County Employees Agree to Call Off General Strike : Labor: Progress is made during negotiations. The union says 40,000 employees will stay on the job today.

Fewer than 15 hours after Los Angeles County social workers walked off their jobs, a “conceptual agreement” was reached Monday evening to avert a countywide general strike threatened for today by the union representing 40,000 county workers.

Gilbert Cedillo, general manager of Local 660 of the Service Employees International Union, announced the tentative agreement at a news conference, saying: “The strategy of Rolling Thunder worked.”

“Rolling Thunder” was the union’s tactic of calling selective one-day walkouts by any of its 21 bargaining units in support of all of its negotiating demands.

Elliot Marcus, county director of employee relations, said the proposed agreement will be submitted to the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors behind closed doors at today’s meeting.

Marcus said Monday night: “We have established a framework for settlement. We have moved far enough ahead for the parties to be satisfied that an agreement can be reached shortly, and as a result, the union has called off a strike.”

Cedillo said many major economic issues remain to be resolved before contracts are settled. However, a breakthrough on fringe benefits--specifically, on how the county will handle increased health insurance costs--persuaded the union to call off the strike.

The county also agreed, union officials said, not to impose parking fees on employees. Instead, union officials said, a joint labor management committee will spend the next six months developing a plan to reduce the number of cars employees use in commuting to work.

Vicki Landry, a nurse at High Desert Hospital, who served on the negotiating committee, said: “I am hoping that this will help us get a whole lot more nurses and drastically reduce the waiting time for our patients.”

A major issue for the 4,500 nurses represented by Local 660 was understaffing and unfilled nursing positions at the hospitals and 47 public health clinics. The nurses--who staged a two-day strike last week--have been fighting for improved salary and benefits to attract more nurses to county jobs, officials said.

Marcus said he and Cedillo personally hammered out the settlement in phone calls during most of Monday. He said he and Cedillo conducted personal talks while negotiating teams were sitting at the bargaining table.

Before the tentative settlement, county social workers had walked off their jobs Monday, raising tensions in already overcrowded welfare offices.

The walkout by 3,421 eligibility workers and clerical staff reduced staffing by as much as 90% at welfare offices. Many welfare recipients were forced to wait as long as six hours for assistance, and supervisors turned away hundreds of needy people.

“What we’re doing is asking clients who do not have an emergency to come back another day,” said Carol Matsui of the Department of Public Social Services.

Half of the 840 clerks in the Children’s Services Department also stayed off the job Monday, but there were no reports of significant disruption of services to abused and neglected children.

Local 660 had planned to turn up the heat on the County Board of Supervisors with the one-day strike today by half of the county’s work force of 85,000 in an effort to win pay raises and better benefits. Union leaders had rented 30 buses to bring strikers to a planned demonstration at the supervisors’ meeting today.

Local 660 represents social workers, librarians, court reporters, airport managers, public works employees, some coroner’s staff, supervising security officers and about 300 workers scheduled to help conduct today’s election in a number of smaller cities and school districts.

Before the tentative settlement was announced, Richard Siler, assistant registrar-recorder, said his office had prepared contingency plans to prevent any disruption of the election, including using staff from other county departments.

If the general strike had occurred, welfare offices could have been thrown into turmoil because about 1,000 of the county’s 66,000 general relief recipients are scheduled to pick up their checks today.

None of the union’s 21 bargaining units other than nurses are being offered pay raises the remainder of the fiscal year.

Many of the employees have been offered a 2.25% raise, effective next July 1, but their wage demands have not been made public.

Richard B. Dixon, the county’s chief administrative officer, has said that the county has offered a substantial pay raise for nurses--5.5% immediately and 7% next year--because of difficulty in recruiting nurses.

But Dixon has said that “because of the recession, we’re able to recruit and retain the quantity and quality of (other) workers we need without a salary increase.”

Union officials had complained that workers were essentially being asked to take a pay cut because they would be paying increased health insurance costs out of their own pockets.

Dixon said the breakthrough in talks with Local 660 came when the county agreed to consider phasing in over a number of years better health benefits demanded by the union.

The strike at welfare offices earlier Monday drew mixed reactions from the public.

At some offices, there was little sympathy for striking county employees from recipients of Aid to Families With Dependent Children recipients who suffered a 4.4% cut in their stipend because of state budget reductions.

“They don’t do their job that good anyway,” griped Neicey Johns, 30, as she stood halfway back in a line of about 150 people at the Beverly Boulevard office near Echo Park. “They talk to you crazy. They don’t treat you with no respect and then act as if the money is coming out of their own pocket.”

Strikers said they were concerned that their walkout could cause a hardship to some clients, but they were hopeful most would understand that their plights are not entirely different.

“Not all the clients understand because they have their own personal emergencies,” said Janice Netterville, a striking eligibility worker at the Grand Avenue office near USC. “But this is our personal emergency. If someone doesn’t take a stand, we could very well end up being our clients.”