COUNTY GOVERNMENT : Another Security We Can’t Take for Granted

My mother always said there was nothing so certain as a government job. I have been thinking about my mother’s advice, these last few days, as Los Angeles County, faced with the greatest fiscal crisis in its history, weighs firing thousands of workers.

When I was a boy in Sacramento, in the 1950s, the biggest employer in town was the state government. California was growing and the bureaucracy undergirding our optimism was hiring. In those anti-communist years, people talked proudly of “working for the state.”

Last week, in an article in this newspaper, Lisa Ross, the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant who came to California and worked for 25 years as an L.A. County marshall, remembered her father’s advice: “He said there was always room for advancement with the county.” Lisa Ross took her father’s advice. She worked in the county assessor’s office. Last week, she was given her pink slip.

We are, many of us, in an anti-big government mood these days. The news that county workers in Los Angeles face losing their jobs does not earn much interest or even concern.

We forget, perhaps, that for many Americans, working and middle class, the government was a kind of affirmative- action employer before there was any such thing as affirmative action. Black Americans, white, brown, got a chance to make their way into America through Civil Service, at a time when private business was not hiring.

My mother, a Mexican immigrant, taught herself how to type. And then she taught herself to type fast, then faster. She had no “contacts” who might get her a job in private business. And there was the matter of her accent and her foreignness. With Civil Service, she could test for a job by taking a cut-and-dry exam.

During her lunch hour, she would often consult the bulletin board for more exams Level 1 leading to Level 2, then 3 . . . And there was something else about working for the state that she liked: The state offered security.

To a boy in California in the 1950s, when there was Cinemascope, in those years when California was OPEN 24 HOURS and KOOL INSIDE, when Sacramento offered ALL YOU CAN EAT, how could the notion of job security interest me? I would see the “state workers” downtown, the women in their cotton dresses, the men in shirt sleeves, carrying bag lunches. Thousands of them going to work at exactly 8 and getting out exactly at 5 o’clock--my mother among them.

Soon, however, my mother earned more money than my father. My father, who made false teeth for a living, twice lost his job. My mother kept advancing, ascending through layers of the state bureaucracy. By the 1960s, she was typing in the outer office of Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown.

From the distance of several decades, we scorn the very idea of state bureaucrats. What comes to mind today are lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles, long waits, and the rude clerk at the desk who says you have to fill out another form altogether.

And now, in 1995, we hear civil servants talk about job security and we sneer. Don’t they realize that we live in a capitalist economy? Why should a job with the county or the state be any more “safe” than our own in the private sector?

Pat Brown was “my” governor, which is to say, his optimism regarding California rhymed with my own. He built freeways in those years when I yearned to be 16 and get my driver’s license. He imagined my future through the University of California’s system. He even made the water run up the side of a mountain.

Are we fated, each generation, to reverse the knowledge of the previous generation? Today, most Americans, probably most in California, have lost faith in government. The generation before us, on the other hand, remembered the Depression (their parents out of work); they remembered World War II (when Washington could mobilize the nation and win). California’s postwar boom was constructed on the belief in big government. The GI Bill. FHA loans. Vast water projects. Freeways. Big government invented the California Dream for millions of Americans after the war.

But then another generation would come along. By the late 1960s, suburban kids would shut down the university in protest. They distrusted the government that wanted to send them to a losing war in Vietnam. Several years after, among the politically conservative, came an even more devastating rebellion against government--the taxpayer’s revolt that began with Proposition 13.

We laugh at Hillary Rodham Clinton’s dreams for a comprehensive national health plan. Do you trust the people who bring you the U.S. mail to deliver good health care? We are certain we know about the inevitable arrogance and ineptitude of government bureaucracies, do we also forget the reason that an earlier generation turned to the government?

A few weeks ago, the city of San Antonio was horrified that one of its largest employers was on the list of military-base closures. The base was also the biggest employer of Mexican Americans. “Where shall we go now?” one woman with a Spanish accent asked.

Today, public schools seem unable to teach poor children to read or even speak conventional English. A generation ago, the military was the most important institution for assimilating young people into American public life. An entire generation of young Mexican American men, for example, was assimilated by the armed services during World War II.

Who cares what the old men knew about America? That was then, this is now. Now welfare doesn’t work. Now, we’re not getting our tax dollars’ worth. Now the postman misdelivers the mail and is always late.

Each generation undoes the vision of the one previously. The son inherited a California of freeways, but soon the freeways were crowded and there was not enough money to repair them and the air was dark with smog. The child undid his father’s optimism. Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. announced to California his revision: “Small is beautiful.”

A Los Angeles County employee lost her job and her faith in job security last week. An aspiring black family is losing its footing--a minor story, we think. All around America you hear stories of people being laid off, as private business “downsizes.” People scramble, take three or four part-time jobs to approximate the full-time employment, with benefits, that was lost.

Are we a generation away from rediscovering what our grandparents in the 1930s and ‘40s knew about the necessary role of government in a capitalistic economy?

After 30 years, a policy like affirmative action seems to many of us worthy of being dismantled--a heavy-handed example of government activism turned bureaucratic and wrong. But the problem that affirmative action tried to address, the exclusion of millions of Americans, is not going to disappear. What will happen when Americans--those at the very bottom, as well as the aspiring--conclude that there is no such thing as job security and no openings for ambition?

The generation coming is being handed a vision of California that is mean, skeptical and tough. What do they think of the future (the open sky) as they sit now in schools where windows get busted and nobody bothers to replace them?