Playing Tough in Hard Times : Rough, relentless and always ready for a fight, UTLA chief Helen Bernstein battles for the rights of the city’s teachers.

It is the Friday afternoon before Veterans Day and Helen Bernstein is barreling down the Santa Monica Freeway, shouting into her car’s speaker phone, heading for her downtown office after taping a television interview.

On the other end of the conversation is a bureaucrat at the Los Angeles Unified School District who is grasping for answers to a volley of Bernstein’s questions.

Bernstein, president of UTLA, the 30,000-member United Teachers-Los Angeles union, demands answers about what she calls the latest outrage perpetrated by district officials.

The man signs off, saying he’ll “try to look into it.”

“You wanna know what keeps me going?” Bernstein explodes to her passenger as she changes lanes in heavy traffic. “Not the TV appearances. Not the attention. It’s this. This shit. This is how you treat professionals?” she asks, gesturing toward the speaker phone and sarcastically paraphrasing: “ ‘Oh, by the way, don’t come to work on Tuesday.’ ”

Because of some snafu, the district had discovered only that afternoon that it needed to tell teachers in certain schools not to work the next Tuesday as part of cost-cutting measures the district is implementing.

The union not only contends that the board’s policies are unacceptable, but also says this last-minute announcement would not reach everyone affected, would mess up a holiday weekend, would, in general, compound the injustice. Within moments she’s on the phone again, the umpteenth call this day to UTLA’s lawyers, seeking redress.

Bernstein’s steady supply of anger is fueled daily, she says, by the words and actions of district officials and school administrators. She generally categorizes them as “stupid idiots” or “mean and vicious human beings” who produce “garbage” they dump on teachers.

With emotions running high--teachers voted this week whether to accept the district’s contract offer, continue bargaining or strike--Bernstein does not expect to run out of fuel.

Bernstein has been a scrapper within L.A. Unified since Day 1. She is strongly anti-management, and her bias toward authority seems deeply rooted.

A product of Los Angeles schools--class of ’62 at Hamilton High in West L.A.--Helen Sherman grew up with three brothers and learned to “hold her own” among them.

“I do not remember sitting down for dinner and not having a political debate,” she recalls. “We would not just sit and listen to the news. We’d argue.”

Active in civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, she worked for Rep. George E. Brown Jr. after college but felt restless and ineffectual and wanted to make an impact.

Brown had a fatherly talk with her, she says, reminding Bernstein that she had an unused teaching credential from UCLA. If she really wanted to have an impact, he told her, teach.

She applied, but says she was frustrated after interviewing at local high schools: “I couldn’t get placed. I was sort of a hippy-dippy person in miniskirts. I looked 12.” Angry and indignant, Bernstein called the union and complained. Union official Ralph Segure, whom she fondly credits as a great influence, gruffly told her, “Helen, you need to get into the system before you can change it. Just put on a dress and put you hair in a bun. Come in and join the union.”

She did just that in 1967, becoming a history teacher and counselor and marrying another teacher and union activist, Harvey Bernstein. Now 47 and divorced, she has combined teaching and the union for years, at times staying home to raise her daughter, Jessica, now 20 and at UC Berkeley.

She previously served as a union vice president and was a member of the negotiating team during the nine-day strike in 1989. The strike resulted in a 24% pay raise, parceled out at 8% over three years.

That increase, she now says, is behind the current plan to reduce teachers’ pay by 3%.

“Part of the problem is fiscal,” she concedes about the district’s action. “The other part is union busting. They want to get back at us for the strike and the raise.”

Bernstein became UTLA president in 1990, succeeding Wayne Johnson. Now a close adviser to Bernstein, Johnson was invariably described during his tenure as a firebrand, an “in-your-face” adversary of the district, a traditional union leader.

Bernstein was seen as more open, diplomatic, ready to cooperate, to work as a partner with the district rather than as an adversary.

To unionism, it was said, she would add professionalism.

Although she says her values are unchanged, events keep overtaking the priorities.

With a vengeance.

No sooner does she pull into the UTLA parking lot that Friday afternoon than her outrage over the post-Veterans Day furlough is bumped from her attention. Bernstein has been complaining all day about cuts in district funds for substitute high school teachers, saying principals will try to force regular teachers to cover classes once those funds run out.

Now, her secretary, Millicent Scarlett, approaches the car door with a knowing smile. Scarlett delivers news about one school’s economy measure: “They are putting six classes in the cafeteria with one sub (substitute teacher).”

“Can you believe it?” Bernstein ask incredulously. “How can you do that to people? . . . We represent substitutes too.”

By now her voice is a high, tired squeak as she calls the district, lawyers, the school’s union representative. . . .

There has been no time for lunch. Standing at her desk, asking legal opinions, plotting strategy, Bernstein sticks a plastic fork into a jar of Laura Scudder Unsalted Peanut Butter, licking it off the fork while she talks.

On a recent afternoon, Bernstein participates in a televised panel discussion at NBC in Burbank. She is seated next to school board president Warren Furatani. Just before the taping is to begin, a voice from the ceiling asks them to look at each other as if conversing.

Bernstein turns to Furatani, stretches her mouth and clenches her teeth into an exaggerated fake smile. Jokingly, she utters a hostile two-word obscenity.

Is this the leader heralded as the one who would usher in a new era of diplomacy and cooperation?

Those days seem over.

Bernstein is no Miss Manners; small and feisty, she has a smart mouth and a street vocabulary.

To a union leader’s traditional stance, she seems to add the “oh, yeah?”or “sez who?” attitude that teachers like her get in back-talk from students.

To district personnel, she can be accusatory and demanding, sometimes kidding and cajoling as she goes along. If people are vague, Bernstein hauls out a special weapon, the ability to haggle over details until she wears them down.

Her low opinion of the district and school administrators sounds exaggerated at times, designed to please the rank and file. It may sound good to union members, but how does it set with others?

District Supt. William Anton declined to be interviewed.

Furatani, who shrugged off the incident at the television studio, says, “Helen can be glib at times. I’ve worked with her pretty intensively. Those are not the things I’m interested in.”

Instead, he praises her for bringing an expanded agenda to the union, saying she not only cares about “bread and butter” pay issues but also advocates such concepts as school-based management. Furatani’s attitude is “look what we’ve done together.”

Today, UTLA will tally the ballots cast earlier this week by its membership regarding contract negotiations with the district.

Members had three options: Accept the district’s proposal; reject it and authorize an immediate strike (possibly starting Dec. 2); reject it and order UTLA to resume bargaining, holding a strike vote later if necessary.

Bernstein and the UTLA board recommended the latter, saying the schools would be closed without a strike for winter break and that spring would be a better time to assess the general economy.

Under normal circumstances, Bernstein says, she goes to schools almost every day, calling it the only way to keep in touch.

In the weeks between the district’s announced proposal--accepted by the Board of Education earlier this month--and the UTLA vote, she has averaged three or four visits to schools a day, squeezing in talks at lunch hours and brief “nutrition breaks.”

“It’s OK,” she says of the latter. “It’s time enough to tell them we’re screwed.”

Bernstein meets the same situation wherever she goes: Angry teachers who say they feel powerless and are looking to do something out of their frustration.

She comes on as ready to fight the good fight and even play dirty, with a we-against-them stance. Clearly, they are at the barricades.

She advises against striking now, but says if they vote for it, “I’ll be there with you.”

Bernstein talks strategy, telling them UTLA lawyers are drawing up a list of actions they can take without risking paychecks.

Then, rolling up her verbal sleeves, she tells them what they can do right now:

* “Four percent less pay means 4% less work,” she has been telling everyone to whoops and cheers. (Because the cut will be implemented late, it will amount to 4% to 5% out of paychecks.)

* “You should come to school one minute before the bell and leave one minute after.”

* They should be too busy when the principal asks them to cover a class and, as a last resort, insists that the principal order them to do it. Then file grievances.

Such statements often are real crowd pleasers.

One night, Bernstein goes so far as to tell a crowded meeting of UTLA’s 400-member policy-making House of Representatives to boycott a conference that UTLA is sponsoring Nov. 24 on her pet subject--school-based management: “You’re not going to be there. ‘Pay us or release us,’ ” she says of conferences.

Or, go to faculty meetings and turn your backs on the principal. And no more participating in the United Way campaign unless that agency names the school district as one of its charities.

She is being bad and getting a kick out of it; the group snickers and cheers at the thought of it--Bernstein along with them.

No more buying classroom supplies out of their own pockets--if they do so, she tells them, “you’re nuts and you deserve a pay cut.”

Comparing Bernstein and Johnson is a minor pastime around the district.

After the representatives meeting, Dan Garrett, chapter chair from Union Avenue Elementary School, says he felt a little empty-handed. It might have been different with Johnson, he thought.

“Our teachers want something immediate. Wayne would have been ready,” he says. “This list of possible actions she’s talking about should be ready right now. You don’t want to lose the momentum.”

Then relenting a little, Garrett adds, “She’s an excellent leader. I’d like to see her move more quickly, but she’s been there for me when I’ve asked her to be.”

Johnson says the union would be faced with the same problems regardless of its leadership: “Style wouldn’t have anything to do with it.”

But would he have handled it differently?

“Well, I never trusted them. I would not have gone in and tried the cooperative thing to the extent she did. In defense of Helen, however, I supported her in her effort to do that. It had to be done (after the acrimonious strike), and I couldn’t have been the one to do it. It didn’t work out, but she should not be criticized for attempting.”

Others find her brand of leadership lacking in general. Robert Matano belongs to Teachers for Change, a rank-and-file group within the union that tends to oppose whomever is in charge.

He takes Bernstein to task for “thinking you can lead by following, by going with what you think the majority will go for. Rather than thinking ‘How do you move a good idea forward?,’ she does not want to stick her neck out.”

Says Bernstein of being more authoritarian: “You’re kind of playing God. Since I don’t believe in a God, I certainly don’t believe I’m It.”

Well into the representatives’ meeting, with lines of people standing behind three mikes, it is Ana Coria’s turn. She does not agree with reduced or deferred pay or feel she can afford it.

But. . . .

Explaining that she teaches in a poor area, she says: “If I tell my second-graders, ‘I can’t afford to buy you cookies,’ I feel very uncomfortable with that. All the teachers there--from the bottom of our hearts, we feel it just hurts the kids too much not to give them their sticker, their cookies. Maybe not with high school kids, but these little babies. . . .”

Bernstein smiles in sympathy. “I can’t tell you what to do. You have to do what you feel comfortable with.”

If there is one common theme underlying Bernstein’s issues, and those of her constituents, it seems to be an aching desire for respect and a conviction they do not receive it--from the district and administrators, from the students and parents, from the community.

“When we went out on strike, it was not just for wages,” she says. “It was about empowerment.” She says she’s angry and disappointed that teachers are still not treated as partners within the district and as valued members of the community.

“It got to the point, before the union got strong, where people would rather not say what they did for a living,” Bernstein says, becoming reflective and softer for a moment.

To those who asked what she did for a living, she says she would answer, “I’m a teacher.”

And she seems pained by what she calls a typical response: “ ‘You seem smart. You could be doing something better.’

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten that. I want to get to the point where no one is ever ashamed again to say, ‘I work with kids.’ They should be able to say, ‘This is a job you ought to have, too.’ ”