Blue Collar Pales Next to Gold

Not one Angeleno in a half-million could identify Jocelino Joun on sight, but at the green age of 25, he stands well to becoming the poster boy for the faceless bureaucrat--the ‘90s L.A. answer to Ronald Reagan’s anecdotal welfare queen.

Joun is the clerk-typist who took a leave from his Department of Water and Power job to work in the Personnel Department. When a DWP buyout offer came along to save the city money by getting rid of employees, Joun returned to his DWP job for one bonanza of a day, picked up a $25,000 check as a lovely parting gift and immediately bounced over to a better job at the city Department of Aging without missing a day’s pay of his new $33,000 annual wages.

It sounded fabulous--the Big Spin, the triple word score, bank error in your favor.

It was quite legal, but city fathers and mothers, steaming like Vesuvius, found it morally suspect. “Doesn’t pass anybody’s smell test,” the mayor said. Joun’s boss--one of them, for a few hours, at least--is DWP Director William McCarley, who declared Joun to be “a clever, manipulative person.”

But the DWP is rid of him and 1,500 more, including a senior DWP power engineer who had been on leave, working for the Pasadena DWP since January--on loan, the way David O. Selznick loaned Ingrid Bergman to Warner Bros. Yet he was eligible to pocket an $80,000 Los Angeles severance check. (It’s the way of news and politics that the second outrage, even if it is more outrageous than the first--and this one was, by a factor of $55,000--never gets the same headlines simply because it is second.)

People trying to reach Joun, mostly reporters, were told that he was not in the office. He was telecommuting.

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At high noon Thursday, outside City Hall, the temperature had climbed past 90, the flags had dropped to half staff, and city employees huddled in the shade or wilted in the sun, waiting for a ceremony.

Some found a perch on the white marble lip of the Frank Putnam Flint fountain--a small irony in a day of larger ones, for Flint, born during the Civil War and dead the year of the great stock market crash, helped to bring water from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles. His commemorative fountain is dry.

This was a memorial service to four city employees with more than a century of service among them who were shot to death one morning, allegedly by a fifth who feared he was about to lose his job.

Four urns of violet and white flowers--irises, delphiniums, stock--sagged in the heat as the mayor and the minister praised and prayed for the four. Ten firemen held their caps to their chests, bright white circles in the shade.

Tony Gain was the city’s senior employee; 78 years old, with 53 years service, he was on the golden watch track before Joun was born. Except Tony Gain didn’t want a watch. He wanted to work.

It wasn’t the money. Retirement would probably have paid him close to the $65,000 or so he was earning as a senior communications engineer. They used to call people like Tony Gain hi-fi nuts. He, like the other three, was a ham radio fan, and he worked for the love of the work. In 1942, when Tony Gain punched his first city time card, black-and-whites with two-way communications were called “radio cars,” and radios had vacuum tubes. Now they have computer keyboards, and cops and firemen alike carry holster-sized “rover” radios that Tony Gain’s department fixes. They were sci-fi, not hi-fi, when Gain started working here.

A fund has been established in memory of the four dead men. How it fattens will be a barometer of public fury toward bureaucracy. Oklahoma City blunted some of the edge, but it will bear watching, how the anger at the world’s Jouns washes over onto its Gains.

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The saying goes, Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Within a few hours of the service, the city went back to the business at hand, hastening to close those embarrassing golden-handshake loopholes. Councilman Joel Wachs said it sickened him. The mayor wanted an investigation.

Well and good. But why should we be aghast that Joun would take this rich opportunity? He was 10 years old at the start of the high-flying 1980s, whose financial do-si-dos made billions in dizzying dollar acrobatics unseen since the Roaring ‘20s, whose collapse triggered the Hungry ‘30s.

Companies--department stores, airlines--were bought, divested, sold, rebought, resold. Some profited on the fast turnaround. Food companies and tobacco companies bedded down together. Leveraged buyouts created and destroyed; mega-firms divided and re-formed as wildly as a paramecium on acid.

The revolving door whirled, making government bigwigs into well-paid big guns--lobbyists, spokesmen, officers in the same defense or financial corporations they used to regulate. The question--until people got caught--was never “Is it right?” but “Is it legal?”

On those terms, Joun, who grabbed a brass ring and found it was gold, is a smart man, a Civil Service Donald Trump. Gain, who was content to do well a job that he loved, for little more than he’d get by leaving it, was a fool.