For Some, Strikes Are No Big Deal

The people of Los Angeles, long nurtured on images of utter catastrophe -- the city in flames or tumbling into the sea -- are scarcely the sort to be fazed by a couple of work stoppages.

With the transit and grocery strikes in their second weeks, walkouts and lockouts that might be crippling in another city, or at least the subject of obsessive interest, are regarded by many here as merely inconvenient.

“I heard about the strikes on the news, but they don’t affect me,” said Bill Tsang, 52, at the San Gabriel Square mall.

“I’m not affected by either strike whatsoever,” Kyung Chan Kim, 47, said while shopping in Koreatown Plaza. “I have a good car, and normally I eat out.”

And so it went in random interviews across the city. Crisis? What crisis?

“Los Angeles is like the Internet -- millions of little pieces communicating with each other, and if one goes down you use another,” said Joel Kotkin, a senior research fellow at Pepperdine University who is writing a history of cities. “It’s not like an electrical grid. You can’t knock it down.”

There are a lot of reasons the strikes haven’t slowed the city much. For one thing, the proportion of workers who commute via public transit is less than 5%, according to the 2000 Census. The comparable figure for New York: 25%.

As for shopping, choices abound: Smaller chains such as Smart & Final and independent markets, including ethnic food stores, control 41.4% of the grocery business in the Los Angeles-Long Beach metropolitan area, according to the research group Market Scope.

“Los Angeles is fragmented and decentralized, which means that most of the time it’s hard to solve problems and get things done,” said Dowell Myers, a professor at USC’s School of Policy, Planning and Development. “But once a decade, like now, you get the benefit.”

Another instance, he said, was the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. “There were dire predictions the city would be in gridlock. Instead, traffic was better than normal. People made adjustments in their schedules, in their routes.”

This wasn’t done out of any regard for the greater good, the urbanist cautioned. “Everyone overreacted out of self-interest. It’s every man for himself here.”

To be sure, hundreds of thousands of people have seen their lives disrupted by the transit strike. Rush-hour traffic is worse around the city, but poorer, transit-dependent neighborhoods have been hit particularly hard. People without cars are paying for cabs or shuttle vans to get them to work, or imposing on friends and relatives for rides. In some cases, workers simply can’t get to work at all.

Lupe Gutierrez, a 19-year-old community college student in Mission Hills, had an old Camaro, but a friend wrecked it. So she’s had to depend on her parents to get her to jobs at an auto dealership and a party equipment store.

“To be honest, I don’t even know why [the transit workers] are striking,” Gutierrez said. She’s just eager for it to be over.

But for the majority, the strikes pose a detour, not a derailment.

Confronted by pickets at their local supermarkets, shoppers are taking the path of least resistance. They’re leaving those stores mostly empty and going elsewhere -- which isn’t hard to do, because there are so many alternatives.

Adam Lowe, a 24-year-old waiter in Hermosa Beach, is typical: Usually, he has a Ralphs, an Albertsons and a Vons to choose from, all within a few blocks of each other. But they’re all being picketed, so when Lowe runs out of food, he figures he might try Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods. But that’s a whole week away.

“It doesn’t really affect me too much,” he said.

Four hundred thousand people a day take the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s buses, trains or subways. For the other 9.2 million people in Los Angeles County, mass transit ranks in exoticism somewhere between a balloon and a camel ride.

“Last time I was on a city bus was in 1976, or was it ‘77?” said John Zeil, 41, a landscape designer. “I was in junior high. Once I took the bus from Glendale to the L.A. County Museum, and once to the beach. Such long treks. It took hours. Never again.”

Zeil, who was eating a pastrami sandwich outside Porto’s Bakery in Glendale, said the lack of widespread disruption from the strikes illustrated a central Los Angeles truth: “We’re all on our own little island here.”

For better or worse, strikes in other cities often tend to be big deals. No newspaper story about a pending transit strike in New York is complete without intimating that it would paralyze the metropolis. When private sanitation workers went on strike in Chicago this month, Mayor Richard M. Daley angrily threatened to sue the union and the trash haulers to recoup the city’s expenses in picking up the garbage.

Of course, garbage rotting in the streets is a bigger threat than the inability to use double coupons. Even so, it would be hard to imagine the leaders of those cities taking the laid-back stance of Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn, who didn’t comment on the grocery and transit strikes until prompted by a reporter last week, much less roll up his sleeves to try to settle them. Hahn has since taken a higher profile, but his initial response seemed to follow in the tradition of his predecessor, Richard Riordan, who declined to interrupt his bicycle tour of France during the last MTA walkout in 2000.

“If the mayor of Detroit did that during a strike, people would be up in arms,” said Ken Droz, a publicist who was noodling on his screenplay at a Melrose cafe.

Droz, 46, moved here from Detroit four years ago, and still marvels at how very different it is. “There’s very little sense of community here,” he said. “It’s sad that Los Angeles can’t be passionate about something, whether it’s a police scandal, a transit strike, or who owns the Dodgers.”

The opening last year of a new Detroit football stadium, Ford Field, was a big deal in a way unimaginable in Los Angeles, he adds.

Angelenos: smug, self-centered, withdrawn, uncaring. It’s a notion that has been limned in a thousand books and movies, an assertion that long ago calcified into a cliche.

It infuriates some people.

“Folks is folks,” said actress Lisa Banes, watching television at her home in Echo Park. “I’ll defend Los Angeles to the mat. It gets such a bad rap, but it’s full of middle-class people like anywhere else.”

Maybe a little less full than anywhere else. In the 2000 census, Los Angeles County had the third-highest rate of income inequality in the state, surpassed only by two rural counties. Some researchers believe that that gap between the haves and the have-nots results in less civic engagement.

There may be other factors at play -- including the city’s legendary sprawl.

“It’s not some malevolent atmospheric influence that makes Angelenos uncaring, but there is something about the way the city is structured that encourages a sense of disconnection,” said D.J. Waldie, author of “Real City,” an essay on downtown Los Angeles, and “Holy Land,” a highly regarded account of growing up in Lakewood.

No strike is ever going to bring the city to its knees, or even cause it to stumble too much, because the region is too large, too disassociated, too dislocated. And, like everywhere else, it has a surplus of stores selling food.

“There are lots of ways to buy stuff, including stuff to make a decent meal,” Waldie said. “So going out of one’s way to avoid the three chains being struck isn’t difficult.”

So while thousands of Angelenos heeded the request of the United Food and Commercial Workers to honor picket lines, it didn’t necessarily mean a major sacrifice.

“I shop at Ralphs. I used to,” said Dorothy Rice of Torrance, who described herself as a retired housewife. “I haven’t been going in there since the strike. I’ve been going to Sam’s Club,” a warehouse store owned by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. “It’s a little further. I’ll go back to Ralphs when the strike is over, but not until.”

Daniel Flaming, president of the Economic Roundtable, an L.A. think tank, said strikers in Los Angeles “have always had a hard time getting people to care about their cause. This has always been a nonunion town. We all have a powerful sense of disengagement from the collective identity as being part of Los Angeles. One of the challenges we face as a region is to find a common destiny.”

That makes it a city of intensely private people.

“This is a quintessentially capitalist city, an individualist city,” Pepperdine’s Kotkin said. “It drives social ideologues bonkers. There’s an element in academe and the media who wants the world to become a political drama, something on a big stage. But in L.A., the stage is the tri-tip cooking on the grill in the backyard, it’s your close friends coming over for Thanksgiving. It’s a city of villages.”

Simon Horwell, who arrived from Britain a month ago, already has found his village. It’s downtown, where he’s living in a friend’s apartment. He has a girlfriend -- a bartender at Pete’s Cafe, where he hangs out. He’s looking for a job as an entry-level consultant. And he has a car, a Dodge Neon.

He didn’t actually want the car. “Now I have to pay for parking and insurance.... In England, I took the bus everywhere. But here -- it doesn’t go anywhere. Public transport is a dirty word in this city. Just to be alive I have to have a car. How am I going to go shopping?”

Horwell said he felt “bad” about the supermarket strikers, “but this really isn’t my problem.” Which, he’s noticed, makes him fit right in. “No one cares here about anything.”