County Reaches Accord With Nurses, Averts Threatened Strike

A strike by Los Angeles County nurses was averted Wednesday night when a tentative agreement was reached only five hours before the walkout was to begin.

The last-minute settlement was announced by an upbeat Board of Supervisors Chairman Ed Edelman, who presided over the six-hour closed bargaining session in his office.

Terms of the proposed contract, which will be presented to the 5,126 nurses for a vote Friday and then must be ratified by the Board of Supervisors, were not revealed.

But hours later, Debbie Davenport, the head of the nurses’ bargaining team, indicated that a final agreement is far from certain.

“The salary isn’t quite where we want it to be,” she said.

The agreement was reached with only some of the 19 representatives of the nurses’ bargaining unit present for the talks. It will be presented to the nurses without recommendation, Davenport said.

Sources said the proposed agreement provides for a pay raise of 17.25% over two years.

The nurses, who staff six county hospitals and 47 neighborhood clinics, had been seeking a 22% pay increase over two years, plus increased security, including guards to escort nurses to their cars at night.

The nurses, represented by Local 660 of the Service Employees International Union, AFL-CIO, were poised to strike at 12:01 a.m. today--and hundreds of picket signs had been prepared--after talks broke down Tuesday night.

Edelman, who occasionally works as a federal mediator in private contract disputes, summoned both parties to his office in a final effort to end the stalemate.

In announcing the tentative agreement, reached shortly before 7 p.m., Edelman said it “averts a strike that could have been devastating to the county health system and the public.”

Hospital officials predicted that even a short strike could overwhelm the county’s public health care system and would severly impact private facilities, where most of the patients would be transferred.

When the nurses struck for three days in January, 1988, the county’s emergency and trauma services were severly curtailed, filling emergency rooms at private hospitals in cities throughout the county. In that dispute, a Superior Court judge ordered the nurses back to work.

County officials said they were prepared to seek a court order, as they did in 1988, directing the nurses to return to work. And the clinics and hospitals had prepared Wednesday to drastically scale back their operations--including diverting ambulances to private hospitals, discharging or transferring patients and postponing non-emergency surgery.

County nurses--who currently earn between $2,600 and $3,000 a month--claim they make less money than nurses working at private hospitals. “We want something that is going to rebuild the health care network, not to mention take care of the stress of the nurses,” union spokesman Steve Weingarten said.

The potential effects of a strike already were felt at several county facilities Wednesday, when most of the county’s 64 nurse anesthetists staged what a union official called a wildcat sick-out, forcing postponement of surgeries.

Edward J. Foley, administrator at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, said the sick-out forced the closure of three operating rooms at the 553-bed facility in Torrance.

Edelman, who treated negotiators to lunch from the county cafeteria during their talks Wednesday, joked that he promised he would “order them a chocolate Frappe if they worked hard. I think that’s what did it.”

Times staff writers Andrea Ford, Kenneth J. Garcia, John Kendall and Hector Tobar contributed to this story.