Income Gap More Like a Chasm

In the last week I’ve written about the quick recovery of an illegal immigrant who was shot in the chest while landscaping a yard in Inglewood, and a U.S.-born high-rise security guard who makes so little money she can only afford a phone booth-size room in downtown Los Angeles.

Some readers saw an obvious connection:

The illegal immigrant and thousands like him have depressed wages for legal blue-collar residents like her.

There’s certainly some truth in that. If you’ve got an illegal workforce willing to work for peanuts, and employers happy to exploit their desperation, wages at the bottom end are likely to stay low.

But let’s forget illegal immigration for a moment, because if you ask me, we’ve got other economic problems in Southern California, and here’s a thumbnail sketch:

Despite a relatively healthy economy on paper, middle-income jobs are as scarce as intelligent screenplays, and that has more to do with the death of manufacturing than the influx of illegal immigrants.

Meanwhile, you’ve got to be Eli Broad to afford a house in this cuckoo real estate market, and thousands of kids can’t get through high school, let alone move on to a college and university system that isn’t what it used to be.

What this means is that we’ve got $20-million houses offering spectacular views down the hill and into the Third World. If not for the fact that it takes forever to get anywhere on the bus, we’d have a revolution on our hands.

So the question I’ve been asking public officials and civic leaders is what we can do about the income gap that runs like a fault line through the land, dividing the haves from the help.

I want to stand up and clap when Jack Kyser of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. lays some of the blame on the big-box planning model. He says we do not need -- repeat, IX-NAY-- any more Targets and Kmarts, or any other Coliseum-size discount joints.

Not only do those places devour what little land is still available, but the jobs they provide are lousy, and it’s not as if consumers have nowhere else to turn for tube socks and toilet paper. City officials would be smarter, Kyser says, if they used scarce land to build jobs in expected growth industries like technology, international trade and engineering.

Kent Wong of UCLA’s Center for Labor Research agrees that we need to keep trying to replace the kinds of jobs that were lost in Southern California when aerospace and manufacturing went belly up. But he also knows that the service economy is here to stay, and that means we have to find ways to elevate the standard of living for bellhops, janitors, security guards, nannies, maids, construction workers and waiters.

“We have a situation like we did in the 1930s, when auto manufacturing, mining and steel work were poverty jobs,” Wong said. Unionization moved those workers into the middle class, he says, and it can push service employees in the same direction.

Los Angeles County has 55,000 security guards, said Bruce Stenslie of the Los Angeles Workforce Investment Board.

“If you could move them from $8.50 an hour to $10.50, $11, $12, with health benefits,” as Local 1877 of the Service Employees International Union is trying to do with security guards, “you’d have an enormous impact on the economy,” he said.

If you hear a sucking sound, it’s mass hyperventilating by the fat and happy building and business owners who employ the security guards. But before you shed too many tears for the captains of industry, consider the billions of dollars in corporate welfare shelled out each year across the land, not to mention congressional largesse on offshore flimflam and other tax shelters and loopholes.

Beyond that, a living wage translates into more people contributing and fewer people on the dole.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s office estimated Tuesday that if security guards were better trained -- as they should be in the post-9/11 era -- and were paid even as much as unionized janitors, it could pump $100 million a year into South Los Angeles, where many security officers live.

So why can’t the leaders of Greater Los Angeles work together on some of these ideas?

Because it would break the long and proud tradition of self-interest and isolation.

Dan Flaming of the Economic Roundtable said the public entities involved -- transit, port, even economic development agencies -- are incapable of “chewing gum and walking at the same time.”

He recommended, among other things, a crackdown on “predatory work conditions,” putting city and county prosecutors to work collecting back wages from underground employers and enforcing labor laws.

And, as Los Angeles City Council President Eric Garcetti said, we need to be thinking not just about today’s labor force, but about the next generation of workers.

“We don’t have a jobs gap,” he said. “We have a skills gap.”

The dropout rate in Los Angeles high schools is astounding, and the options for dropouts are bleak. One reader suggested that my Sunday column on the security guard -- who didn’t graduate -- should be required reading at every high school. Drop out, and you’re looking at $8.50 an hour, with a skid row hotel room that has no bathroom.

Nobody living in the real world expects a sizable public investment in education any time this century. But it would be sensational, Garcetti said, if Villaraigosa’s planned takeover of the schools put a focus on vocational training and specific linkage to the Los Angeles economy.

He said he had just been told by the Gas Co. that 40% of new hires are let go within two years because they don’t know math and other basic skills.

And so I repeat my suggestion of a couple of months ago:

If one reason for the huge high school dropout rate is that kids can’t hack algebra, let’s leave advanced math to those who want it and teach practical math to others, especially since we’re the world capital of service economies.

What would be better, a kid with a diploma knocking on the door of the gas company, or a dropout on the dole?

Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at latimes.com/lopez.