Behind The Help-Wanted Signs

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Disneyland has sent "presentation teams" to Los Angeles-area schools to tout the advantages of summer jobs at the giant amusement park. The teams have plenty to offer: wages of $4.25 an hour or more, well above the $3.35 minimum wage; free entry to the park during non-working hours; the right to request or occasionally refuse specific shifts. And any employee who refers another gets to enter a monthly raffle for a free TV set. Even so, as of last week 200 of Disneyland's 2,000 or so summer jobs were still unfilled.

Across the continent in Hyannis, Mass., Denny's Restaurant closed before the start of what should have been its peak season. It needed at least 70 employees to serve the summer crowds flocking to Cape Cod, but was able to hire only 13. A nearby Stop & Shop Supermarket found six cashiers only by recruiting in New Bedford, Mass., 40 miles away. The store will send a van to pick up the six every morning and drive them back at night, and the company will pay the employees time and a half for their two hours of daily travel.

Similar stories abound around the country, illustrating a disturbing trend in the labor market. In the U.S. economy's fifth year of steady expansion, the coexistence of spotty labor shortages and relatively high unemployment rates (6.1% nationally in June) is no longer news. But it is not just those seeking engineers, accountants, computer systems analysts and other highly skilled workers who are having trouble finding help. Employers seeking to fill seasonal and entry-level jobs demanding no experience and little skill -- dishwasher, store clerk, hotel maid, gas-station attendant, farmhand, to name just a few -- are often having just as much difficulty or more.

One reason is simple: such jobs traditionally are taken by young people eager to get their first taste of the work. But because of the low birth rates of the late 1960s and early 1970s, there are a lot fewer such youths than there used to be. The number of people ages 16 to 24 dropped from 37 million in 1980 to 34 million in 1986. While the economy has grown at a 3% rate since July 1986, the number of young people in the summer labor force has stayed the same: about 26 million. Says Louis Masotti, a political scientist at Northwestern University: "What we have is a burgeoning service economy that has walked right into the face of a declining demography."

But isn't unemployment among youths frighteningly high? It is indeed: 15.9% among teenagers generally, 33.3% for black teenagers. Unfortunately, many of the jobless youngsters are stuck in central-city ghettos. They have no way of getting to the fast-growing suburban areas where jobs in stores, hotels, fast- food restaurants and the like go begging; public transportation out to the suburbs is often nonexistent. They also do not have easy access to the resort areas, where the summer-worker crunch is particularly severe.

Better-off youngsters who live in the suburbs are equally inaccessible to many employers who are desperately trying to fill entry-level jobs, though for a different reason. Says Oscar Ornati, professor of manpower management at the New York University Graduate School of Business Administration: "Kids in Hastings-on-Hudson ((a community in wealthy Westchester County, north of New York City)) don't get jobs wrapping fast food. They get jobs as summer para- legals or interns at corporations."

Some employers in the West have an additional problem: the new immigration law has shut off the supply of seasonal immigrants who took many jobs that U.S. citizens shun. A shortage of migrants is hindering picking of cherries and raspberries in the Pacific Northwest and is likely to interfere with harvesting of the later apple and pear crops too. Farmers say that inducing enough American citizens to do backbreaking field work would require wages so high that U.S. fruit and vegetable farms would not be able to compete with foreign ones.

Employers in some other industries, however, are raising pay to attract workers to formerly low-wage jobs. Ed Berry, personnel manager for an office of the Georgia department of labor serving a fast-growing area north of Atlanta, could find employees to fill only 293 of 883 retail-trade jobs during the last eleven months. "At one time in the early spring, a construction worker would take a job for $9.50 an hour for a few days, until he could find one that paid $11.50," Berry reports. Cape Cod restaurateurs relay tales of dishwashers in Provincetown being offered $10 an hour. "In eastern Massachusetts, it would be one heck of a hunt to find someone working only for minimum wage," says Robert Vincent, an official of the state department of employment security.

Employers are coming up with other lures, such as flexible hours for students and working mothers and medical-benefit programs for jobs that never had them before. McDonald's and other companies are recruiting retired people for jobs usually held by youths. But the most ambitious efforts are those that try to resolve the labor mismatch by searching in city ghettos for workers who can be brought to the available work. Universal Studios worked with two Los Angeles County high schools to select 400 mostly black and Hispanic students and put them through six hours of "employability" classes where they were taught how to dress and behave in job interviews. It hired 209 for summer jobs at up to $4.15 an hour serving tourists who visit the movie studios in Universal City; the new employees arrive in school buses donated by the county.

Such efforts so far are all too rare, but they are likely to expand. The pool of youths about to start their first jobs will go on shrinking into the early 1990s, and the suburbanization of the economy seems an irreversible trend. At least until the next recession, the days when employers could pick and choose among hundreds of youths lined up outside their doors seeking low- paying jobs appear to be over.

With reporting by James Willwerth/Los Angeles, with other bureaus