Labor Relations : Handful of Workers Talk About Life on the Job in ’86

On this Labor Day, six people in a variety of fields talk about the personal challenges and problems facing workers today.

A teacher reflects on upheaval in Los Angeles city schools; the chief executive of a high-technology firm fumes about workers’ drug use and unreliability; a graphic artist and mother of three tells how she juggles career and family demands.

A public defense lawyer worries about the potential impact of a ballot measure to limit government employees’ salaries; an aerospace worker discusses the growing communication gap between management and labor, and a business researcher predicts where commerce will grow in the Valley during the next decade.

Paul Greenwalt has a simple explanation for his lengthy stay in teaching: “I am not a quitter.”

Frustrated by years of turmoil in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the 49-year-old West Valley teacher has contemplated leaving the profession on several occasions. But each September he returns to his post.

“I love working with kids--they’re a lot of fun,” says Greenwalt, now in his 25th year with the district. “It’s a challenging job. And I am not a quitter.”

Still, it has not been easy.

Mandatory desegregation during the late 1970s and early ‘80s--combined with plummeting enrollment that forced the closure of 22 schools districtwide--caused such upheaval in teaching assignments that many of his colleagues threw in the towel.

“Many teachers couldn’t cope with the change,” says Greenwalt, a third-grade instructor at Wilbur Avenue Elementary School in Tarzana. “People are constantly getting shoved around. You don’t know where you’re going to be or for how long.

“I’ve seen so much burnout. Too much change can kill you.”

Greenwalt recalled one colleague who had purchased a home in Ojai while he was serving as a department chairman at a mid-Valley school. District needs forced him to relinquish his chairmanship and the corresponding salary bonus in order to transfer to an inner-city school, where he taught remedial English.

“We don’t want to have to commute a long distance,” says Greenwalt, adding that he has been assigned to six schools during his tenure with the district. “That’s an insanity. You burn up all your energy commuting.

“That doesn’t make us racists because we want to be a reasonable distance from our homes.”

Greenwalt, who serves as West Valley representative for United Teachers of Los Angeles, the largest teachers’ union in the district, says California’s acute teacher shortage only will be solved when teachers’ salaries are improved and they are given more say in making decisions

Increased decentralization of power in the district has created demigods of individual school principals, Greenwalt asserts. As a result, each school has different policies, and teachers face new procedures whenever they are reassigned.

A teacher with high seniority and a good reputation can be ruined if he fails to adjust to a new principal’s administrative style, Greenwalt says.

“It takes a year to settle into a school and learn the rules and procedures--and then you’re uprooted,” he says.

Greenwalt’s career has come full circle. He joined the district in 1961 as an elementary schoolteacher in East Los Angeles, where he had many non-English-speaking students at a time when schools were forbidden to instruct in Spanish, he says. This year, Greenwalt will teach a bilingual class in Tarzana.

The ethnic diversity in the district is the biggest challenge facing teachers today, he says.

“We’re dealing with 85 languages in Los Angeles today,” Greenwalt says. “There’s no way to cover that waterfront, as I see it.

“I think we have to take a one-room-schoolhouse approach with such diversity. Students and teachers have to pitch in and help each other.”

Greenwalt says teachers do not receive the respect they deserve and are treated as scapegoats in many instances when parents and churches are to blame for failing to instill moral values.

At the same time, he acknowledges that the teacher shortage has led to the hiring of some unqualified instructors, which further tarnishes the profession’s reputation.

Standards should be strengthened, he says, but, at the same

time, salaries must be increased and teachers must receive a greater share of power if the district hopes to attract qualified men and women.

Despite growing demands and complications in the teaching field, Greenwalt says: “Knowing what I know, I’d do it over.”

Foreign competition looms as the greatest challenge facing American industries today, but problems much closer to home are proving to be just as stubborn, according to the founder of a Chatsworth high-technology firm.

Drug use and the flighty nature of California workers have contributed to a 30% to 40% annual turnover rate among production employees at Micropolis Corp., a leading manufacturer of computer disk drives, says Chief Executive Stuart Mabon.

“It’s very hard to run an airline when 40% of your work force will disappear within the year,” says Mabon, 49, of West Los Angeles.

Continuous employee turnover can wreak havoc in high-tech firms, which require lengthy on-the-job training before a worker becomes proficient, he says.

The typical California worker, Mabon complains, is inattentive and transient.

“They go to the beach in the summer,” he says derisively.

Such irresponsibility is exacerbated by a rising rate of drug use among employees--a problem that Mabon labels “insidious.”

“It’s cancerous,” Mabon says. “You can buy drugs in this company anytime you want, and I don’t think we are unique.”

Joining a growing trend in business, Micropolis requires new job applicants to submit to a drug test, but the company has not yet instituted random testing of its work force. But, Mabon warns, if management finds that “we’re not winning the battle” by testing incoming employees, additional procedures may be necessary.

The issue is not simply whether management has the right to regulate what a worker does on Saturday nights, Mabon says. Even those employees who use drugs only recreationally, during their off hours, spend time on the job thinking about how and when they are going to make their next drug purchase, he maintains.

“It’s a hell of a preoccupation for 20% or 30% of the work force,” Mabon says.

To reduce production costs and increase productivity, Micropolis this year shifted some of its operations to Singapore, where 300 of its 1,300 workers are now employed.

Mabon says the company’s older-model equipment will be manufactured in Singapore, while the Chatsworth plant will continue to pave the way with research and development of new products, in an effort to stay one step ahead of the competition.

He describes the firm’s Singapore work force, composed primarily of Chinese, as “awe-inspiring.” Within several months, he says, they rose to the same productivity level of the average Chatsworth employee, who needed several years to become that proficient.

The Asian employees, he says, focus unwavering concentration on their jobs.

“You can’t compete with that,” Mabon says of domestic operations.

Furthermore, Micropolis has no drug-testing policy in Singapore.

“It’s completely superfluous,” Mabon says. “There are no drugs among the population there.”

Balancing a successful career and a family is a constant source of frustration for Cathe Physioc-Negele, but the 34-year-old Studio City graphic artist says she cannot imagine anyone having a better situation.

Married and the mother of three children, ages 6, 4 and 3, Physioc-Negele runs her own free-lance commercial art business and does much of her design work in a studio in her Laurel Canyon Boulevard home.

Although she has been tempted by better pay at a large advertising agency, Physioc-Negele says free-lancing enables her to regulate her workload and spend more time with her children.

“Many, many times it is very hectic, and I get very frustrated attempting to be 100% career woman and 100% mother,” she says. “It’s going to be difficult, no matter what, so you do what you can to make it as easy as possible.”

Although she had no household help until two years ago and frequently toted her children to meetings with clients, Physioc-Negele says she now has a live-in housekeeper who looks after the children during the day.

But she cooks most of the family’s meals herself, she says, and insists on a traditional, sit-down, family dinner at least six nights a week. Many of her business meetings are now held in her home, she says.

With the freedom to chart her own work schedule, Physioc-Negele says she makes no appointments before 9 a.m., spends as little time as possible on the freeways and refuses to take business calls at home after 5 p.m.

She says, “I have the kids answer the phone after 5 and say, ‘My mom is busy with us. Can she call you back after 9 a.m.?’ ”

Her hours are seldom strictly 9 to 5, she says, but she puts in a full day, frequently working late after the children have gone to bed.

Although her family is her first priority, Physioc-Negele says, motherhood has never caused her to miss a deadline.

“It’s very important to me that my clients don’t feel that, because I have children, I can’t get their work done,” she says. “I want that never to enter their minds.”

For the past two years, she says, she has been at a crossroads in her career and has contemplated expanding and hiring full-time employees to help her take on larger projects. But for now, she says, it is more important to spend the time with her children and to become active as a volunteer at Carpenter Avenue Elementary School, where her eldest is enrolled.

“Everybody thinks I’m so relaxed and have everything under control, but I’m not at all,” she says. “I go crazy a lot.”

But, she adds, “I’m very lucky. Few people are in my position. I make good money doing exactly what I want to do, and I have a wonderful family.”

William M. Thornbury, a deputy public defender assigned to Van Nuys Superior Court, says the greatest concern among public defenders on this Labor Day is Proposition 61, the November ballot measure that seeks to limit salaries of government employees.

Prosecutors, county defense attorneys and judges will resign in droves if the measure becomes law, Thornbury predicts.

“We’ll all leave,” says Thornbury, who is active in the Los Angeles County Public Defenders Assn.

The measure is commonly called the Gann Initiative, after author Paul Gann, the tax-cut crusader. Although its sponsors maintain that opponents have grossly overstated its potential impact, Thornbury calculates that his own salary would be slashed almost in half.

“People in public life will go to private industry,” Thornbury says. “Judges’ salaries will be cut substantially. You’re going to wipe out the judiciary with one brush.”

If public lawyers are driven into private practice, Thornbury says, the increased competition for business will result in a reduction in the number of plea bargains and civil settlements, with attorneys choosing to go to trial instead.

Although the measure ranks as the greatest concern of many court employees today, Thornbury says, he is confident that the initiative will be defeated and that, even if it does pass, the state Supreme Court will rule it unconstitutional.

A public defender for 18 years, Thornbury, 42, of Santa Monica, says criminal law is in a constant state of flux, with the Legislature and courts amending the law “almost monthly.”

“It requires constant study and education to keep abreast of the changes,” says Thornbury. “It’s mind-boggling, the kind of stuff you have to deal with.”

With violent crime on the rise and sentencing laws growing tougher, more cases are reaching trial today, rather than being disposed of through plea bargaining, Thornbury says. As a result, the caseload of the public defender has increased.

What is needed, Thornbury believes, is a corresponding increase in the numbers of prosecutors, public defenders, judges, jails and prisons.

Harold Pickett is 66 years old and verging on retirement, but he still has a child’s fascination for outer space.

A 34-year Lockheed Corp. employee, Pickett believes that within his lifetime America will establish a permanent space station and that travel there will become routine.

“It won’t be quite as easy as flying to New York, but it will be close,” Pickett says.

The Palmdale resident even dreams of making the celestial journey himself someday.

“I’m an adventurer,” Pickett says.

Pickett, who started on Lockheed’s Burbank assembly line as an upholsterer in 1952, has watched the corporation’s work force burgeon from 46,000 in his first year of employment to more than 80,000 today.

The result, he says, has been an ever-widening gulf between management and the worker.

“In the old days, there was a lot of cooperation with management,” Pickett says. “You could go to the boss and talk to him face to face.”

He recalled a day during Lockheed’s lean years after World War II when a friend in the upholstery division brought a sewing machine from home and lent it to the company.

“I miss the old days,” Pickett says. “It was so much easier to go to the top than it is now. The boss now is just not available.”

Today, complaints must be channeled through a series of grievance committees before union and management representatives sit down and hammer out a solution, he says. Problems typically fester for lengthy periods before they are attacked and solved, he laments.

Still, Pickett says, Lockheed management is generally responsive, and the complaint system proves satisfactory about 85% of the time.

Pickett serves on the contract-negotiating committee for the International Assn. of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, District 727, in Burbank.

In an effort to make commercial jetliners lighter and military aircraft less detectable on radar, Pickett says, airplane construction will rely increasingly on plastics with chemical bonding, rather than on metals riveted together.

The result will be a redistribution of jobs and a demand for better-educated workers, but not necessarily widespread unemployment, he predicts.

“It will enlarge the frontier,” Pickett says. “ ‘Rosie the Riveter’ must now be able to understand the application of chemicals, rather than just drilling a hole and putting a screw in.”

Having worked 23 different jobs at the Burbank and Palmdale facilities, Pickett will retire next year from his job as an inspector who certifies that the aircraft coming off the Palmdale assembly line meets design standards and is flight-ready.

Even in retirement, Pickett says, he will keep a close eye on each new project coming off Lockheed’s Palmdale assembly line.

“I’m going to leave it behind in the sense that I won’t be working,” Pickett says. “But I’ll be there in my house on the hill overlooking Lockheed, and I’ll be watching and marveling at what happens.”

During the past 10 years, the greatest employment growth in the San Fernando Valley has occurred in the West Valley, with manufacturing firms flocking to Chatsworth and white-collar businesses springing up in Warner Center, according to David Hornbeck, the director of business research at California State University, Northridge.

More recently, Hornbeck says, Universal City and Encino have emerged as significant employment areas.

Those trends will continue, but Hornbeck also predicts that some aging Valley communities will begin to attract their share of commercial development during the next decade, establishing themselves as centers of business and industry.

Hornbeck predicts that Pacoima, with its state-enterprise zone, will develop into a major distribution center for wholesale goods. And Van Nuys will experience a rebirth in office development, he says.

“We’ve hit the end of the Valley with the development in Chatsworth, and now we’re coming back into the older communities, where land values have declined relative to other areas,” says Hornbeck, a 15-year member of the CSUN teaching staff.

In February, Pacoima was chosen as one of the first state-enterprise zones, a designation intended to stimulate growth in blighted communities by offering businesses incentives in the form of tax breaks and exemptions from many state and city regulations. Hornbeck says he believes that Pacoima is ideally suited geographically to become a distribution hub for products coming into Southern California.