Resumption of Strike Threatened : Labor: A tentative agreement with county workers begins to unravel and talks break off. Social service employees plan to walk out Tuesday.

Union leaders for 40,000 Los Angeles County workers Wednesday threatened to resume their “rolling” strikes after a tentative agreement reached earlier this week began to unravel.

“We’re very angry,” said Gilbert Cedillo, general manager of Local 660 of Service Employees International Union, after talks broke off Wednesday afternoon.

He said the union will resume its “Rolling Thunder” strategy of staging walkouts by different county employees every day in an effort to win better health benefits.

Late Wednesday, Cedillo said 5,100 Department of Public Social Services workers will walk off their jobs Tuesday. A meeting today will determine how other union workers will respond, he said.

“Rolling Thunder is back on,” he said.

Dan Savage, another Local 660 official, said, “The idea of the general strike is back on. Things have unraveled.”

The county’s chief negotiator, Elliot Marcus, also gave a pessimistic account late Wednesday. He said the union had broken off talks at 4 p.m. and refused the services of a state mediator.

No date has been set for further talks.

The county, consequently, is preparing for strikes on all fronts, Marcus said.

Cedillo accused county officials of backing out of a tentative agreement that averted a general strike threatened for Tuesday by nearly half of the 85,000-member county work force. “County reneges on agreement” was the message being played Wednesday on a telephone hot line operated by Local 660.

But Marcus said the agreement was clearly understood by all parties as “conceptual” in nature, with details to be hammered out in continuing negotiating sessions.

When those sessions got under way Wednesday, Marcus said, it became apparent that union officials had “convinced themselves that the county was going to accede to every one of their demands.”

“That is delusional,” Marcus said. The county made significant improvements to health and dental insurance benefits, he said, but gave less than what the union wanted.

Both sides had predicted that the tentative accord reached Monday night on health benefits would pave the way for a final settlement of the contract dispute that has led to strikes by nurses, welfare workers and other county employees over the last 10 days.

But Tuesday night, top officials on both sides disagreed about what they had agreed to.

Cedillo contended that under the proposed settlement, the county would pick up the entire cost of health insurance for many workers. But Richard B. Dixon, the county’s chief administrative officer, disputed that Tuesday night. He said that the county agreed only to pick up full health insurance costs for individual employees opting for coverage through the health maintenance plan Kaiser Permanente. If employees want family coverage, workers would have to pay some of the cost, he said, but the county would absorb any increase in premiums.

The union official also maintained that the county agreed to a deadline of January, 1994, for bringing Local 660 members’ health benefits up to par with those of other county employees. But Dixon said that although the county agreed to phase in parity, it did not commit to a date.

Marcus, the county negotiator, said Wednesday that the union may be jeopardizing other tentative agreements by taking issue with the county’s position on health insurance. Among the concessions the county may take back, he said, is its offer to drop a controversial proposal to charge employees for parking.

“We deal in packages,” Marcus said. “It includes our position on parking, our position on health and dental, our position on salary. If you reject (the health benefits proposal) you reject the package, you reject everything.”

Said Dixon: “Rolling Thunder is not a way to get us to be more accommodating at the bargaining table.”