Labor Mediator Hailed for Aplomb

Initially, state mediator Draza Mrvichin doesn’t inspire confidence at the school districts and cities where he’s called to settle labor disputes.

The 47-year-old Ventura resident, who stands 6-4 and weighs 300 pounds, wears loud Hawaiian shirts, droopy polyester pants and Birkenstocks. Until recently, his briefcase bore a sticker with his favorite saying, which translates roughly to: “You must confuse me with someone who cares.”

“Originally, you’ll wonder, ‘What can this guy do for us?’ ” said David G. Miller, a Los Angeles labor attorney who represents five school districts, including the Oxnard School District.

But as school districts and cities throughout Southern California have found, looks can be deceiving. In a rare consensus, union and management officials alike say that nobody is better at jump-starting stalled contract negotiations than this 14-year veteran of the California Mediation and Conciliation Service.

Mrvichin (pronounced Merv-itch-in ) played referee in the Los Angeles Unified School District’s dispute with 34,000 teachers, whose nine-day strike in May paralyzed the nation’s second-largest school district.

A year earlier, the Orange Unified School District turned to him when 650 teachers were walking picket lines with 300 of their students.

Police Strike

He also helped to resolve the Corona Police Department strike of 1983 and the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department strike of 1981.

“He can settle anything,” said his boss, Thomas McCarthy, the mediation service’s head conciliator in Southern California.

Mrvichin is also the one who, year in and year out, tends to tussles closer to home.

In 1987, he helped Ventura County arrive at a contract settlement with the Public Employees Assn. of Ventura County, or PEAVC, just 16 hours before a potentially crippling strike.

This week, he was still working on a contract dispute between the city of Oxnard, which is in the midst of a budget crisis, and its clerical, professional and firefighting personnel, who maintain that the city is short-changing them to solve it.

Earlier this year, Mrvichin helped end the most acrimonious contract dispute in memory at the Oxnard School District, where teachers had become so exasperated with the district’s offers that they erected a billboard saying: “Oxnard--Home of Unhappy Teachers.”

‘When It’s Important’

“He’s the one I call when it’s important,” Miller said. “Draza’s the best in the state.”

Each year, he unites about 120 employers and their estranged workers in a big, burly bear hug. That means sometimes juggling a dozen cases at once and driving 30,000 miles a year on business.

Business will no doubt boom. School districts are increasingly strapped. The cost of health benefits for teachers is increasing, and so are teachers’ salary demands, fueled by expectations from Proposition 98, which increased school funding by $1.4 billion.

Ironically, Mrvichin’s approach to conciliation is to ruffle feathers.

Blunt and irreverent, Mrvichin is likely to dare a union to take the step he’s been called to prevent--a strike--or berate the proponents of a settlement proposal that he finds the least bit outlandish.

“He’ll say, ‘Why don’t you ask for the key to heaven? Your chances are about as great as getting that,’ ” said Stephen Silver, a Santa Monica labor lawyer who represents the Oxnard Firefighters Assn. and other unions.

Criticized for Comments

Tact is not Mrvichin’s long suit. He has been criticized in negotiations for calling the women present girls. He is notorious for his comments, such as telling a county’s assistant chief accounting officer that he’s so cheap his shoes squeak.

“This is not brain surgery, you know,” Mrvichin said.

And in rooms where the air hangs heavy with bureaucratese, the former defensive lineman for East Los Angeles Community College explains things in terms that everybody understands.

He warns city council members that if they stick to their guns on meager raises, their workers “won’t be happy campers.” He tells union officials with too lengthy an agenda that he is going to leave until they strip down their demands to five.

“I don’t get excited till I get down to the underwear,” Mrvichin said.

Along the way, he loosens tense situations and tries to win the confidence of opposing parties. He gives the impression that “he’s in charge and you may not be as important as you thought you were when you came into the room,” one attorney said.

“If a mediator doesn’t assert himself, then the parties are still full of themselves,” said Ed McClain, Ventura County employee relations officer. “You can’t reach an agreement because you’re still convinced how right you are and how wrong they are. This puts the situation in perspective.”

Mrvichin, who worked as a janitor and union organizer before coming to mediation, credits his success to an “almost instinctive” ability to bring people together.

“I don’t analyze what I do or why I do it . . . I just do it,” he said. But negotiators who have worked with him see nothing haphazard in his approach.

Becomes a Player

Although most mediators respect the traditional role of referee, shuttling settlement proposals between two deeply divided opponents sequestered in separate rooms, Mrvichin becomes a player. Negotiators say he is more likely than his colleagues to come up with proposals for settlements or present terms that already are on the table in such a way that they seem new.

He draws from a hefty bag of tricks. A benefit package or a bonus plan or multi-year contract that helped solve a dispute in Orange County one year may surface as a possible solution to a dispute in Ventura County the next year.

Miller speaks of how hard Mrvichin once worked to overcome the last hurdle to a settlement for teachers in the San Bernardino School District.

“Twenty-two times he asked me to drop a no-strike clause,” Miller said. “He hammered and hammered for about 4 1/2 hours on that same issue.” In the end, Miller’s side prevailed, but the experience wasn’t soon forgotten.

Elected officials are not spared Mrvichin’s withering candor.

“Most mediators are overpowered by elected officials because they tend to lose their temper,” said Mark Rona, past president of the Orange Unified teachers’ union, the Orange Unified Education Assn. “He’ll say, ‘I’ll put together a package, but you’ve got to stop messing around.’ ”

Sharp Divisions

Such was the message he gave Los Angeles school board members in May, negotiators from both sides said. Mrvichin told the trustees, who had been sharply divided on the amount that teachers should be offered, that they themselves would have to agree on a settlement before they could expect to reach a resolution. Three school board members had made public statements that gave the impression that they would support a larger increase than the board was formally offering, prompting the union to hold out, said Richard N. Fisher, the district’s head negotiator. But four days after the board reached an internal accord, the teachers had a contract.

John Britz, chief negotiator for United Teachers-Los Angeles, the Los Angeles teachers’ union, attributes the settlement to “pressure generated by teachers closing down the district” but acknowledges that “Draza forced the school board to put aside their personal differences.”

Forcing the lions and the lambs to lie together is not easy, but Mrvichin’s endurance is notorious.

Barry Hammitt, director of PEAVC, recalls one session in which Mrvichin mediated for 43 hours without a break. “People still talk about it,” he said.

And when the only issue left to be resolved in the Orange Unified School District’s strike was complaints by parents that teachers had encouraged students to join them on the picket lines, Mrvichin offered to hear the complaints one by one.

“Some mediators have the parties work out agreements themselves,” said Steve Andelson, a Cerritos attorney who represented the district in the dispute. “Mrvichin’s philosophy is that if the parties haven’t worked out a solution at the table, he needs to be more active.”

Oxnard Contract

In the final hours of negotiations on the Oxnard Educators Assn.’s last contract, Mrvichin persuaded the union to drop a demand for a premium for veteran teachers by pointing out that it would make the union’s job that much more difficult the next time around.

“Any time you negotiate for a raise, the district will beat you down because they can say, ‘Look how much money teachers earn,’ ” said Mark Prim, head of the OEA’s negotiating team. Instead, the union agreed to a smaller increase shared by its 500 members.

Mrvichin says he got his love of a good dispute from his father, a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church who encouraged lively debate at the dinner table in the family’s Alhambra home.

But the seeds may have been planted even earlier: Mrvichin’s paternal grandfather, another Serbian Orthodox priest, was a member of the Black Hand, the terrorist group that assassinated Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, touching off World War I.

That detail of Mrvichin’s lineage will not surprise anyone who has heard him describe his favorite pastime. A former college debater, he says he loves to argue “just for the sake of arguing” and claims that he can’t understand why more people don’t.

“If you don’t agree with them,” he complained, “it’s like you don’t like them.”

For Mrvichin, haggling at work is not enough. He devotes Saturdays to attending garage sales so he can “argue over a quarter or a dime.”

Still, nothing beats the heady experience of reaching a settlement, Mrvichin said. Even when he stumbles home at 1 or 2 in the morning, he awakens his wife of 12 years, Barbara Ann, to savor details with her.

“I really get a kick out of what I do,” he said. “There are some mornings when I can’t wait to get up and at ‘em.”