Power of Organized Labor in L.A. Rests in Sacramento, Not in Disrupted Consumers

Now that our two major local labor disputes have each surpassed three weeks in length, the strike/lockout of grocery retail clerks seems to be retaining the attention of a public still inconvenienced by pickets at two leading supermarket chains. But the second strike, which involves mechanics at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, is much more interesting for what it says about the future of labor relations in California.

It’s not that the transit strike has captured much public notice or wrought noticeable havoc on the local economy or even local routine. Beyond a possible lengthening of rush-hour commutes, this strike, which has deprived 450,000 people of their daily transportation, has scarcely impinged on the region’s consciousness. Even the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., which tracks regional economic burps the way Caltech records seismic shudders, says most of the broader effects are so far invisible.

The strike’s real importance is that it foreshadows that conflicts between public employee unions and public employers are likely to be defining features of the landscape in the coming Schwarzenegger era.

“This is a conflict between municipal unions and employers, and it’s just going to heat up,” says Victor Silverman, an expert on labor history at Pomona College.

Gov.-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger, after all, made the renegotiation of public employee contracts a linchpin of his pledge to balance the state budget. The MTA’s insistence that it has no money to fund an improved transit contract is an early skirmish in this war. I’m not the first to observe that taking a hard line with entrenched unions is easier said than done, but it might be instructive to contemplate the size of the challenge in this case.

Public employment is the beating heart of organized labor in California. What’s the most heavily unionized city in the state? Sacramento. The percentage of California public employees with union membership, 53.8%, handily outstrips the 38% level in the same sector nationwide. Five of the seven California unions that showed any membership growth at all between 1991 and 2002 served public employees, with the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, taking the prize with a gain of 5.9%.

Unionization in the public sector allowed California to buck the nationwide trend of declining union representation in recent years.

It also has given the SEIU and its sister public sector unions unexampled political power in Sacramento. Organized labor poured more than $10 million into the recall campaign, virtually all of it in support of Gov. Gray Davis or Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante. Similar generosity has paid off richly for years in the sort of pro-labor legislation that gives California business lobbyists nearly constant heartburn.

Labor’s influence at the statehouse is so strong that some people think it’s more effective than job action at getting the unions’ way.

“The power of organized labor in L.A. is political power, coming from its ability to finance political campaigns in the region,” says D.J. Waldie, a social historian whose book “Holy Land” recounts his upbringing in and around Lakewood.

Waldie thinks that’s because L.A.’s sprawl makes it too hard to shut down a crucial service through job stoppages alone. “Mass transit and supermarket sales don’t seem to be choke points in the Southern California economy,” he says, explaining why the recent job actions have failed even to bring employers to the bargaining table.

That’s not to say that choke points don’t exist. Last year’s 10-day lockout of longshore workers from West Coast ports over a contract dispute was so disruptive that President Bush was forced to intervene. (The dockworkers won pension improvements in return for letting employers implement new technologies at dockside.) Nurses, who are highly skilled and hard to replace, have won good settlements at local hospitals by calling a few one-day job slowdowns.

The Los Angeles janitors strike in 2000, meanwhile, was sufficiently irksome to tenants in high-rent office buildings that then-Mayor Richard Riordan had to get personally involved in the talks. By contrast, the 32-day transit strike that came a few months later had so little effect on Riordan’s social set that he didn’t even cut short a European vacation to deal with it.

The same phenomenon is unfolding today. Mayor James K. Hahn, a member of the MTA board, did not utter a word about its labor unrest until after the strike began, when he was goaded into making a statement of concern during a public appearance.

The obvious reason for this lack of urgency is that a huge proportion of those 450,000 MTA riders are so disenfranchised that their problems barely return a “ping” to our leaders’ political sonar. The median household income of MTA bus riders is $12,000 a year. Nearly 80% are Hispanic or African American. They’re largely excluded from the car culture of Southern California, so their burdens are even more invisible to the majority of us riding the freeways.

“People inconvenienced by this strike aren’t well organized as consumers,” observes Peter Dreier, a professor of politics at Occidental College. As workers, they’re not generally employed by big companies with political clout of their own, which further diminishes their influence.

This has encouraged the MTA to take its firm stand against binding arbitration or other outside intervention to settle the strike. Such a position would never fly in Boston or New York, where a transit halt, disrupting the lives of millions of middle-class voters, would keep officials and union leaders shackled to the bargaining table until they made a deal.

In those circumstances, the government’s protestation of poverty would be regarded as a strong bargaining chip but hardly the last word. Here, where mass transit is widely regarded as a marginal service, officials such as MTA Chairman (and L.A. County Supervisor) Zev Yaroslavsky are hailed for holding the line against tax increases and public employee giveaways.

One would never presume to say that Yaroslavsky doesn’t honestly cherish the fiscal interests of all county taxpayers. But the contours of his district, which encompasses Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Malibu and chunks of West L.A. and the Valley, suggest that habitual bus and train riders don’t represent an electorally significant bloc of his constituents.

The MTA’s intransigent style of negotiating is sure to meet a lot more resistance as the pressures on unionized public employees escalate. The public unions have been prominent whipping boys since the state fiscal crisis erupted, but here’s betting that they won’t take too many such blows lying down.

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Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. Michael Hiltzik can be reached at golden.state@latimes.com.