minister, focuses on the positive. And she is not the most overqualified of her co-workers, who include a 60-year-old, unemployed aerospace engineer.

“I’m getting good experience dealing with customers,” she said, briefly removing her headphones to talk. “It’s challenging accommodating difficult personalities, whether it’s in shipping-and-billing or about the device itself.”

She makes between $18,000 and $20,000 a year plus benefits at the full-time position, commuting from her Hollywood apartment each day in the Volkswagen Bug she has owned since she learned to drive. Nonetheless, she said she has enjoyed more opportunities than her parents, two government workers, and is satisfied for now.

“I feel we’re doing very well,” she said of herself and her husband.

Across the room of upholstered gray work stations sits the department’s oldest customer-service rep, George Lee, an unemployed aerospace engineer.

Lee, 60, used to make $100,000 a year as a consultant who specialized in making sure that rocket components worked. He has failed to find comparable work since his contracts dried up two years ago amid defense budget cuts.

So he became a customer-service rep at Voice Powered Technology, accepting a salary similar to Mathews’ because of the medical benefits. “Until I’m 62 I can’t draw Social Security, so I need the income,” he said. “But my biggest problem is not only no income but a lack of health insurance. I couldn’t afford the $8,000 a year it takes.”

Now he commutes from La Crescenta instead of working from his office at home. Many of the frustrated customers he helps haven’t bothered to skim the users’ guide or even watch an instructional videotape included for those unwilling to read.

“Their attitude is, ‘We bought the product so we won’t have to,’ ” Lee said.

“This is people work more than anything else,” he added. “But you need a good technical understanding of what happens so you can respond.”

If Mathews and Lee have temporarily set aside technical training to deal with the public, then the nurses at HemaCare have gone the opposite route--leaving behind the grueling job of healing the sick for the task of extracting blood platelets from healthy donors.

“Sometimes we kid our colleagues, ‘Just remember not only the worst days at the hospital, but the best ones,’ ” said Mari Kurzhals, who screens the paid donors, hooks them up to computerized platelet-harvesters, and periodically checks for negative reactions.

Like Kurzhals, a former critical-care RN, between one-third and one-half of the blood bank’s medical staff works part-time and receives no benefits. For now, that arrangement suits Kurzhals, 38, who has a 3-year-old son whom she and her husband, a police detective, prefer not to leave with a sitter.

She works one or two nights a week for $23 an hour, more to keep her hand in her profession than for the money. Sometimes she misses the satisfaction of comforting a patient but said she nonetheless enjoys friendly, even personal, conversations with HemaCare regulars, whose photos are posted on a bulletin board.

“I love it,” she said. “Maybe part of it is that I don’t have to do it.”

The Lineup

Today

Future Tense: A report from the front lines on the new workplace, where entrepreneurs, computer experts and others talk about how they feel about having 21st-Century jobs in the 20th Century. A1

Forever Young, Not: An already overburdened school system struggles to prepare youngsters for the changing workplace. B1

Help: A compendium of tips, lists and insights for coping with the lingering recession and preparing for the new economy. Plus, a Q&A; with Robert D. Bass, an Encino bankruptcy lawyer. B6-B7

Temporary Solution: In almost every industry, from banking to biotechnology, temporary workers are playing an increasingly important role. Valley Business, Page 10