A Hidden Advantage for Some Job Seekers

From the moment he arrived in Los Angeles from Mexico, Pablo Cifuntas told everyone he met in his mostly Latino community that he was looking for work. It wasn’t long before a man down the block found him a near-minimum-wage job at a soy milk factory.

Nineteen-year-old Flossie Bradford never knew anyone in her poor, largely African American neighborhood who had a job. For her, looking for work was a lonely chase, cold-calling reluctant employers and filling out dozens of unsuccessful applications.

“When somebody helps you to get a job, it’s easy,” Cifuntas, 47, said knowingly.

What Cifuntas had--and Bradford didn’t--was a network: a social system he could plug into not only for tips about where to find a job, but for common advice about how to keep one, how to advance and how to find another.

To many social researchers, the existence of these networks is a crucial but seldom-discussed reason why poor Latino immigrants seem to have so much more success than inner-city blacks in finding work. African Americans in California have the highest unemployment rate of any minority group identified by the state, at 11.5%. The Latino average is 9.1%, and the white jobless rate is 6.2%.

Networks, these social researchers say, are one of the most important structural explanations for what is popularly dismissed as a difference in “work ethic” between poor Latinos and poor blacks.

Latino immigrants are disproportionately represented in low-wage jobs not simply because they are more willing to work, these experts say. Rather, their networks get them first crack at many of those jobs and create a pipeline for advancement that benefits those who follow--a rhythm that gives poor Latinos more faith than poor blacks about the promise of advancing through the economic ranks.

“It’s more complicated than some people are lazy and some people are not,” said Martha Van Haitsma, a University of Chicago researcher who worked on a landmark study of how poor blacks and poor Mexican immigrants in Chicago found work. “Why is it that unskilled Mexicans get jobs? Does it really have to do with some sort of national character? I think that’s nonsense.”

Immigrants--who by self-selection represent the most energetic and determined members of their countries’ populations--often arrive in U.S. cities to find a group of other job-seekers from their hometown or village. These neighbors help them not only find job prospects through personal references, but also teach them mundane yet important techniques for daily survival in the working world.

By contrast, the steady departure of middle-class blacks from the nation’s ghettos since the end of legal segregation has left a class of people largely without the vital social contacts that help them plug into jobs.

Among the consequences, the University of Chicago study found, was that inner-city blacks in that city were far less likely than equally poor Mexican immigrants to have phones, bank accounts or friends with job connections.

As the United States moves to push welfare recipients into jobs to maintain their benefits, understanding how these networks operate--and for whom--is expected to become increasingly important. They explain, in part, why “many people eventually lose their feeling of connectedness to work in the formal economy,” wrote sociologist William Julius Wilson, who supervised the University of Chicago study as part of the research for his book “When Work Disappears.”

The contrast between Cifuntas’ and Bradford’s job-hunting experiences are painfully illustrative.

Job Searches a Study in Contrasts

Flossie Bradford, a first-generation Angeleno, was born in South-Central to a mother who has been on some form of aid for as long as her daughter can remember. It was the norm where she lived, Bradford said.

“Most people in my neighborhood stay at home, walking to the stores and walking with their kids,” Bradford said. “I don’t think I ever knew someone inside of a store.”

Like her mother and her older sister before her, Bradford started receiving welfare at 15, when she became pregnant with her first son and dropped out of school.

After having a second child two years later, she tired of staying at home and began scouring the “help wanted” ads. Over the next two years, Bradford filled out applications to be a cashier, an office worker, a hospital helper, a shipping and receiving clerk and, many, many times, a retail saleswoman.

“There were so many of them,” she said, sighing lightly and looking toward the sky. “Nothing ever happened.”

Although other uneducated, unskilled people find work, Bradford believed her background was working against her.

“Most times, for a first job, a family member is working inside that place and they talk to the boss and say they know someone who will really do good for the job,” she said. “I didn’t have that.”

Pablo Cifuntas did.

When he moved here at 26 in 1976, he lived with his brother-in-law and the pair began spreading the word that Cifuntas needed work.

He knew only the first name of the man who told him about the opening in that soy milk factory where he worked. But the neighbor nonetheless was willing to vouch for Cifuntas and help land him the job, Cifuntas recalled.

Cifuntas did odd jobs around the factory--loading, unloading, lifting, fixing and the like--for $2.75 per hour, barely above the minimum wage, for as many hours as he was needed.

The man who recommended Cifuntas for the job also showed him how to use public transportation to get to the factory. He hurried Cifuntas along when the newer employee wasn’t at their bus stop by the appointed hour of 5:30 a.m., and continued tutoring Cifuntas once the two were on the job.

“He helped me a lot to teach me what I had to do,” Cifuntas said.

Such connections often mean the difference between success and failure, researcher Van Haitsma said. An employee who can ask a friend--rather than a boss--how to do a task is often perceived as a better worker. When there is a mistake, a trusted worker can again advocate for the new hire and promise to make sure that the problem does not recur.

Even when living in squalid conditions, poor Mexican immigrants were more likely to be surrounded by small, local, Latino-owned businesses and social service agencies targeted to Spanish-speaking immigrants, often because of the influence of the Catholic Church, according to the Chicago study. By contrast, poor blacks lived in more concentrated poverty and accompanying social isolation.

The result: Mexicans tended to have more assistance than blacks in navigating daily urban life. They were far less likely than poor African Americans to have had their phones and electricity shut off for lack of payment or to have been evicted. Almost half of the immigrants had savings accounts, compared to not quite a third of poor blacks.

A higher proportion of people in Mexican households and neighborhoods were wage earners, meaning more sources of money to help tide a family over during a tough month and more sources of information to solve financial problems--for example, how to negotiate a payment plan to keep a creditor off your back.

“It’s the word-on-the-street kind of thing,” Van Haitsma said. “When Mexican women go to the Laundromat or to these different programs they meet other women and they talk to each other and share information.”

Networks are of uneven value--witness the clusters of predominantly Latino immigrants on many Los Angeles street corners, waiting for potential day labor jobs. However, even here the effects of networks are visible--new arrivals may be tipped by veterans to the most promising locations for day work.

Word of Mouth Leads to Higher Pay

After several months at the soy milk factory, Cifuntas heard about a better opportunity. His cousin Jose, from Washington state, told him a Yakima orchard was paying $60 a day for people to pick apples.

Cifuntas found a ride north with some friends of Jose who were visiting relatives in Los Angeles and were ready to make the return trip.

There were two other jobs in Los Angeles after that, both found by word of mouth, each with some connection to someone he knew. The first was a clothing factory job vacated by his cousin’s wife; the next, at a flower stall where another cousin’s husband already worked.

“He introduced me to the manager and the manager hired me,” Cifuntas said, smiling at the memory. “I’m still there.”

David Hayes-Bautista, the director of UCLA’s Center for the Study of Latino Health, said Latino networks in California go back to the 1940s-era bracero program, in which thousands of seasonal farm workers were brought north under temporary contracts sanctioned by the U.S. government.

Recruited in Mexico, whole villages of men were brought in year after year to work for a specific employer until the program ended in 1964, perpetuating the employees’ ties to their Mexican heritage, Hayes-Bautista said.

“Those routes were hard-wired, burned in during the years of the bracero program,” Hayes-Bautista said. “Today, before people leave the village for the first time, they know where they are going to go, where they are going to stay, often where they are going to work.”

Isolation a Formidable Obstacle

After years of seeking work on her own and getting nowhere, Flossie Bradford picked up the Yellow Pages earlier this year and looked under “Employment.”

After a few phone calls, she found her way to the Milken Family Youth and Literacy Training Center in the Crenshaw district, run by the Los Angeles chapter of the Urban League. There, she began learning the basics of how to dress, speak, interview and interact in the business world.

Sitting in the center’s classroom one afternoon, dressed for “work” in a white dress with black polka dots, a black pocket square and shiny black pumps (students are required to dress and behave during class as if they were at a job), Bradford explained in a soft voice what she wanted to get out of the program.

She hoped to learn computer skills and get a high school equivalency diploma, she said wistfully, so that one day she can be a 911 operator.

“I’d like to help people,” she said.

Moreover, Bradford explained, she is going to make sure that when it comes time for her two toddlers to enter the working world, she will be able to be a good example--a resource, a referral.

“I’ll be able to teach them things I wasn’t taught,” she said. “No one in my family was ever doing anything with their lives. I could only look up to me.”

In the decades before Bradford was born, African Americans had networks similar to those Latinos now exploit. They were formed in the early half of the century as poor Southern farmers moved to Northern cities to find work, relying on friends and family to ease their way.

Until laws banning segregated housing were passed in the 1960s, poor and working-class African Americans in the country’s cities lived largely alongside college-educated, professional blacks barred from moving into other neighborhoods. Not only were there more role models, there were more personal contacts about job possibilities, as well as an economy that offered more good-paying, low-skilled jobs.

“Thirty or 40 or 50 years ago . . . you didn’t need a network,” said Paul Ruffins, the founding editor of the Black Networking News in Washington, D.C. “If you wanted a job at a Ford plant, you went down and lined up.”

During the past three decades, substantial numbers of inner-city manufacturing jobs have been eliminated--either moved to cheaper labor markets or replaced by a service economy in which jobs are more likely to be scattered in suburban areas.

In other cases, the influx of Latino immigrants created a labor pool willing to work substantially cheaper, explaining in part why downtown office building janitorial crews have become largely Latino in two decades.

At the same time, integration patterns allowed middle- and upper-income blacks to scatter as well to neighborhoods of their choice, further isolating poor black communities and people like Bradford.

Friends, Relatives Care for Children

Networks influence the key variable of child care, determining whether mothers will be able to seek jobs outside the home.

As is the case with many Latinos, poor Mexicans were far more likely than poor African Americans to be living with relatives in their households, buildings or neighborhoods, Van Haitsma found.

The poor Mexican immigrants surveyed were more likely to have friends or relatives available for regular child care and more likely to have working friends than African Americans within the same socioeconomic group.

When she was growing up, Bradford lived with her mother, her sister and her brother. Today, she and her sister both have children and men in their lives, but live apart. When there is a money crunch, members of her family essentially face it alone.

The isolation is the worst part of not having a network, said John Mack, president of the Urban League’s Los Angeles chapter. Some people who come to the organization’s job-training program have simply given up on the formal economy, he said.

“[They] have not seen anybody who has a job, have not heard about a job and have only heard about doors being slammed in people’s faces,” Mack said. “That also works against the network. It creates a level of cynicism. It creates the attitude, ‘What’s the use--I’m going to have the same thing happen to me.’ ”

In some cases, convincing students that those entry-level jobs are worthwhile is part of the struggle, said urban sociologist Jim Johnson, of the University of North Carolina. Many do not trust that low-wage jobs lead to better positions, because they have never seen anybody move up the economic ladder for doing a legitimate job, Johnson said.

“They see people who have played by the rules, gone to school, stayed out of trouble and they, too, are struggling. They, too, don’t have jobs,” said Johnson, chairman of his university’s Urban Investment Strategies Center.

In researching his book, Wilson found that many employers view immigrants as harder-working because they are easier to exploit and downgrade blacks because of negative stereotypes.

“[African Americans] are perceived as being lazy, inarticulate, uneducable and, in the case of black men, dangerous,” Johnson said.

Young Mother’s Uphill Battle

Several years ago, a man Pablo Cifuntas had never met appeared on his doorstep. The man said his name was Manuel and that he hailed from the same small Mexican village near Sinaloa as Cifuntas’ wife.

Before he left for California, Manuel explained, a fellow villager had given him Cifuntas’ name. He had no other contacts here.

Manuel had only one question for Cifuntas: Did he know anyone who was hiring?

Just as an acquaintance had done for him years earlier, Cifuntas took Manuel down to the flower market with him the next day.

Manuel was hired on the spot, on the strength of Cifuntas’ recommendation, and worked alongside Cifuntas for years. Manuel left just a few months ago, after a friend told him about a better paying job at his company.

Bradford, dejected and still not having found work, dropped out of her first job-training program a few months after joining. She never learned any computer skills, she said.

But with some hope left, Bradford went back to the Yellow Pages and found new pre-employment computer training classes at a local school.

“I’m going to help my sons,” she promised. “I try not to look in the past. I just try to keep going, one step at a time.”