Los Angeles County Industry

Garbage and old tires litter the gray industrial area outside Farmhouse Furniture on East 59th Street in South-Central Los Angeles. Inside, the view is decidedly different. The factory is humming. Some 60 workers are milling, drilling and carving pine from dawn to midnight, producing 250 stylish beds, night stands and dressers a week.

If the economy were a game show, Southern California's counties might turn to Los Angeles and say: "You are the weakest link." In the business world, though, there is no bullying master of ceremonies to pronounce judgment. Instead, statistics tell the story: The L.A. core has been losing its middle class and providing fewer opportunities for its poor, low-skilled residents. Neighboring counties are gaining good-paying jobs and attracting growth industries such as high technology.

Since the depths of the last recession, in the winter of 1993, more than 300,000 new jobs have been created in Los Angeles County. But a majority of these jobs pay substantially below-average wages--less than $25,000 a year--and barely one in 10 averages $60,000 or more, a Times analysis shows. And perhaps most significantly, this recovery has yielded virtually no net jobs in industries that pay solid middle-class salaries, between $40,000 and $60,000.

Job losses in Los Angeles County's aerospace and apparel industries allowed metropolitan Chicago to edge it out as the nation's No. 1 factory center, but Southern California remains a dominant manufacturing region because of growth in outlying areas, according to the latest report by a local economic group. The study by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. documents the ongoing shift in the region's manufacturing base to surrounding counties where land is cheaper and more abundant.

Boyle-Midway, maker of household cleaning products like Woolite cold-water washing liquid and Easy-Off oven cleaner, will close its manufacturing plant in City of Commerce Sept. 30, it was learned Thursday. The decision to close the plant was quietly disclosed to about 230 employees earlier this week.

Although building rail cars and buses may offer some long-term hope for Los Angeles County's beleaguered manufacturing sector, some experts say such transit work promises little quick relief to the area's thousands of unemployed aerospace and auto workers. The money is there, as Southern California expects to spend about $140 billion on transit improvements over the coming 30 years.

The number of manufacturing jobs in Los Angeles County is expected to fall slightly this year, local economists conclude in a report to be released Friday, but healthy employment gains elsewhere in the region are expected to mitigate any ripple effects in Southern California's bounding economy. For the first time in three years, manufacturing jobs are likely to drop 0.

Los Angeles County's broad range of software, telecommunications, aerospace and other high-tech firms produced nearly one out of every eight dollars generated in the local economy, making it the third-ranked community in a new study of the country's technology hotbeds. In the study, "America's High-Tech Economy," released Tuesday by the Milken Institute in Santa Monica, San Jose easily captured the top spot, thanks to its location in the heart of Silicon Valley.

"It's amazing how L.A. is growing," boasts an ad from the New Los Angeles Marketing Partnership, which touts the county as the place to do business. And, judging from NLAMP's press materials, much of the growth results from including nearby counties as part of Los Angeles. To support its claim that Los Angeles is No. 1 in auto design, an NLAMP news release says: "Chrysler, Ford, GM, Honda, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Toyota, Volvo and VW all have design centers here."

In the first major transaction in the Southland's fledgling "smog market," a major manufacturer in Huntington Park invested more than $1 million Tuesday buying pollution credits. Anchor Glass Container Corp. bought the right to emit 3.446 million pounds of nitrogen oxide pollution from Union Carbide, based in Torrance, for $1.21 million, or 37 cents per pound.

Identifying the source of a chromium 6 contamination in southeast Los Angeles County drinking wells will be difficult and time-consuming, given the number of industries that may have used the toxic byproduct in the region, water experts warned Tuesday. The warning comes as state Sen.

Companies being squeezed out of Commerce and other industrial centers close to Los Angeles have been heading down the freeway to the Mid-Counties market in recent years, but the same boom that has consumed nearly every square foot of industrial space in Commerce appears destined to do the same to Mid-Counties industrial land. The Mid-Counties market, also known as the Mid-Cities, is a group of communities straddling Los Angeles and Orange counties.

When the weather was hot in her La Puente neighborhood during the 1960s and 1970s, state Sen. Hilda Solis (D-La Puente) remembers the sweet stench coming off the nearby Puente Hills landfill. State Sen. Martha Escutia (D-Whittier) recalls the black freeway dust that settled on the laundry hanging from clotheslines in her East Los Angeles backyard. When her family moved to Huntington Park, she recalled, they endured the smell of animal rendering plants in nearby Vernon.

A compromise plan for a new Burbank airport terminal has come under attack by a powerful airline industry group, which cited grave concerns over plans to close the facility overnight. The opposition from the Air Transport Assn. poses a serious threat to the terminal plan, which would be paid for in part by landing fees imposed on the airlines.

Since the depths of the last recession, in the winter of 1993, more than 300,000 new jobs have been created in Los Angeles County. But a majority of these jobs pay substantially below-average wages--less than $25,000 a year--and barely one in 10 averages $60,000 or more, a Times analysis shows. And perhaps most significantly, this recovery has yielded virtually no net jobs in industries that pay solid middle-class salaries, between $40,000 and $60,000.

Los Angeles County's broad range of software, telecommunications, aerospace and other high-tech firms produced nearly one out of every eight dollars generated in the local economy, making it the third-ranked community in a new study of the country's technology hotbeds. In the study, "America's High-Tech Economy," released Tuesday by the Milken Institute in Santa Monica, San Jose easily captured the top spot, thanks to its location in the heart of Silicon Valley.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District recently released its annual list of companies emitting the largest volume of two pollutants--reactive hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen. This list covers emissions during 1988. REACTIVE HYDROCARBONS These are produced by incomplete combustion of gasoline, and from fumes from fuels, paints, and industrial and dry-cleaning solvents.

An explosives manufacturer received permission Thursday to open a plant on the site of a defunct defense plant in Santa Clarita Valley. The Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission tentatively approved a request by Special Devices Inc. to operate an explosives plant for the next 10 years on a 203-acre site in Sand Canyon east of the Antelope Valley Freeway.

Watson Land Co. will break ground Wednesday on three buildings totaling more than 450,000 square feet at the company's Dominguez Technology Center in Carson. It is one of the relatively few large industrial developments underway in a Los Angeles County market where demand for industrial space is at historic highs. The buildings are the first of 3.

The number of manufacturing jobs in Los Angeles County is expected to fall slightly this year, local economists conclude in a report to be released Friday, but healthy employment gains elsewhere in the region are expected to mitigate any ripple effects in Southern California's bounding economy. For the first time in three years, manufacturing jobs are likely to drop 0.