Strike Adds to Montana Snow Hazards as Plows Are Idle : Labor: About 4,500 public employees hold out for 60 cents more per hour, which the governor vetoed. New storm may shut interstates again.

A spring blizzard that struck central Montana overnight closed interstate highways across several passes Friday because snowplow drivers are on strike. So are the state’s highway patrolmen, parole officers, university workers and prison guards.

Highway Department officials said another snowstorm forecast to hit Friday night could dump up to four more feet of snow in the mountains. Bozeman Pass through the Bridger Range on Interstate 90 was closed to all but emergency traffic and Homestake Pass over the Continental Divide on Interstate 90 was closed for several hours Friday because of snow. It reopened after a department supervisor cleared the highway.

In all, 4,500 state employees--about a third of the total--walked off their jobs Wednesday night in Montana’s worst-ever strike by public employees. Since then, skeleton crews of Highway Patrol supervisors have been responding only to emergencies. The Montana National Guard is manning the state prison and hospitals and almost 4,000 felons on probation and parole are unsupervised. The state’s university system is all but shut down.

The strike followed Republican Gov. Stan Stephens’ veto of a compromise bill to give the workers a 60-cents-an-hour raise. On Friday the governor offered a raise of about 48 cents, but the independent Montana Public Employees Assn. and the AFL-CIO-affiliated Montana Federation of State Employees said their members would stay off the job until they got the 60 cents.

Professors at the University of Montana in Missoula were largely honoring the picket lines. Some held classes in nearby apartments and restaurants.

“To hell with him,” said 72-year-old Jean Skelton as word of the governor’s latest offer was passed along her shivering picket line at the university Friday morning. After 14 years as a food-service worker, she earns $6.71 an hour and recently had her hours cut from 40 to 34 a week, she said. Like other MPEA members, her last raise was 2.5% in 1989, and that was after a four-year wage freeze.

Starting pay for state workers ranges from $13,785 for a secretary to $19,233 for a civil engineer and $29,015 for a lawyer. Even relative to Montana’s low cost of living, state employees are “miserably” underpaid, said David Stiteler of the MPEA’s main office in Helena, the state capital.

Stephens is pushing a “market-based” pay plan that would peg state workers’ salaries to wages in the private sector and in neighboring states. He says his plan would cost the state about $55 million in additional payroll a year, while the unions’ plan would cost $80 million a year extra.

The Montana Legislature--which is Democratic-controlled in both houses and only convenes for 90 days every other year--went into a special recess Friday on the last day of its session. The leadership said the recess would last until the governor and the unions reached an agreement--a decision that infuriated both the governor and the unions.

Stiteler of the MPEA said Friday it was “unconscionable” for the Legislature effectively to bow out of the dispute. “For them to walk away from their jobs now is really abandoning the strikers,” he said.

Members of the Senate and House leadership could not be reached for comment Friday.