Concomitant with the decline of established manufacturing regions in the U.S. has been a rise in both output and employment in service industries. Of these producer services, the financial service industries have undergone substantial change as a result of intensified competition, domestic deregulation, and technical change. Financial services are important employers, and they influence the competitiveness of most other industries by virtue of their control over the money supply and the credit system. As world financial markets have become more international, the coordination and control of financial flows is concentrating in a few select centers of banking and commercial capital. After London, Tokyo, and New York, Los Angeles has risen to a position as the financial center of the west coast in terms of employment, assets, deposits, and loan activity. This research investigates how the restructuring of financial services since 1970 has affected the demand for, and the composition of, labor in Los Angeles. The research will link changes in forms of competition and regulation, technical change, and industrial organization with changing employment strategies in commercial banking. Analysis of secondary data will be complemented by semi- structured interviews with senior bank management in order to establish how commercial banks reorganize their internal and external operations to remain competitive, to uncover the strategies they use to restructure labor and lower costs, and to determine whether restructuring affects different labor pools in terms of wages, hours worked, turnover, and job security. An examination of changing employment practices in commercial banking will extent an understanding of how industrial restructuring affects different groups of labor. It will also inform broader theoretical and policy debates about the growth of tertiary employment in the face of a decline in manufacturing employment in U.S. cities.
