CIVIL UNREST EMPLOYER SURVEY

Immediately following the civil unrest of April-May1992, the Employment Development Department (EDD), with the support of the State Department of Commerce, the City and County of Los Angeles, and numerous local economic-development and employment and- training agencies, set out to identify employers in need of help in order to refer them to agencies providing appropriate assistance and to provide one factor for use in estimating the extent to which local employment had been affected. For this purpose, a decision was made to conduct a survey of employers located within the areas of Los Angeles County most affected by the civil unrest.

As the basis for determining employers to be surveyed, EDD used five primary data sources:

1. The Unemployment Insurance (UI) tax records. Virtually all employers in the county are required to cover their employees with unemployment insurance. From this program, EDD receives monthly employment and quarterly payroll information from employers.
   
   
2. A 1990 employment-site project. This project is a one-time study that supplemented the UI-tax records with survey data that provided employment by physical location for all employers in the Los Angeles County.
   
   
3. Lists of addresses of buildings and the names of some businesses that were damaged during the civil unrest. These were prepared by various municipal and county building and safety departments.
   
   
4. Records of eligible claimants who filed Disaster Unemployment Assistance (DUA)claims. DUA is a special program in which individuals who might not otherwise qualify for UI benefits can receive help. This list supplements the UI employer list since many of the DUA claimants were self-employed.
   
   
5. Los Angeles City Clerk business licenses file. EDD received a listing of business licensees that had been matched with addresses of damaged buildings.
   
   
   
   
6. A list of all employers in the ZIP codes affected by the civil unrest was developed from these sources. After removing duplicate addresses, the sources were combined, and 54,416 questionnaires were mailed to businesses in early July. The mailing included a translation of the EDD Director's cover letter in both Spanish and Korean. An 800-number telephone bank provided assistance in English, Spanish, Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese. Table 2summarizes the status of the questionnaires mailed out by the source of the mailing address.
   
   

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When survey forms were returned to EDD, all requests for assistance were immediately forwarded to responsible agencies including the Trade and Commerce Agency, local Service Delivery Areas, and EDD's Tax Branch and field offices. A total of 17,355survey forms were returned between July and the end of September. These represented a 31.9 percent response rate.

Of the 17,355 firms that responded to the survey, 2,095requested one or more types of assistance. These responses included3,451 separate requests for aid (see Graph 16 for specific type of requests made). Over 58 percent of the employers requesting assistance needed help with short-term loans, over 30 percent requested assistance in letting people know that their businesses were still open, and over 20 percent wanted tax credit information.

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Analysis of the 1992 Los Angeles Civil Unrest