School Employees Asked to Take Pay Cut : Education: One-time rollback in wages is aimed at saving programs and jobs. The unusual proposal comes from Black Leadership Coalition.

Employees of the Los Angeles Unified School District are being asked to take a one-time, 4% cut in next year’s wages as a last-ditch effort to save threatened school services and more than 1,000 jobs.

The unusual proposal came Monday from a coalition of black community leaders and educators, who persuaded the Board of Education to postpone action on further budget cuts until Thursday.

If applied to all the district’s 77,000 employees, the unprecedented pay cut would save $80 million, enough to rescue all the jobs eliminated in this spring’s round of budget cutting, according to Robert Booker, the district’s chief financial officer.

But such a move would take the consent of all seven of the district’s bargaining groups, and in at least some cases a vote of their members. The board was turned down in earlier efforts to reopen contracts.

Board members, struggling to finish the job of slashing $220 million from the budget by Saturday, gave the Black Leadership Coalition on Education until Thursday morning to see if employee groups will agree to the cut.

Initially saying she was “astounded . . . that we are even considering this,” board member Roberta Weintraub urged all sides in past labor disputes to end personal attacks and work together to make the job-saving plan fly.

A one-time forfeiture of raises by a teachers union would appear to be unprecedented, according to the National Education Assn., the nation’s largest teachers union, and the California Teacher’s Assn.

The proposal puts enormous pressure on United Teachers-Los Angeles, the district’s biggest union. Representing about 35,000 teachers, counselors, school nurses, school psychologists and librarians, UTLA led its members on a nine-day strike last year that brought pay raises of 8% a year for three years. The board then gave many of its other employees the same percentage increase.

UTLA spokeswoman Catherine M. Carey said the union is still gathering information on the proposal and would wait until this morning to make a statement.

But a leader of another large union, John Tanner of Local 99 of the Service Employees International Union, said, “We’re willing to take a look at it.”

The 18,000 custodians, janitors, classroom aides, maintenance workers and bus drivers represented by Local 99, known as the School Employees Assn., account for a disproportionately large number of the jobs eliminated so far. Many of the jobs--among the lowest-paying in the district--are held by blacks, Latinos and other minorities.

“This will work only if all the employee unions support it,” Tanner said.

One of the unions, which represents workers who provide many of the district’s repair services, received a 5% wage hike this year, meaning that its members would get only a 1% pay hike.

The difficultly of getting all employee groups to agree and the fast-approaching deadline prompted skepticism from some school board members.

Others noted that the one-time forfeiture would simply mean an even bigger budget problem next year unless the board begins a comprehensive study of ways to fundamentally reorganize the nation’s second-largest school district.

Because of fund-juggling and other one-time savings actions it has taken so far, the board already faces a $100-million gap in the 1991-92 fiscal year, Booker said. The pay forfeiture proposal would increase that gap to $180 million, but Booker added that it would “at least give the district an additional year” to resolve thorny, long-term financial problems.

Like districts all over California, costs for Los Angeles schools have been rising at a much faster rate than the subsidies it receives from state and federal governments. Sacramento provides about 75% of the district’s revenues; another 10% comes from Washington.

The 4% pay reduction would be deducted from employees checks over the course of the year and would be tax deductible for employees filing so-called long-form income tax returns, Booker said. It would not affect base salary rates.

Despite the odds against getting widespread employee agreement, the proposal generated palpable excitement among members of a board clearly weary of making increasingly tough budget-balancing decisions.

With roughly $30 million to go to reach a tentative, balanced budget of just over $4 billion, the board seemed doomed to break its promise to keep cuts away from the classroom.

The proposal was forged Saturday in a meeting arranged by Assemblywoman Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) and school board member Rita Walters.

As presented to the board by John W. Mack of the Los Angeles Urban League, other alternatives that came from the meeting included withholding special integration funds from schools that have recently become predominantly minority, not paying employees for a certain number of days, and increasing class size by two in 11th and 12th grades.

Noting the jobs cut so far affect large numbers of blacks and other minorities, Mack told the board: “The African-American community is prepared to share the pain of the budget ax, equitably, with all others, but not more so than any other segment of the school district.”

But board member Mark Slavkin said he thought it was ill-advised to take such a step without extensive overhauling of the district’s way of doing business, but he agreed in the end to see what could be worked out.

Board President Jackie Goldberg said it will be up to the coalition to forge agreements with the unions.

“We tried to reopen contract talks and we were turned down, so now it’s a community effort,” she said. She added that board members will assist the coalition in any way they can.

Walters, who has angered the teachers union by blaming it for the district’s money problems, was beaming with optimism on Monday.

Praising the black community for its leadership in proposing alternatives, Walters told an impromptu news conference after the budget session: “I am confident that we can do it.”

Times researcher Tracy Thomas assisted in preparation of this story.