Other Forces Can Outweigh Affirmative Action Efforts : Employment: Minorities, women have made modest gains in private sector. But job and pay inequities linger.

In 1982, an African American aerospace engineer named Carl E. James decided that the only way to create opportunities for minorities and women in this historically white and male industry was to strike out on his own.

By 1994, his Cal Tron Systems Inc. of Carson, an assembler of electronic military aircraft components, had annual sales of about $2 million and 26 employees--half of them female and four out of five minorities.

“When we hire a new person . . . we always try to ensure that we include minority candidates,” said James, whose company has no formal affirmative action program.

The firm’s efforts illustrate how even informal attention to diversity in the private workplace can dramatically increase the representation of women and minorities.

But even at Cal Tron, the highest-paid positions--engineering jobs--are still held by white males, while the lowest-paid assembly jobs mainly are held by Latino immigrants and women.

The company’s staffing profile mirrors that of hundreds of the state’s private companies with affirmative action programs, according to an analysis of government records.

Often, forces such as education, work experience and language capability overshadow affirmative action efforts, perpetuating job and wage stratification in California.

In the three decades since federal civil rights laws and affirmative action goals went into effect, minorities and women have made gains in employment in the private sector, records show. And they have tended to fare better in firms and industries with affirmative action programs than in those without them.

But the successes in private business have been modest, UC Berkeley economics professor Jonathan S. Leonard told a conference on affirmative action at UCLA earlier this year. “It has improved minority growth rates by something on the order of 1% per year,” he said. “This program is neither the angel nor the devil that its proponents or critics might paint it as.”

As Gov. Pete Wilson moved to scrap the state’s affirmative action programs and as an initiative to ban the programs was proposed for the November ballot next year, The Times analyzed U.S. Census Bureau and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission databases to determine the effect of affirmative action on private industry.

Affirmative action programs--which are aimed at improving the opportunities for minorities and women to be hired, trained and promoted--are found in only a minority of private companies, according to experts and interviews with dozens of businesses throughout California.

Only an estimated one in five companies is required to have an affirmative action plan because they do business with the federal government. Other private firms have voluntary programs, such as those in place at major California employers ranging from Kaiser-Permanente to Hyatt Hotels. Other programs result from agreements growing out of discrimination lawsuits, from contracts between civil rights groups and employers, or arrangements with labor unions.

In the state’s private workplaces, affirmative action has benefited some groups more than others--and, scholars argue, the biggest gains were achieved in the 1960s and 1970s.

Since the 1980s, employment gains by some minorities appear to have stagnated or even declined, while whites have maintained the largest share of the private work force.

In California, which has a work force as diverse as any in the nation, the disparities stand out sharply:

* Black males have made the smallest gains, and Latinos and African Americans continue to hold the lowest-paying jobs, such as manual labor and service sector jobs. Black males hold 3.9% of the private sector jobs and black women 4.1%.

Although the representation of Latinos in the state’s work force and population has been climbing steadily for decades, they appear to benefit the least from affirmative action in California’s private industry. Latinos constitute 22% of the work force but hold only 8% of administrative jobs and 6% of professional jobs, according to EEOC data.

Asian Americans have increased their representation in high-paying professional jobs since 1966. In some California professions, such as health care and post-secondary teaching, Asian American males actually do better than their white counterparts on average, according to census data.

* White women seem to have made the largest gains during the last three decades, though they continue to trail males in wages, census data shows.

It is unclear from studies just how much of the gain by white women results directly from affirmative action.

But in the state’s professional and sales occupations, for example, as well as in the finance, retail and service industries, they are overrepresented, suggesting that something other than demographic changes are at work.

* White males continue to be overrepresented in management and in higher-paid professions and industries--even in aerospace, where many firms have government-mandated affirmative action programs.

White males hold 53.7% of the state’s high-paying administrative jobs and 39.6% of the professional jobs, though they constitute only 31.3% of the total California work force.

Aerospace Industry

In a manufacturing section of El Segundo within earshot of Los Angeles International Airport sprawls a collection of industrial buildings marked by glass office towers.

It is here that thousands of Hughes Electronics Corp. workers design and build satellite, telecommunications and aerospace equipment--part of the defense industry that once dominated California’s economy.

Like many other industrial giants, Hughes has had a formal affirmative action program since the 1960s, when large federal contractors fell under the requirements of Executive Order No. 11246.

David R. Barclay, a former official with the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing, came to Hughes in 1971 to help implement a diversity program. At the time, the Hughes work force was 11% minority.

Nine years ago, Barclay became the company’s first black vice president.

By last year, minorities and women each composed almost one-third of Hughes’ work force, a dramatic increase. Now there are eight blacks, two Asians and one Latino among Hughes’ 75 corporate vice presidents.

“We have made progress,” Barclay said. “But that doesn’t mean we’re satisfied with our results. More needs to be done.”

Overall, white males have seen their share of jobs in durables manufacturing in California drop from 55.9% in 1975 to 41.8% in 1993, a decline roughly in keeping with the state’s overall work force.

But white males continue to dominate the aerospace industry’s top jobs: at Hughes, minorities accounted for 16.9% of its officials and managers as of June, 1994. Women accounted for 15.4%.

That is partly attributable to the relatively small pool of minorities with the relevant training and experience for Hughes’ technical jobs, said Barclay, the company’s vice president for workplace diversity.

The affirmative action program at Hughes has engendered some friction and resentment, particularly among manufacturing workers, employees say.

Some minorities say they are stigmatized as “affirmative action hires,” and on occasion have had to put up with snide remarks or hard glares from co-workers.

Although affirmative action hires must meet all qualifications for a given position, just as a white candidate must, some white employees believe minorities are given an unfair advantage.

“When I was hired here, I didn’t know until I got in that for 10 days they were waiting to see if a minority candidate applied for the same job,” said one white manager at Hughes, who like others interviewed on this sensitive subject agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity. “They said to me, ‘Lucky they didn’t, or you wouldn’t be here.’ ”

At least two black employees have sued the company for discrimination, arguing that they have been passed over for promotions. The two each won multimillion-dollar jury awards. In one case, the jury award was reduced on appeal. In the other, the company is still appealing the case.

Barclay denies any widespread problem. “We as a work force are reflective of the general society, and I think there is racial tension in the general society.”

“Affirmative action has never been a popular program in this country, and I’m not sure it ever will be,” he said. “But in spite of that, I think it’s absolutely essential to the progress we’ve achieved.”

Entertainment Industry

Contrary to its glamorous image, the movie and entertainment industry does its real work in warren-like studio offices, in warehouses and sound stages, on city streets where camera crews scramble to catch the last shot before the light fades.

The industry employs more Californians than aerospace: 318,300 workers in 1994, up from 205,800 in 1985, according to estimates by the UCLA Business Forecasting Project.

Because it has virtually no government contracts, the entertainment business is not required to adopt affirmative action programs. And since employment is largely temporary and based on a project-by-project basis, there is no industrywide reporting of employment statistics broken down by race or gender.

A few studios and entertainment unions have taken it upon themselves to create programs for minorities and women and to monitor their progress.

One such program, announced in May by the Walt Disney Co. and the Directors Guild of America, provides fledgling minority directors with training and a chance to shoot a television scene. Disney also has put 85 minority writers through a 5-year-old writers training program.

But such programs are the exception. And minorities, as well as women, remain underrepresented in the entertainment industry.

Although no industrywide statistics are available, the Writers Guild reports that minorities make up only 4% of its membership. And the Directors Guild reports that minorities were employed as directors on only 5% of the total days worked in 1994, and women only 9% of the time.

In Hollywood, industry executives argue that the underrepresentation of minorities results in part from a lack of known minority talent and an unwillingness to hire unknowns.

“It’s very difficult for an executive to risk his or her career and millions of dollars . . . simply for the putative greater good of the society, and people have to be realistic about that,” said Dean Valentine, president of network television at Disney.

Added John Wells, executive producer of the NBC television drama “ER” and a producer with a long track record of hiring women and minorities: “It’s very much an industry where you get a job with people you’ve worked with before.”

Reggie Rock Bythewood, 29, an African American, was a struggling actor and had already started his own small theater company in New York when he came west in 1990 to try his luck in Hollywood.

If not for the Disney writing program, he said, he probably would not have found employment.

After a year in the Disney program, he was hired as a writer on “A Different World,” a sitcom with an African American theme. He subsequently went on to write a couple of unsuccessful TV pilots before hiring on as a producer of the Fox cop show “New York Undercover.”

“It’s hard, obviously, for anyone of any race to break into the industry, but this is an industry that puts out 90% of the TV and features starring or featuring people who aren’t anything else other than white, and they are geared toward hiring white writers,” he said.

Ultimately, affirmative action does not guarantee success in this most volatile of industries. “What sells is the work,” said James Wong, a former co-executive producer for the Fox drama “The X Files” and executive producer of the upcoming science fiction series “Space.”

Wong is one of the few Asian Americans with his own television series. But that won’t matter if the work is no good, he says.

“I can see some point to [affirmative action], if people who have no chance at all are given a chance to come into the industry,” he said. “On the other hand, the way we work in a room as writers, it’s hard to work with people you don’t respect or that you feel you have to bring along.”

Construction

Towering concrete freeway columns and deep tunnels for the Los Angeles subway dominate the construction landscape. But these massive state- and federal-funded projects, with their accompanying affirmative action requirements, represent only 20% of California’s $30 billion in construction industry spending in 1994.

Affirmative action is not a requirement for the lion’s share of construction jobs--those in the private sector. Home building and remodeling and the erecting of hotels, shopping malls, office buildings and other commercial buildings typically proceed without rules specifying participation by women and minorities.

It is a male-dominated field, despite labor union efforts to recruit more women. White males make up the majority of developers, architects, designers, engineers and contractors, according to industry sources. Of the 278,000 licensed construction contractors in California, 95% are male, according to the California Contractors State Licensing Board.

Racial and ethnic minorities have made some inroads into the skilled trades, with jobs as electrical workers, heavy equipment operators, carpenters and cement masons. But they typically make up only a small percentage of union members in these skilled trades.

Latinos dominate the lowest rung, the laborers. Of the 7,200 members who belong to the Laborers Union, Local 300, in Los Angeles County, 90% are Latinos, said Ric Quevedo, a labor union official. That does not include the hundreds of non-unionized Latino workers and day laborers, he said.

On private projects, critics say that personal contacts, past experience or recommendations from friends are how most jobs are awarded, a process that can freeze out women- and minority-owned firms.

“There’s no good faith effort or outreach,” said Peruvian-born Hector Castillo, a Los Angeles engineer who heads the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers. “There’s no incentive to look for minorities.”

While many construction companies and development firms say they adopt voluntary affirmative action policies, minorities say such policies in the private sector have had little effect on improving their upward mobility.

Jim Burton, executive vice president of the 1,000-member Southern California Contractors Assn., argued that many contractors perceive affirmative action as a burden that increases costs and prevents effective management.

Affirmative action “drives up the cost of construction when you’re trying to bid a contract and you are required to spend a lot of money running ads and documenting your efforts,” Burton said. “It’s a huge bureaucracy.”

Affirmative action does not seem to be a problem for Turner Construction Co., one of Los Angeles’ largest construction companies. Bob Wund, vice president and general manager of the Los Angeles office, estimates that 80% of Turner’s $200 million worth of annual construction work is in private projects. From his 37th-floor Downtown office, his view takes in some major Turner projects--the 73-story First Interstate World Center and the twin Arco towers.

The company puts forward the same affirmative action efforts in its private jobs as its government-contracted work, with participation by minority contractors ranging from 15% to 55% depending on the project, Wund said.

The 120-member Turner staff in Los Angeles is itself 28% minority and 29% female, with minorities representing 17% and 12% of the professional and administrative staff, respectively. For women, the corresponding percentages are 12% and 18%, the company reports.

The company’s affirmative action program features college recruiting and annual diversity training for all staff. Progress on affirmative action is part of the evaluation criteria for executives in each of Turner’s nationwide offices.

“It’s good citizenship,” Wund said.

Health Care

In some echelons of the health care industry, which provides 10% of all jobs in California, affirmative action has arrived relatively painlessly.

“It’s one of the fields that traditionally has been a real haven for women and minorities,” said David Langness, a spokesman for the Health Care Assn. of Southern California.

But in most hospitals, minorities and women continue to fill lower-paid jobs as maintenance workers, janitors, cooks, clerks and nurses. Doctors and administrators, meanwhile, remain predominantly white male, Langness said.

While women and minorities have risen to middle management positions in greater numbers in some hospitals, “the glass ceiling is very thick trying to move up from there,” said Margaret Smith, president of Women in Health Administration. Women make up 55% of hospital nursing staffs nationwide, but they occupy at most only 3% of top executive positions and account for less than 1% of community hospital board members, Smith said, adding that the situation is similar among minorities.

Although increasing numbers of women are enrolling in medical school, Smith said they tend to go into primary care and obstetrics and gynecology, where their income is 66% that of their male colleagues.

“I can name on the fingers on one hand the board-certified neurosurgeons who are women in this country,” Smith said. “There are five of them.”

Rita Zwern, the medical manager in the sales and marketing division of Kaiser-Permanente and president of Health Care Executives of Southern California, began her rise 27 years ago while working as a file clerk at UCLA Medical Center. After advancing to management positions and getting a master’s degree in health services administration, she came to Kaiser 11 years ago.

She credits her rise to outreach by Kaiser, which had adopted an informal affirmative action policy with goals for women and minorities, diversity training and a commitment to using minority and women-owned vendors.

“I never felt because I was a woman I was being held back.” she said.

White females such as Zwern seem to have made the largest gains during the last three decades under affirmative action, though they continue to lag behind males in wages, according to The Times’ analysis of EEOC data.

In 1993, white women’s representation has grown steadily to 25.3% of the state’s private managerial jobs (compared with 15% in 1975) and 32% of the professional jobs (compared with 21% in 1975).

Zwern believes the glass ceiling that keeps women from top jobs will not be lifted until a generation of men has passed out of the work force.

“It’s a cultural thing,” she said. “They’re used to dealing with their peers and their peers have been men.”

Librarian Janet Lundblad and editorial researcher Tracy Thomas contributed to this report.

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About this Series

* In this series: The Times examines affirmative action, a policy that has left its imprint on the workplace and college campuses over the last 30 years. With some now questioning whether giving preferences to minorities has been fair to all, this series, which will appear periodically throughout 1995, will measure its impact on American institutions, ideas and attitudes.

* Previously: Why affirmative action became an issue in 1995, its legal underpinnings, its impact on presidential politics, the difficulties of defining a minority, the views of its beneficiaries, a Times poll showing ambivalent attitudes on the issue, how informal preferences have molded American life, the mind at work in racial stereotyping, the evolution of diversity programs in the workplace, affirmative action in sports and recruiting minorities.

SUNDAY: Affirmative action has cut an uneven swath across America’s workplaces, benefitting some groups much more than others.

MONDAY: Attacked from all sides, affirmative action contracting programs in California fail to deliver on promises of giving women and minorities significant shares of public business.

TODAY: Forces more powerful than affirmative action have helped relegate many minorities to lower paying jobs in small and large businesses throughout California.

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California’s Employment

The following graphs describe some trends in California private industry employment over the last three decades.

WHITES

Though the total proportion of whites in the state’s private sector work force has declined, white women have seen their share of the work force increase. Moreover, white women now find themselves overrepresented in administrative and professional jobs.

Whites in Calif. Industry (Administrative, Professional, Total)

White Women in Calif. Industry (Administrative, Professional, Total)

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BLACKS

The overall share of blacks in the state’s private sector work force has grown in the last three decades, though most of the gains were made in the 1960s and 1970s. Most strikingly, black males have seen their share of the state’s work force remain relatively flat, while that of black women has grown dramatically.

Blacks in Calif. Industry (Males, Females)

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LATINOS

Even though Latinos have seen their representation in the private work force grow strongly in the last three decades, they remain overrepresented in the lower-paid occupations, such as laborers and semi-skilled workers.

Latinos in Calif. Industry (Laborers, Semi-skilled, Total)

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ASIANS

Asian-Americans have seen their representation in the state’s work force grow strongly, and they find themselves overrepresented in higher-paying occupations, such as administrative and professional positions.

Asians in Calif. Industry (Administrative, Professional, Total)

Sources: Reports drawn from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s annual employer informational form, or EEO-1, the principal national source for employment data on minorities and women for large, private employers. The reports reflect staffing at only half of private sector employers.

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California Earning Power

Women, particularly whites and blacks, made the greatest wage gains during the 1980s. Latino and Asian males, affected by large immigration increases, did not keep pace.

Percentage of people above the median wage

Percentage of people below the median wage

* Median wage of full-time workers was $14,005 in 1979 and $25,000 in 1989.

Source: U.S. Census Public Use Microdata Sample, 1980 and 1990.

Compiled by Richard O’Reilly, director of computer analysis, Los Angeles Times

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How State’s Work Force Has Changed

A look at how the California workforce has changed in various types of occupations, since 1966:

Administrative: Includes executives, managers, and supervisors.

Professional: Includes accountants, engineers, lawyers, physicians and teachers.

Clerical: Includes bookkeepers, stenographers and secretaries.

Skilled: Includes mechanics, electricians, tailors and artists.

Laborers: Includes car washers, farmworkers and stevedores.

Services: Includes hospital attendants, firefighters, janitors, waiters and police officers.

Note: Some categories do not add up because of rounding.

* Data for Latinos was compiled differently in 1966 than in other years. In 1966, survey included those with Spanish surnames. In later years, Latinos were self-identified.

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How This Series Was Prepared

In three decades of affirmative action, a multitude of voluntary and mandatory programs have arisen in America’s private and public workplaces. But there is no uniform system to keep track of these programs or to measure their effect on the hiring, training and promotion of women and minorities. Although large employers are required to report the composition of their work forces to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency does not even ask whether these workplaces have formal or informal affirmative action programs.

To assess the impact of affirmative action for this series, The Times:

* Measured changes in the employment, occupations and salaries of women and minorities in the United States since 1960, using computerized data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the National Archives and the EEOC.

* Studied additional EEOC reports from UCLA’s Maps and Government Information Library, scholarly studies from other major universities and congressional reports from the Library of Congress.

* Using detailed questionnaires, interviewed officials of more than 130 small and large businesses throughout the country to determine whether they have affirmative action programs and why they do or do not.

* Visited selected workplaces throughout California and the nation to interview workers, employers and others whose lives have been affected directly or indirectly by programs designed to diversify work forces.

* Analyzed state and local government reports, tapes of hearings and computerized data regarding programs for encouraging participation of minorities and women in billions of dollars of public contracts in California.

COMPUTER ANALYSIS:

* Richard O’Reilly, Times director of computer analysis, and data analyst Sandra Poindexter wrote more than 200 programs to generate more than 3,000 pages of information on job and earning trends.

* The computerized census data included individual records of more than 5.1 million people in samples drawn from the 1960, 1980 and 1990 censuses and from the annual current population surveys taken in 1993 and 1994.

* Other important data came from annual reports filed with the EEOC by more than 483,000 private employers and 62,000 state and local governments in 1983, 1984, 1987, 1988 and 1993.