Labor Shortages

Having a police force that is too small has its rewards, at least for the bank accounts of officers patrolling Los Angeles' streets. Just ask the Los Angeles Police Department sergeant who made $240,000 last year -- $131,000 of that from working overtime. Or another sergeant, who added $105,800 in overtime pay to his $101,900 annual salary.

In the labor market's pecking order, Chen Xiulan is at the very bottom. She is female, middle-aged and from the countryside and stands barely 5 feet tall. (Height requirements are common with Chinese employers.) Yet when the nearly 60-year-old grandmother from Sichuan province showed up in Shanghai last fall looking for work on the construction site of the sprawling World Expo, nobody laughed. Chen was handed a hard hat and a broom and put to work with the crew that sweeps up debris.

A 36-year-old housewife waiting for her three youngsters to return from school glanced at the deluge of newspaper advertisements begging for job applicants. Enticements such as free retraining, premium salaries and opportunities with prestigious international corporations failed to spark even a hint of enthusiasm. "I want to work only on weekends and during school holidays," said Tan Lee Eng, "when the children don't need me at home."

Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas called Tuesday on the county Probation Department to hire more internal affairs staff to investigate employee misconduct. Ridley-Thomas' comments followed publication of a Times story revealing incidents in which probation officers were convicted of crimes or disciplined in recent years for inappropriate conduct involving current or former probationers, including several cases of officers molesting or beating youths in their care.

Widespread labor shortages and higher inflation will increase pressure on U.S. employers to raise salaries and benefits in 1989, according to the Conference Board. The business-financed research group said today that its panel of 10 business and human resources experts predicted that private industry wages and benefits would grow 5% next year, up from 3.7% in the year ended this September. That's compared to expected inflation of 5% next year, which would be up from the current annual rate of 4.

Oil-field service companies, buoyed by a mild rebound, are looking for workers and having a hard time finding them. "We've hired 100 people in 90 days, and I need 40 more people now," said Dailey Berard, president of Universal Fabricators. "I see it as a serious problem for the industry to get back in the business," he said. "The materials are not here; the personnel are not here, and the expertise has been retired."

If you're having trouble getting your builder to come back and fix those sticky doors, loose floor tiles and other annoying little problems, you're not alone. New-home buyers everywhere are experiencing the same thing. Not because builders have decided all of a sudden to stop responding to their buyers' pleas. Rather, they are simply unable to react as quickly to them as they once did. The culprit: labor; more precisely, the lack thereof.

Singapore, now seeking to encourage a baby boom after years of proclaiming that "two is enough," faces a long-term threat to its economy because of a labor shortage, a government report says. A labor shortage, rather than a lack of export markets, will curb growth in this small island republic in the years ahead, the Trade and Industry Ministry's Economic Survey for the third quarter of 1987 says.

The Federal Reserve raised a key short-term interest rate to 5.5% on Tuesday, warning that the booming U.S. economy continues to strain against its limits and that employers are running out of people to hire. It was the third time this year that the Fed boosted the federal funds rate, which banks charge one another, by a quarter-point in hopes of protecting against an outbreak of inflation.

The United States faces a growing skilled labor shortage potentially more destructive to long-term economic health than the budget or trade deficits, an Economic Policy Institute report said. The authors of the report, "Workforce Policies for the 1990s," predicted there would be millions of unskilled and economically dependent young people ill-equipped to participate in a modern economy. The study was written by former Secretary of Labor F.

Faced with an unrelenting fiscal crisis, Los Angeles city officials have refused to hire needed analysts for the Los Angeles Police Department's crime laboratory, hampering a plan to eliminate a backlog of untested DNA evidence from rape cases and angering victims' rights advocates. Last spring, despite a near freeze on all city hiring, the City Council set aside $1.4 million to hire 26 staffers for the LAPD lab and cover their salaries for about six months. The proposed hires were part of a three-year plan that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and other officials unveiled in 2008, vowing at the time that it would remedy the chronic staffing shortfalls in the lab that had led to a massive backup of evidence.

For more than four decades, a dreary, two-level jail in a corner of the Los Angeles Police Department's downtown headquarters has been an unwelcome pit stop for thousands of men arrested in the city each year. Accused of petty theft, murder or anything in between, the Parker Center Jail is where one waits -- sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for a few days -- to see a judge. Never a pleasant place, the jail has fallen into increasing depths of disrepair and inadequacy over the years.

With seven children to care for and a caseload that quadrupled this past year, U.S. District Judge Stephen G. Larson says he can no longer afford his prestigious lifetime appointment. The 44-year-old, named to the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California less than four years ago, is the latest defection in an accelerating nationwide trend toward leaving the federal bench long before retirement age to earn more money in private practice. Vacancies in the federal judiciary are mounting, and too few of the best legal minds are stepping forward to replace them, judicial analysts say. They attribute what they see as a troubling phenomenon to Congress' failure for nearly two decades to pass a significant pay increase for federal judges or to expand their numbers to handle a soaring caseload.

Under pressure from a Los Angeles County supervisor, Sheriff Lee Baca has agreed to allocate $3 million from his department's already battered budget to help clear a yawning backlog of untested DNA evidence collected after rapes and sexual assaults. The funds will jump-start what has been an uneven effort by the Sheriff's Department over the last several months to deal with unanalyzed samples of blood, semen and other genetic material from nearly 4,700 cases that have long languished in storage freezers.

Former employees of Aurora Las Encinas Hospital, a private psychiatric facility in Pasadena, filed a class-action lawsuit Thursday against the owner alleging that chronic understaffing has compromised patient care. The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court on behalf of four former employees, says understaffing forced Las Encinas staff to work past the ends of their shifts, with no overtime pay, to complete work obligations.

`The UCLA Center for Health Policy Research has revised an earlier study detailing severe shortages of dentists in several California counties. A technical error -- which arose because some ZIP Codes span two counties -- caused an underestimate in the total number of active dentists and the ratio of dentists to population in some areas. The overall remain largely the same: Some counties are experiencing a severe shortage and others may soon see shortages when aging dentists retire.

Although some Orange County agricultural employers disputed his conclusion, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service Western Regional Commissioner Harold Ezell claimed Tuesday that reported labor shortages on California farms reflect "more a perception than reality."

The Christmas season began in early September this year in Hartford, Conn., or at least, that's when retailers around the labor-hungry city began running newspaper ads for seasonal help, and posting plaintive signs announcing "Help Wanted--All Positions." These days some fast-food restaurants around Hartford advertise counter jobs offering vacations, fringe benefits and starting salaries that have been raised to $6 an hour from the long-standard minimum wage of $3.35.

Have a toothache in Alpine County? Tough luck. There are no active dentists there, making it the most underserved dental population in California, according to a report released Thursday by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. The 700-square-mile mountainous region is one of several counties with severe dentist shortages. San Benito and Inyo counties have less than one dentist per 5,000 people; Imperial and Colusa counties have less than one dentist per 4,000.

University of California hospital nurses voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike in a dispute about staffing levels, the California Nurses Assn. said Tuesday. The vote, which ended Sunday night, allows the negotiating team to call a strike if it reaches a point where it feels that further talks are fruitless. Beth Kean, director of the association's University of California division, said the nurses are upset because UC has been cutting staff at all five hospitals for what appears to be financial reasons, even though the hospitals are profitable.