In this land of plenty, we have so many people who depend on charity for food
On one of my recent daily routine trips down 9th Street to the Beacon Street U.S. Post Office, I passed by the local YWCA that’s been doing charity work for decades at this location. On Friday mornings each week, volunteers set up food give-aways right on the sidewalk. Upon arriving at the post office, I looked out over the great expanse of the San Pedro Bay twin harbors and thought about the $400 billion of cargo that passes through it annually. The century of investments that continue to this very day, in the hundreds of millions, to keep it operating. On a good day, there are hundreds of people working on the ships and cranes. It seems so routine as to be normal. Only later, when I drove back by and saw hundreds of people lining up for a free bag of groceries, did I stop and wonder.
How is it that, amidst all of this great wealth of the industrial import economy, in the wealthiest nation in the world, in the wealthiest state in the union, and in a very wealthy city, can we have such poverty of people wanting for food? Yes, food and gas prices have exploded and will likely continue to escalate because of this damn war on Iran. Yet the homeless and housing crisis goes back at least four decades and is nothing new. In fact, it’s become the “new normal.” It didn’t have to be this way.
What many residents of the harbor area will recall are the days when many more of their families were actually employed in the harbor, as cannery workers, fishermen, and shipbuilders. In the 1980s, there were some 60,000 blue-collar workers, men and women, working on or near the waterfront. Before the Vincent Thomas Bridge was built, the main access to Terminal Island was by the ferry boat at the foot of Sixth Street. Thousands of workers trekked down Sixth Street daily, passing by shops with merchant goods — shoes, shirts, pants and more. There was even one women’s undergarment shop that sold industrial-strength bras! Nothing like women’s wear today.
It was these jobs that built the local middle-class economy to buy not just groceries but homes, cars, and eventually higher education for many of their children. These were all kinds of immigrant workers — Italians, Croatians, Polish, Norwegians, Blacks from the South, and every shade of brown– making this one of the most diverse communities in the melting pot of Los Angeles. How did this all change, you might ask?
With the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, who promoted the “trickle down” theory of economics (that if you lowered taxes on the rich, the benefits would trickle down to workers), there was a great hollowing out of jobs. What, of course, happened over the next decade was the offshoring of American manufacturing because labor was cheaper abroad. Corporations invested in factories in China, Korea, Japan, and later Vietnam and India. And it seemed to happen so quickly. Here, as elsewhere in the heartland of America workers lost their jobs. Locally it totalled half of the well paid blue-collar jobs. It hit the San Pedro Bay communities hard.
Those who came of age during the 1980s never thought of jobs in the harbor, following in their parent’s footsteps, unless you happened to be the children of longshoremen– those were some of the only jobs that couldn’t be exported. Those and tug boats and teamsters remained. Those remaining jobs saved the local economy from complete collapse.
In the end, there was the loss of 30,000 good-paying jobs, which at the time was half of the local workforce! Those jobs have never been replaced! And automation now threatens more.
Subsequently, real estate prices bottomed out, the retail storefront economy nearly collapsed, and the rise of alcohol and drug addiction began to soar. Yes, other factors, including the fallout from the Iran-Contra scandal that brought tons of cocaine and drugs into South Central and the harbor area, which fueled the pain and suffering. I was here to witness this decline; we even wrote about the various parts of it, but the enormity of the consequences is still reverberating today as I drive by the food line outside of the YWCA or realize the necessity of the LA County homeless shelter next to the post office or Curt’s Kitchen on Pacific Avenue. These solutions just aren’t enough.
Recently, a CBS 60 Minutes report went to Norfolk, VA, where the only remaining American shipyard still exists. As reported, they only produce six ships per year, but the Korean shipyard produces 60.
That’s because the Korean government has invested in shipbuilding, just as China has, and is the leading shipbuilder on the Pacific Rim. Clearly, as the leading seaport in North America, for the ports of LA and Long Beach not to have a shipyard is rather dumb.
Why would this even matter? Because with all the new emphasis on STEM learning and the as-yet-to-be-built “job training” centers, there is really no economic incentive to create the number of jobs necessary to lift up the local economy. And I’m not just talking San Pedro — the hollowing out of the LA industrial base went from here all the way into South Central and beyond that supported hundreds of thousands of middle-class jobs. Not just warehouse jobs for Amazon or shelf stocking jobs for Walmart, but jobs that paid competitive, livable wages.
The only two unions to have survived this onslaught are the ILWU and the Teamsters, and of course, the police, fire and teachers unions, but the driving force of American manufacturing has been gutted for higher corporate profits. This is why we now have to tax the billionaires who profited from this.
My argument here is that with one or two well-placed investments in a couple of key industries like shipbuilding or perhaps hi-tech, we would create a complete renaissance of economic prosperity not seen in half a century.
The problem is that most people don’t realize what was lost, and the leaders don’t have any vision of how to bring it back!