As co-director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast, Daniel J.B. Mitchell tracks local, national and international trends in the workforce to decipher how jobs are affected by everything from trade restrictions to the widespread use of cell phones. He also has worked as a consultant for the Federal Reserve, the Congressional Budget Office, and the U.S. Department of Labor, and was chief economist to the Pay Board, the federal agency that administered the final phase of President Nixon’s wage and price controls. The Business Journal interviewed Mitchell about changes taking place in today’s workplace.

Question: How much has the makeup of the workforce changed because of computer-age technology?

Answer: There has been dramatic change that displaces some types of jobs and creates others. For example, in the 1970s the Bureau of Labor Statistics was projecting a much larger growth in clerical jobs than what resulted; perhaps those jobs didn’t come about because word-processing systems substituted for people who were using typewriters.

Q: Has the adoption of new technologies been the primary factor, or have other factors like international competition played a bigger role?

A: Competition has some displacement impact on the domestic workforce. The argument is over how much.

Countries tend to specialize in the production factors that they have in high supply. What does much of the developed world have in high supply? Raw labor.

Even some of the more sophisticated technologies like computers and electronic equipment tend to first get developed in a limited number of places. Then they become items that can be stamped out on an assembly line that doesn’t require a lot of skilled labor to run.

Sophisticated products end up coming from the same places as export textiles and apparel China, the rest of Asia, Mexico. You can produce relatively standardized products with relatively unskilled labor.

Q: The intensity and scope of work are expanding. People are expected to work longer hours and maintain a faster pace. Companies are trimming their workforces. In that environment, are people working better, or just harder?

A: Looking at the labor market today, if there’s a single characteristic, it’s a labor shortage. Some jobs may not be getting done because the person to do the job just isn’t there. Employers are having to figure out creative ways to get jobs done, which includes asking employees to take on additional responsibilities.

When the labor market doesn’t supply what you need, then you have two choices: upgrade the people you’ve got, or hire people who don’t meet your standards and provide the training in-house to get people to the level you want.

You can find examples of companies that took downsizing as kind of a fad and overdid it. Boeing, for example, may have gone too far; they got rid of people they discovered they needed, then they had to hire them back or find other people who could do the work or make do in one way or another.

L.A. County has lagged in experiencing labor shortages, but the Anderson Forecast suggests that may change. In Silicon Valley, employment has leveled out because of humongous housing costs and transportation problems.

Parts of Orange County have experienced serious labor shortages, so L.A. County may be the next place that companies go.

Q: Which local industries are thriving in this tech-heavy environment?

A: The most obvious example is entertainment/multimedia the Hollywood special-effects processes that have become computerized and animated. It’s possible to do all sorts of things with technology that weren’t conceivable 10 or 15 years ago. A lot of jobs that are in high demand are a direct result of the expansion in technology.

The whole creative sector of the local economy has changed because of technology, some parts in unexpected ways.

Take architecture. It’s not a sector that employs a lot of people, but you have people like Frank Gehry. If you go into their studios, you don’t find a lot of drafting tables. What you find are high-end computers that do things that people used to do in laborious ways by hand designing and imaging things and looking at them from different angles. If you were a student of architecture today, you would be trained in a much different way than you would have been 10 or 20 years ago.

The fast pace of technology is also having an impact on health care, especially when you think about devices like magnetic resonance imagers. These things cost a lot of money, and new devices are constantly being developed. There’s always a question of who’s going to invest in them. Then you need to have trained technicians to operate them.

Another industry that has benefited is the manufacturers of medical instruments, not just in L.A. but in Orange County. Then there are some pretty low-tech industries that benefit from the high-tech sector, like the companies that make the boxes that you put computers in before you ship them

Q: In this high-paced environment, are people getting stressed out?

A: The only area we have any kind of accurate measure is in the high use of overtime in manufacturing. These are factory workers, not the sorts of professionals who might be complaining about additional stresses, but it may indicate that the demands of the workplace are increasing.

This (overtime) pattern has persisted throughout the ’90s, even though the labor market has fluctuated (from soft to tight) over the years. The pattern has not changed.

There may be some change in the way employers are utilizing labor in a longer-term sense. It’s quite possible that employers have converted to a different time calculation (and have increased) the expectations they have for their workers.

In manufacturing, with union contracts, when you hire more people, you add to your benefit load. (Companies have to pay more for health care, pensions, and the like.) But if you merely make the same people work more hours, you only have to pay the labor costs.

Q: So it’s cheaper to demand more from your existing workers than it is to hire more people?

A: That’s right.

Q: Labor union membership continues to decline. How can unions respond to a workforce that’s more fluid?

A: In part, they’re diversifying. At UCLA, there was an election to organize teaching assistants; the union was a local of the United Auto Workers. They’ve gotten into the higher-education arena.

Hollywood is still highly unionized, perhaps by accident. You’ve got a fluid workforce in which people move from project to project rather than from employer to employer, so unions adapted. They fulfill certain roles that might otherwise be taken by management job referral, information networks, implementing revenue sharing from new developments like videotapes or DVD.

Hollywood unions also have benefit funds that follow members around from project to project; you can move from one job to another and still maintain your health insurance.

One really old industry has always had that model the construction industry. Those unions go back to the 19th century and have always had benefit funds that covered the workers in the whole area rather than those of individual employers.

Unions may end up returning to an earlier kind of model like that, with people moving around more fluidly and taking their cards with them, so to speak.

Other unions are focusing on changing demographics. Hotel and restaurant workers, janitorial services, and health care workers are largely Latino. Manufacturing in L.A. is becoming a Latino workforce, too. The unions have attracted Latino organizers and gotten active in Latino community organizations. Now, it’s mainly a public relations strategy. Whether it will lead to Latinos organizing in these industries is an iffy proposition.

Q: What role does the education system play in preparing people for the workforce? Is “lifelong learning” more than a clich & #233;?

A: We have a chronic problem in the K-12 area and don’t seem to be on the way to resolving it. Cutting class size may help. Of course, if you cut class size, you have to hire more teachers. There are concerns about teacher quality and teacher training.

On the other hand, we do pretty well with higher education. Community colleges are trying to compensate for what the K-12 schools aren’t providing. Some of the more ambitious community colleges like Santa Monica College see that as their mission; they advertise that they are the entrance (point) to UCLA.

In some sense, we’re stepping around high school, the K-12 problem, and trying to catch up by using the higher-education system.

Q: What about aerospace?

A: The combination of cuts in the defense budget and a loss of local market share even in the ’80s, when the industry was booming is a big reason L.A. had a bigger recession in the early ’90s than some other parts of the country. It’s also why the area lagged in recovering.

We have a lot of consolidation in aerospace. There’s no longer a McDonnell-Douglas; we’ve got a few branch plants of companies that are headquartered somewhere else. If Boeing gets a contract, it has to decide whether it wants to “outsource” it down here rather than build it in Seattle or use some subcontractor.

The Anderson Forecast is projecting a bottoming-out of aerospace and a bit of a comeback if the defense budget increases. But that may not happen.

You can say our local economy is no longer so vulnerable to the “one-customer” model, when we were either selling to the federal government or to no one.

Aerospace companies and engineers are also using their knowledge for commercial purposes rather than relying on the federal government. There’s more commercial activity and less defense.