Temporary Employment

The Los Angeles city parks department plans to lay off nearly 140 temporary workers and reduce hours for hundreds more, cutbacks that union officials argued Wednesday will lead to dirtier restrooms, unkempt playgrounds and reduced security at Griffith Observatory. The job cuts began in September and will continue this week, focused primarily on part-time workers across the city who maintain ball fields and recreation centers.

Like others classified by the Los Angeles County bureaucracy as a temporary student worker, Patricia Lopez, 51, was not temporary and not a student. For two decades she has answered phones in county health clinics, a job she took initially to get off welfare. Today, Lopez works about 39 hours a week and takes home little more than $1,000 a month.

With Christmas fast approaching, Molly Oswaks has checked out stores in the Grove shopping center, boutiques in Larchmont Village and shops along 3rd Street. All across Southern California and the country, the search is on -- not for the perfect gift but for holiday jobs. And the news isn't good with financial uncertainty in the air. A sophomore at New York University from Hancock Park, Oswaks took this semester off and started looking for job openings in September.

Immigration agents arrested 69 people Thursday in raids on a temporary-employment agency's offices and places where it provided illegal immigrants as workers, including the port of Baltimore, authorities said. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents also seized a bank account containing more than $600,000 from the company, Jones Industrial Network.

Nearly seven years ago, colleagues Rick Hammond and Myra Mendizabal sorted through a stack of resumes and applications spread across a living room floor, the only work space they could spare as they started a recruiting business out of an Encino home that Hammond shared with five roommates.

The sun was beating down and a hot Santa Ana wind on the verge of kicking up Saturday but, as the organizer of a workshop titled "The Business of Santa" pointed out to his largely red-garbed, bearded audience, Christmas was a mere 100 days away. So, inside a small conference room at a freeway-close San Dimas motel, nearly 40 Santa Clauses, and a fair number of Mrs.

The fishing boats and hiking trails offer a welcome respite for countless visitors at the Wagon Trail Resort along Lake Michigan. This summer, however, the getaway has also become a lifeline for casualties of the economy who are about to go under. A factory worker once employed by General Motors awakens before dawn to oversee an assembly line of pastries in the bakery. A husband and wife who lost their business and home now staff the buffet and reception desk. Throughout the region, employers and job-placement officials have reported a rush of applications from American workers who are interested in hard-to-fill seasonal jobs, many of which traditionally go to foreign students.

Insurance authorities say two Southern California business executives have been charged with defrauding the state of $18 million in a workers' compensation scam. State Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner said David Zahler and David Tai were charged after a 2 1/2 -year investigation of their temporary employment company, Staffing Services Inc. in Bellflower. Zahler, who is chief executive, and Tai, who is chief financial officer, are accused of misrepresenting the type of employees for whom they were seeking workers' compensation coverage so they could pay cheaper premiums.

President Bush stressed his commitment Saturday to tougher efforts to prevent illegal immigration, while maintaining that a temporary worker program should be part of the nation's strategy to protect its borders. "To defend this country, we have to enforce our borders," Bush said in his weekly radio address. "When our borders are not secure, terrorists, drug dealers and criminals find it easier to sneak into America."

The union member on the picket line and the replacement worker who took his job kept their eyes on each other during the 20-week strike and lockout. As long as Tom Wilson could peer through the plate-glass windows and spot Demond Camper uncrating tomatoes or spraying lettuce in the sparsely supplied, infrequently shopped corner of Vons, he knew the supermarket chains were suffering and the union had a fighting chance to protect his wages and benefits.