Survival Techniques : Pico Rivera Exemplifies Life After Manufacturers’ Exodus

From behind the counter of the Athena Family Restaurant in Pico Rivera, owner Athena Sehremelis has had a ringside seat to the economic changes that have rocked Southern California the last decade.

Sehremelis opened the coffee shop 13 years ago on the corner of Washington and Paramount boulevards in this working-class suburb. And for her, the economic disruption began almost immediately.

Expected lunch crowds from the Ford Motor Co. plant across the street never materialized. The auto maker closed the factory in 1980, one of several Southland auto plants to disappear as the fortunes of the U.S. auto industry soured.

Then the nearby vitamin company closed up, as did a trucking company up the road--victims of the shift away from heavy industry.

Business picked up in the late 1980s, when Northrop Corp., riding a wave of increased defense spending, opened a plant to build components for the B-2 Stealth bomber on the site of the old Ford plant.

But with the recession and cuts in the B-2 program--part of a trend to slashing military contracts--some of Sehremelis’ regular customers now are saying they won’t be back.

“It’s going to hurt us, it’s going to hurt us bad,” she says. “But I’ll just stay open. What else am I going to do?”

In many ways this city is a microcosm of all of industrial Southern California, a region where steel-making and auto manufacturing have vanished, where defense cutbacks mean aerospace layoffs, where most new jobs are in the lower-paying government and service sectors.

The changes have touched not only the inner city, which exploded in flames and rage in late April, but also blue-collar suburbs such as Pico Rivera, to which earlier generations of inner-city residents moved in pursuit of their share of the American dream.

People throughout Pico Rivera are feeling the effects of these changes, particularly the shrinkage of the once-robust industrial sector.

Unemployment in Pico Rivera hovers around 11%, well above the state average. The city’s tax revenues are falling $2 million short of projections this year.

Civic leaders here, like their counterparts in the southern part of Los Angeles, hope to attract new business to renew the faltering economy. Their sights are set on clean, high-tech businesses--such as the manufacture of electric vehicles or mass-transit equipment--that economists say would hold the best promise of reviving job-rich industry.

But Pico Rivera’s prospects are unclear. Despite the best intentions, officials of a small city can do just so much to manage economic fortunes. Like a dinghy in a maelstrom, a small town must simply ride out the waves of change sweeping the state and the nation.

Indeed, for now, the riots and recession have put Pico Rivera’s plans for winning new businesses on hold. And that bodes ill not only for the 60,000 residents here, but also for people in the inner city.

In the last year, just five businesses have moved into Pico Rivera. None is a large employer or high-tech firm; they include chain drugstores, a warehousing company, a truck leasing firm and some light manufacturing.

Pico Rivera--bounded on two sides by the Rio Hondo and San Gabriel rivers, fewer than 10 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles--is a town of eight square miles of modest, stucco houses, strip malls and factories.

Its residents are truck drivers and factory workers, secretaries and office clerks, computer programmers and accountants.

A new generation of local workers is trying to prepare for the shift from manufacturing to service industries. Some of them can be found in a job retraining program, supported partly by the state and federal governments, at the El Rancho Adult School’s Meller Education Center.

On a recent morning, about 30 students in an office skills class pounded typewriters, noisily trying to improve their typing speeds in anticipation of a visit from a Los Angeles County recruiter the next day.

Instructor Elizabeth Villarreal said the classes have been over-enrolled since the economy turned bad. Just since September, she said, “I’ve seen a 50% increase in the number of (unemployed) students in the business department.”

It is a sign that jobs in Pico Rivera’s new economy will require more--and different--training than many workers received in the past.

Until January, Mario Nelson Carcamo, 26, had a good-paying job in a Buena Park medical laboratory. He had worked there as a lab assistant for three years, but lost the job when the company was swallowed up by a larger rival.

Carcamo is only the latest member of his extended family to be out of work. His cousin’s wife lost a good job with a computer software company; one cousin lost a job at Northrop; another was thrown out of work when his employer lost a government contract.

With a wife and two children to support, Carcamo knows that he cannot take the only jobs now available to him in Pico Rivera: minimum-wage positions in fast food or retailing along Whittier Boulevard, the results of a massive redevelopment effort by the city.

So he is in the class at El Rancho, learning to type and to operate a computer. Carcamo hopes to remain in the medical testing field, which he believes will grow.

“In the next five or 10 years, if you don’t have a degree or something or prove you have some skills, you won’t find a job, not even for the minimum wage,” he said.

Carcamo’s classmate, Sally Morones, 39, has no high school diploma or any of the skills that would get her off the factory floor and into an office.

Her employer--which made plastic foam packaging for fast-food restaurants--closed down in August, a victim of heightened environmental concerns. She was laid off after 19 years from her job operating an offset printing machine.

Morones had nowhere to turn but to the unemployment office and the training class, where she is learning typing, computer operation and other office skills.

“It’s an opportunity for me to better myself,” she said hopefully, “to get something clean, a decent job. I used to work with inks and go home all dirty . . . and now I come dressed, and it’s totally different.”

It wasn’t always this way.

In the past, Pico Rivera’s auto plant was a ticket out of the barrio and into the suburbs for the uneducated or unskilled worker. The traditional career path: Work in a gas station, get an entry-level job at the Ford plant, graduate to the skilled trades.

Once you made it, you could count on a job for life and a union pension when you retired. It was pretty much the same story throughout postwar Southern California.

Those former auto assembly workers still get together once a month over a potluck lunch of fried chicken, sliced ham and potato salad at the United Auto Workers union hall on Rosemead Boulevard. On a recent afternoon they shared their stories under a banner that read: “Go America: Support Our Troops.”

Manuel Talavera, 68, tells of moving into the community in 1927, when it was nothing but nut, orange and avocado groves. “Where the plant used to be, I used to pick walnuts when I was 13 years old, for 35 cents a sack,” he said.

As in the rest of Southern California, it didn’t take long for the orchards here to be subdivided to make way for new houses after World War II.

In 1952, Talavera got a job at the Lincoln Mercury plant in nearby Maywood, working in the body shop, welding pieces of sheet metal together by hand.

“It was a good job if you didn’t mind working,” he says. “I used to break in guys, new hires. . . . One guy worked for three hours, then said, ‘I forgot to turn off my radio.’ And he never did come back. He didn’t want no part of the body shop.”

As Ford’s production soared in the boom time of the 1950s, the auto maker combined the operations of its Maywood and Long Beach plants and moved to a new factory in Pico Rivera in 1957.

At the same time, many of the region’s Anglo residents began moving out. Second- and third-generation Latinos began moving in, foreshadowing the growth of the Latino population throughout Southern California. (By 1990, Pico Rivera’s population would be 83% Latino, overwhelmingly Mexican-American.)

With thousands of new employees streaming into town, restaurants, liquor stores and other businesses sprang up along Washington Boulevard. Later, in metal and concrete buildings along Paramount Boulevard, hard by the Rio Hondo River, trucking firms and light manufacturing businesses sprouted.

As the 1980s began, more than 1,600 workers were still building Ford LTDs at the plant, making it the largest employer in town. But two oil shocks in the ‘70s had fueled the ability of Japan’s car industry to capture a larger share of the U.S. auto market--especially in Southern California.

In January, 1980, Ford decided to close the plant, citing high costs, “international uncertainties and severe shifts in the automobile market.”

The closure was part of a trend away from heavy manufacturing in Southern California. It followed the shutdown of the Chrysler Corp. plant in Commerce and a Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. plant in Los Angeles, and preceded by only a few years General Motors Corp.’s shutdown in South Gate and Kaiser Steel Corp.’s closure in Fontana. The assembly line in the last Southern California auto plant--the GM plant in Van Nuys--is scheduled to go silent in August.

The Ford plant closing “was very hard for people,” said retiree David Prieto, 64, who worked at the auto plant 32 years. “Some took it in stride, but . . . some wanted to commit suicide. Some took to the streets, some got divorced.”

Three years later, Northrop stepped in. It took over the Ford site and moved production of the B-2 to Pico Rivera. By early this year, that plant employed about 9,000 people, including 260 residents of Pico Rivera.

Northrop’s arrival spurred a new round of growth. Restaurants, drugstores and fast-food joints were opened to accommodate the lunch crowds. Taxes collected from the plant fueled the redevelopment effort that, by 1988, had transformed dreary Whittier Boulevard into a string of new shopping centers and strip malls.

Now, the street looks like any other in the San Fernando Valley or Orange County, with its pseudo-Mission-style buildings and acres of parking lots. Hordes of cruisers no longer choke the boulevard’s lanes four nights a week.

Some residents object to the transformation of their downtown area into what they call a fast-food “miracle mile,” but civic leaders proudly point to it as the next step in Pico Rivera’s evolution from industrial hub to commercial and retail center.

“Expansion of the retail sector is more than we could have imagined, drawing people from all around us,” said 18-year City Councilman and former Mayor Jim Patronite, a prime mover in the redevelopment effort who retired in April.

Still, the recession’s toll is apparent in the empty storefronts in Whittier Boulevard’s otherwise bustling shopping centers. And redevelopment is not likely to offset the effects of the latest change in the region’s economy: the decline of aerospace.

By year’s end, Northrop says, it will reduce its Pico Rivera work force by 1,000. In all of Los Angeles County, a county task force forecast in March, defense cuts will cost the aerospace industry 184,000 to 368,000 jobs by 1995.

In a building across Washington Boulevard from the massive plant, Northrop has set up a “career resources center” to help those being laid off find new jobs. It was filled one day recently with well-dressed people working at computers, on telephones, at desks and in seminar rooms.

Their desperation was apparent.

Lisa Boyer, 32, a computer programmer, was laid off May 4 after 10 1/2 years at Northrop. She was a second-generation Northrop worker, following in the footsteps of her engineer father.

“My mother actually talked me into it,” she recalled with a nervous laugh. “ ‘Oh, you’ll have a job for life; you’ll be able to go anywhere.’ It doesn’t seem so real now.”

Boyer had a baby in September, her third child. Her husband, Gregg, was out of work for more than seven months after he was laid off from a manufacturing firm. He started a new job in April, with similar duties but for lower pay.

When she got news in March that she would be losing her job, Lisa Boyer recalled: “I was depressed, nervous, especially because my husband was out of work at the time. It was like, ‘Now what are we going to do?’ ”

Only a year ago, it had seemed that things were looking up.

“We were right in the middle of selling our home and buying another home,” she said. “We’re in a little two-bedroom condo right now, with five people. . . . Now, we don’t even know whether we can afford to keep the one we have.”

She has sent out 60 resumes so far, with no luck. “They say, ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you,’ ” she said.

The city, mindful of its dependence on Northrop, wants to diversify its economic base. But there have been few successes so far.

Pico Rivera is reportedly one of several communities being considered for an electric-car plant in a project being developed in part by a Monrovia aerospace firm. But the location is hampered by, among other things, a lack of available industrial sites.

Even when new businesses move into Pico Rivera, they often employ few people.

When manufacturer Atlas Wire and Cable Inc. moves from nearby Montebello to a new plant on a bigger site in Pico Rivera early next year, it will bring its 75 to 80 employees with it.

“We’ll be close enough,” company president Gary Farquhar said. “Everybody’ll just move with us.”

That’s bad news for Sally Morones and her laid-off classmates at El Rancho Adult School.

“There was one girl, they placed her two months ago,” Morones said. “She was on welfare before, and she was all happy. . . . And I saw her (back here), and said, ‘What you doing? Aren’t you working?’

“And she says, ‘No, they moved to Irwindale.’ All the companies are going elsewhere.”

Pico Rivera at a Glance

Land Area: 8 sq. miles

Population: 1990: 59,177

1980: 53,459

1970: 54,170

Per Capita Income, 1987: $8,989

Median Value, Single Family Home, 1990: $165,000

Median Rent, 1990: $561

New Home Permits, 1990: 9

Source: California Cities, Towns & Counties