NEWS ANALYSIS : A Declaration of Victory by Organized Labor

The guerrilla warfare of “rolling” strikes and the threat of a paralyzing general walkout by Los Angeles County government’s biggest union was a reminder that if organized labor has any muscle left, it’s likely to be found in the public sector.

Some 37% of all American government workers are unionized, as opposed to only 12% of the private sector. Forty percent of the nation’s 17 million union members now work in government,compared to only 27% a decade ago--a byproduct of huge drops in private-sector union membership.

Government unions are likely to have a grip on a wide range of vital services, analogous to the kind of multi-industry grip that made the Teamsters union powerful in bygone days.

That kind of leverage gave Local 660 of the Service Employees International Union the power to squeeze county executives with tactics that touched a wide range of citizens and promised to bring much of county government to an ugly halt--the kind of urban chaos from which Los Angeles has considered itself immune.

The fact that the union’s tactics appeared to be an unusually tough or novel spoke volumes about the ineffectual state of organized labor. Americans, particularly those in Southern California, with its long tradition of hostility to unions, simply aren’t used to seeing unions apply pressure to management. Unions now represent such small chunks of the American economy that they are rarely able to do it.

The fact that the union was declaring victory on Tuesday illustrated how the world of collective bargaining has changed.

A few years ago, Monday night’s “conceptual agreement”--which will likely result in no raises, or pay hikes far below the rate of inflation, for most of the local’s workers--would have been considered a sell-out.

But as governments at all levels cope with unprecedented financial shortfalls, and as health costs veer wildly out of control, contract standards become more modest. In a couple weeks, for example, teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District may strike simply to keep what they have. The district, facing a huge budget deficit, this week ordered all employees to take a 3% pay cut.

In the county government talks, the union’s most passionately argued goal was not the attainment of more, but the restoration of what had been lost in the past: full county-paid medical benefits. Local 660 could claim Tuesday that it had won because the county had agreed to spend an extra $50 million annually on employee health benefits.

It was fitting that the past days’ brinkmanship was staged by the Service Employees International Union, which has been responsible for most of the labor conflict in Los Angeles during the past two years.

With nearly a million members, about one-fourth of them in California, SEIU is regarded as one of the nation’s few labor organizations with a bright future. It is headed by a one-time janitor, John Sweeney.

In 1990, SEIU Locals 399 and 535 waged separate strikes against Kaiser Permanente on behalf of nurses and other hospital workers.

That same year, Local 399’s “Justice for Janitors” organizing campaign--part of a national SEIU effort to recruit non-union janitors--won a raucous strike against a building maintenance company that featured a bloody confrontation between 100 Los Angeles police officers and 400 janitors and their supporters.

A few months later, SEIU Local 99 used the “rolling strike” against the Los Angeles school district on behalf of 10,000 teaching assistants, who were trying to obtain their first contract. The strike, in which 500 or so teaching assistants struck various sections of the district each day, did not significantly disrupt the educational system and fizzled after 12 days. But a month later--and after nine months of unsuccessful negotiations--the district signed a contract with 8% raises.

Local 660 officials, who represent 40,000 members, followed the same strategy last week, planning for a general strike from the start, introducing walkouts by new groups of employees in stages. The idea was to attract attention by starting with nurses, a high-profile, life-or-death commodity in the county labor market--and also the workers who were making the highest bargaining demands. Each successive strike was to give various groups of anonymous workers like social service clerks their day in the sun, and to effectively create dress rehearsals for a countywide walkout.

Muscle was deployed. Muscle won.

“You look for where management is most vulnerable,” said Victor Gotbaum, the former head of New York City’s municipal unions and now a professor of labor-management relations. “There’s nothing new about that.”