Strike: New Pawn in County Negotiations

Labor leader Phil Giarrizzo’s eyes flashed with excited intensity as he summed up his basic approach to ongoing contract talks between his union and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors’ conservative majority, dismissed by him as “bozos.”

“The choices for us, really, are slow death--meaning roll over and agree with their philosophical program and cut our losses--or the choice for us is to fight back,” said Giarrizzo, head of the county’s largest public employee union. “We’ve chosen to fight back because that’s the obligation we have to our members.”

Asked to define “fight back,” Giarrizzo’s face wrinkled into the uncontrolled grin of a novice poker player who has just filled an inside straight. “I’m preparing for whatever actions they (the members) choose to exercise,” he said.

Including a strike? Giarrizzo, looking serious, said: “If that’s the one, that’s the one. It’s always the possibility that you have to think about and prepare for. You don’t just walk out on strike. Any crazy fool can walk out. Walking out is the easiest part.

“It’s getting back in that’s always the problem.”

Giarrizzo stressed that his union, the Service Employees International Union, Local 660, wants to reach a peaceful accord by the time contracts expire Aug. 31, but he added: “We can’t continue to make all of the sacrifices. A lot of our members are expecting raises of 10% and upwards.”

While Giarrizzo’s Local 660 is one of 21 unions representing county employees, it bargains for 40,000 of the county’s nearly 70,000 employees, although the union has a dues-paying membership of about 18,000. Among the diverse groups represented by the local at the bargaining table are clerical workers, deputy public defenders, prosecutors, blue-collar workers, welfare eligibility workers and nurses.

Leaders of the other unions--representing employees ranging from deputy sheriffs to white-collar workers--have bargained at a much lower decibel level than Giarrizzo. They have expressed confidence that they will reach a settlement with the county. But, they say, they are under intense pressure from their members to produce a contract superior to the one approved in 1983, which included a wage freeze the first year and a 5% pay hike the second.

The fundamental issue between the county and all the unions involves pay and fringe benefits. All the unions are seeking pay raises and an improvement in benefits such as payments for health and dental care. The county has taken no position yet on a pay raise. But in early bargaining, the county has asked for a reduction in some fringe benefits, including holidays and sick leave.

Regardless of Giarrizzo’s presence, this year’s county labor negotiations already contain volatile ingredients: an uncertain funding source for pay raises; a threatened cutoff next year of $60 million in federal revenue sharing; rising demands for county services, particularly for the homeless, and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling granting public employees overtime pay instead of compensatory time off.

That decision’s impact has yet to be assessed, but it will likely cost the county millions of dollars, particularly for deputy sheriffs and firefighters, who traditionally have received days off instead of overtime.

Complicating the picture further are two other factors: county negotiators’ view of Giarrizzo as “unpredictable” and a new weapon--legal strikes--given to Giarrizzo and most other public employee unions by the California Supreme Court in a landmark decision last May.

Since 1966, when California’s public employees won the right to bargain collectively, there have been 46 work stoppages against the county, most of which were limited to brief sickouts or slowdowns. Full-fledged strikes were illegal, and there were none.

As a result of the state Supreme Court’s ruling, in a case involving Local 660, Chief Administrative Officer James C. Hankla ordered all county departments to plan for the worst.

A few weeks before the state Supreme Court’s right-to-strike ruling, Hankla proposed a budget providing no employee pay raises this year. If implemented, that proposal will mean that the county’s 72,000-employee work force will receive no wage hike during three of the four years between 1983 and 1987.

County supervisors, however, agreed in closed session after the ruling that some sort of pay increase was necessary, although several supervisors said in interviews that “fairness,” not the state Supreme Court’s action, motivated the wage-hike decision. Supervisors, however, are faced with the problem of where to find the money for pay hikes.

Vehicle License Fees

Management and labor may have located a pot of about $42 million in the form of a controversial increase in the amount of money the state collects from motor vehicle license fees. The proposal, which cleared the state Senate last week after intensive joint lobbying by Hankla, county supervisors and the various unions, still faces an uncertain future in the Assembly and, finally, on the governor’s desk.

The license money would provide less than a 3% pay increase for county employees, Hankla said, adding that about $90 million is needed for a 5% hike. If the pending legislation fails, Hankla said, supervisors might be forced to dip into other reserves or cut further into county programs that recently were trimmed by 2%. Such reductions could mean as many as 1,300 layoffs, he added.

Even with the money from Sacramento, however, the county will still face labor problems. Both labor and management agree that selling a lean contract to rank-and-file workers will be difficult.

“We got no pay raise (in 1983) and that was a real hard pill for our members to swallow,” said Les Robbins, president of the Assn. for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs. “We kind of sold it to them that lightning ain’t going to strike again.”

Robbins survived an ouster attempt by members angered by the 1983 no-raise agreement, but others were not so lucky.

Larry Simcoe, president of the Los Angeles County Fire Fighters, unseated former president Dallas Jones largely on a campaign that he could produce a better settlement this year than Jones did in 1983.

Simcoe acknowledged that he has promised the 2,400 county firefighters that he can win a better contract for them, then added: “If not, they’ll probably look for somebody else that can produce.

“My survival is probably predicated on my ability to provide a substantial increase.”

While employing a less militant approach than Giarrizzo, leaders of other county unions say a number of issues may complicate the negotiations. These include the county’s aim to increase the services it contracts out to the private sector and to eliminate a number of holiday and sick leave benefits.

But those issues are not generally considered by either side to be enough to stand in the way of an eventual settlement. Except in the case of Local 660.

‘Willing to Go to War’

“It certainly appears to me that they are ready and willing to go to war,” said an official of another union, who asked not to be named. The official quickly added, “I didn’t say able.”

How the Board of Supervisors would react to a mass walkout is unclear. The current board majority--conservatives Pete Schabarum, Deane Dana and Mike Antonovich--has taken a hard-line stance against public employee strikes, going so far as to draft two ballot measures in two years that called for the automatic firing of any striking employee. Both measures were voided by court orders.

The three conservatives also have applauded President Reagan’s firing of more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in August, 1981. The state Supreme Court’s right-to-strike ruling, a top county official said, does not guarantee an employee who walks off his job that it will be there when a strike ends.

Giarrizzo, who once taught collective bargaining at San Jose City College, said a walkout is not the only option if negotiations end in a stalemate.

“The union may strike. The union may sit in. The union may have a pray-in,” Giarrizzo said. “The union may chain ourselves together, form a human circle or have a fast for 90 days. There are all kinds of tactics in the arsenal.”