Countywide : New Twist Offered to Work-for-Food Signs

If Garden Grove businessman Lynn Baldock has his way, street people will discard their crude, hand-printed Will-Work-for-Food placards and switch to signs he’s devised to distinguish potential workers from panhandlers.

Beginning today, Baldock says he’ll visit parks, libraries and other places frequented by the homeless to distribute professionally printed signs reading “I will swap or sell my services; I’m experienced in . . .,” and followed by a blank spot for potential laborers to detail their work background.

Baldock, a high school dropout who owns a window-tinting business, said that while he believes many people standing at freeway entrances or along busy streets are panhandlers more interested in playing on motorists’ sympathies than working, many others are earnestly looking for gainful employment.

But with most motorists and passersby suspicious of the motives of the placard-waving street people, the truly needy are often ignored. Baldock said he believes the answer lies in a free, walking classified ad.

“I don’t have a good education but if things go bad, I wouldn’t go out on the street and put up a sign that I’ll work for food,” Baldock said Thursday. “I would say that I do glass and window tinting.”

Baldock said his signs would set apart the true job seekers from those who are looking for a handout.

“A job could help them get out of a financial hole,” he said. But a person getting money from sympathetic motorists for holding a sign “could stand on the street for life,” he said. In a trial run Thursday, Baldock handed one of his signs to David Watts, 44, who was trying his luck at finding work while standing on Harbor Boulevard in Garden Grove, a few blocks north of the Garden Grove Freeway.

Watts said he was seeking plumbing, janitorial or warehouse work to tide him over until he receives a welfare check next week. He said he has been out of work for two years and went to the streets after leaving a Christian home recently.

He added that Baldock’s idea had promise and that he would try carrying the sign for a while. “I don’t do drugs or alcohol, but it doesn’t help me to get a job,” he said.

“I’m down and out but not dirty, down and out,” he said. “Some of the people with the work-for-food signs are so dirty, people wouldn’t want them to work for them.”

Capt. Scott Jordan of the Garden Grove Police Department agreed with Baldock that the work-for-food signs have become a fad and that many who wield them are not homeless. “It’s how they make their money,” he said.

Jordan added that he believes Baldock’s signs are a good way to educate the public about who is sincere about working.