Paper, plastic or pander?

THE LOS ANGELES UNIFIED School District faces a perennial shortage of math and science teachers. High school students face the perennial problem of boring economics classes. So we’ve come up with an ideal win-win: Send the kids straight to City Hall. There isn’t a finer setting in all the county to witness up close the disastrous, unintended (though predictable) consequences of legislators trying to micromanage individual sectors of the economy.

When it comes to dealing with large-scale retailers that have the nerve to do business in this city, the City Council flunks Econ 101. On Thursday, the city was rightly sued for equal-protection violations by the California Grocers Assn., a trade group representing more than 6,000 food stores (including Supervalu Inc., which agreed in February to buy Albertsons Inc.) The supermarkets are challenging an ordinance prohibiting any buyer of a grocery store larger than 15,000 square feet from firing any employee in the first 90 days without sufficient “cause.� Even after 90 days, cutbacks would be dictated in order of seniority.

It’s tempting to make a crack here about the council knowing more about the sausage-selling business than Vons, but legislation of this kind is no joke. There are few better ways to discourage large employers from buying or creating businesses than by telling them how they can hire and fire employees.

Council member Jan Perry told The Times this week that the ordinance is intended to protect the “vulnerable.� Really? How about the vulnerable people in her district who would like a job? Or the slightly less vulnerable people who would like more convenient grocery shopping? After the 1992 riots, activists begged for grocery stores to do business in South L.A. Yet now the council requires giant retailers to survive an “economic impact report� before being allowed to operate in even the most blighted of neighborhoods.

Like the Wal-Mart law (aimed technically at stores larger than 100,000 square feet that devote at least 10% of their sales floor to food), the union-crafted supermarket initiative was a transparent attempt to affect a single company. The ordinance was hustled through the council’s back door, without the usual public input, so it would apply to Supervalu’s purchase of Albertsons.

Even if that linkage wasn’t blatant, the council should be more concerned with public safety, utility services and potholes than singling out one sliver of the economy for micro-regulation. Supermarkets have less reason than ever to do business here, and now taxpayers will be on the hook to defend a law that should never have been written in the first place.