2 Tough Negotiators Face Off in County-Deputy Sheriffs Labor Dispute : Union Negotiator Wouldn’t Trade His ‘Ideal Labor Relations Job’

Robert J. MacLeod never took industrial relations or bargaining courses in college, but you’d never know it by looking at his Santa Ana office.

Five shelves of one book case are filled with Labor Arbitration Reports. Another bookcase holds a paperback book entitled “You Can Negotiate Anything.” On his desk is a pamphlet entitled “Strike Instructions.”

Bearded and bespectacled, a “just folks” kind of guy given to propping his feet up on his desk and discussing the soothing beaches of Mexico, MacLeod is the general manager of the Assn. of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs.

He’s held the job since joining the union as general manager in 1979, the first year it negotiated with the county as a separate bargaining unit. MacLeod represented the deputies in talks that year and has done so since.

This year’s negotiations have been the longest--and the toughest--on record, MacLeod said. And in recent weeks, bad feelings have escalated to the point at which the union membership has begun to talk loudly and seriously about a strike.

The county is pointing to a no-frills budget and a nearly empty treasury in its talks with the deputies and other members of other unions, but so far county employees do not seem to be willing to accept that explanation.

MacLeod, the son of a union carpenter and grandson of a Scot who emigrated to Canada, is not the type to scare easily.

Built like a tree trunk at 6 feet, 2 inches and 250 pounds, he played center on a basketball team in his younger days.

“I had to look up to everybody,” he laughed. “I never got to play anybody my own size.”

Now 39, he has worked as a lifeguard, an asphalt spreader on a road crew (“the worst job I ever had . . . all I remember is how hot it was), a mover for a moving company and a messenger for Orange County.

While working in the county’s surplus property office (“I was the Fred Sanford of Orange County,” he says), he became involved in the union that then represented him--the Orange County Employees Assn.--and eventually went to work for it from 1973 until 1978.

In college, he took psychology and criminology courses, and “I thought I’d probably be a police officer. But when I got into this, I guess I just found a niche. Been doing this ever since.”

Much of his time is spent representing association members who have grievances against the Sheriff’s Department or who have been charged with violating department regulations.

But once every two years or so--depending on the length of the deputies’ contract--he steps forward as part of the association’s negotiating team and spokesman for the group.

“One of the old truisms that negotiators talk about,” MacLeod said, “is that negotiating is like making love: Everybody thinks they know exactly how to do it.”

But it isn’t as easy as it looks.

“Negotiating is something nobody really understands unless they’ve done it,” MacLeod said. “There’s really not much browbeating. In some units (of other unions), there is. Some of the units--I know their negotiators pound the table and yell. We don’t do that. Reporters always say, ‘Well, what was the atmosphere? Was the county angry? Were you angry?’ Generally that doesn’t happen. It’s really pretty cordial.”

Although he calls negotiating the most important of the union’s functions, MacLeod said union leaders try to keep themselves and the membership emotionally detached.

“We take it very seriously,” he said. “But generally you only negotiate a few months every other year. So when negotiations are over, we have to go on doing business and representing our members with the sheriff’s administration, the county’s administration. It’s not like they go away or we go away. This is just a part of our relationship.”

Sheriff’s Lt. Richard Olson, who ran the personnel bureau in the Sheriff’s Department before becoming press spokesman, said he “always felt that MacLeod was very professional” in the days when they sat on different sides of the negotiating table.

“I always felt that he represented his people very well,” Olson said. “I would say he’s reasonable because he knows there are always two sides to every story. But he can get tough. He knows his facts, and he knows his labor law.”

For MacLeod, the problems of the world have not been confined to negotiating difficulties with the county this summer.

The California Angels baseball team has fallen out of the running in the pennant race.

And now “Hill Street Blues” has gone off the air, meaning that “my television viewing has come to an end.”

MacLeod does keep up with his reading, two or three books a week, “a little bit of everything,” but especially best-selling fiction. Long weekends give him a chance to escape to Mexico and the beach at Estero with his wife and two teen-age children.

MacLeod said he’s had offers of other jobs at more money than the $44,000 a year that he now makes, but “this is the ideal labor relations job as far as I’m concerned.”

“The (union) does have some influence. You don’t have the feeling of helplessness. We have a small board of directors. They’re cohesive. . . . (There is a) small enough membership that I know an awful lot of the members. I know their faces, and I know their names. And they know me.”

“I’ve been doing this long enough that I know all the players on both sides. And I know the history of things. And it makes me more effective. I think I’m more effective doing this kind of work right here in this county for this group of employees than I could be in any other job.”