No Guarantees : Proposed Cutbacks Stun Workers Who Sought Stability With County

For decades, the desire for stability is what drove thousands of workers to get on the Los Angeles County payroll. The private sector, many were convinced, was too savage, with too arbitrary a climate in which to build a life.

When Mark Gant, 32, went looking for work, his parents--who came from the segregated South--told him that if he got a good government job he would be treated more fairly. So both Gant and his wife, Dinah, 32, who are African American, became county clerks.

Lisa Ross, 26, saw her father, a Jamaican immigrant, work 25 years as a county marshal and followed him into government service as a clerk in the assessor’s office.

Monica Sanchez, 25, traced her mother’s footsteps into a job in a county welfare office on the Eastside, convinced that she would enjoy better pay and health benefits while private companies were downsizing.

For these and other families, county government was not merely a paycheck but was a seemingly protected route to the middle class, a cultural network. Now that network is crumbling.

Los Angeles County officials are proposing to help balance the county budget with at least 10,000 job cuts and have mailed out 1,900 “pink slips”--formal notices that termination may be only weeks or months away.

Sanchez and Ross are among who those received pink slips last week, while the Gants are nervously awaiting word about the status of the hospital where they work.

“When I got my job, I thought I was in dream heaven,” Mark Gant said. “I had benefits, a stable position and security to take care of my family.”

The Gants began working for the county in 1986 at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center. She worked in nursing administration and he landed a job in medical records. With two steady incomes, they moved out of a crime-ridden area and bought a five-bedroom house in Lancaster where they looked forward to raising their three children away from the urban madness.

For a time, the couple endured the long, arduous commutes to work at King Hospital until transfers could be arranged to Lancaster’s High Desert Hospital.

Then just when it appeared their lives were beginning to settle down, word came that High Desert was among several ailing county hospitals that may be sacrificed as one way of reducing the Department of Heath Services’ $745-million budget gap. One proposal calls for turning the hospital into a medical center that would only handle outpatients.

“You pray for things that you want and sometimes you actually don’t want them,” Gant said, sadly. “If I were still at King, I probably wouldn’t be looking at losing my job.”

Suddenly, their lives have been thrown into turmoil. They worry about the future--the mortgage payments, the car loan. If they lose their jobs at High Desert, he said, they will be isolated in Lancaster, where there are few opportunities for work.

When he was growing up, he said, his parents emphasized the importance of getting a job with the county. His mother, who worked 25 years as a school cafeteria manager, retired with a pension and benefits. His father had no pension after working 20 years in a plastics factory.

“A county job was supposed to be something to hold on to, to grow around,” he said. “Now I feel like nothing is permanent.”

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Lisa Ross’ father, a county marshal, encouraged her to get a county job straight out of high school and use it as a stepping-stone to continue her education in college.

“He said there was always room for advancement with the county,” she recalled. “I took his advice and for a while everything was fine, but then everything went belly-up.”

Ross met her husband, Brian, 38, in the assessor’s office, where she went to work. They have been married two years and are helping to raise his four children from a previous marriage.

Ross received a pink slip, and her husband, a supervisor in the same office, was demoted as a cost-saving measure. Suddenly, they were facing the prospect that their combined income of $56,000 would be cut by more than half.

“Things were stable so we purchased a home about a year ago,” she said. “Now we face the possibility of losing it all--the house, the car, everything. It’s like a powder keg.”

Brian Ross began working for the county assessor’s office 15 years ago after being laid off from a job with a private company.

At the time, Ross said, he was assured that he would not have to face cuts or layoffs again.

“The assessor’s office generates money [through increased property values],” he recalled someone telling him. “Now property values are losing value so fast that they can’t keep track of it.”

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Through her county job, Monica Sanchez could get the medical benefits and steady income her husband’s job in the construction trade did not provide. Because times were tough, she and her husband lived with her mother in a cramped trailer in a Paramount mobile home park. They met in high school

She left her clerical job with a plumbing supply company to begin work with the county several years ago.

Sanchez and her husband were just beginning to see their way clear to getting their own place when the pink slip arrived. Monica was told she would lose her job as a clerk in the welfare office. Her mother, who also worked there, was being demoted as a cost-cutting measure.

“It seems like everything is falling apart,” she said. “My husband works, but with the recession he has been unable to find a steady job. The money from the county has carried us through the rough spots.”

Her county benefits, for example, covered the expense of costly medication for her diabetes.

If she loses her $25,000-a-year job as a clerk, she said, “I’ll have no future.”