Teachers Union President Calls for Removal of Supt. Anton : Education: Helen Bernstein outlines aggressive plans to drive home the effect of pay cuts, including a campaign to discourage businesses and people from coming to Los Angeles.

The head of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s teachers union on Saturday called for the ouster of Supt. Bill Anton and outlined aggressive plans to enlist the support of civic and business leaders to fight double-digit cuts in teacher salaries.

“The movers and shakers of this city must understand that they will hurt if we hurt,” Helen Bernstein, president of United Teachers-Los Angeles, told 700 of the union’s school-based representatives at an annual leadership conference.

Bernstein said the union has sent letters to Mayor Tom Bradley and other elected officials warning them to help stave off the proposed cuts in pay and other education spending or face a union campaign to discourage companies and people from moving to Los Angeles.

Borrowing a strategy used recently by the local hotel employees union, UTLA plans to send letters to corporations, chambers of commerce and real estate firms across the nation if civic leaders do not oppose the cuts. The letters would warn of the school funding crisis and its effects on the quality of life in Los Angeles.

Bernstein said her remarks were designed to “harness” the mounting anger and frustration of the district’s teachers who, like other employees, are in for a second consecutive year of pay cuts.

Faced with a mounting state budget deficit, Gov. Pete Wilson and legislators are proposing to cut funding for public education statewide. In Los Angeles, school officials slashed $400 million from the district’s $3.8-billion budget, well over half of which is to come from employee pay and benefits. Higher-paid groups are to get larger percentage cuts.

In contract negotiations, the district wants teachers to take a pay cut of about 8%, continue the 3% reduction imposed last year, and give up another 6% in unpaid days off.

The union leader’s call for the removal of Anton drew the loudest cheers from the audience, made up of union representatives from individual schools.

“It makes about as much sense to keep Anton as it would to send Dan Quayle to a spelling bee,” Bernstein said. Her declaration that “Anton must go now,” was met with chants of “Go! Go! Go!” from many teachers.

Bernstein contended that no other school district in California is asking its employees to take such large cuts. She blamed Anton for having “no creative ideas,” and accused him of protecting the district’s highly paid administrators at the expense of other employees and students.

Anton was unavailable for comment. But district spokeswoman Diana Munatones said the district “has full confidence in the leadership of Bill Anton.”

“It is unfortunate,” Munatones said, “that the leadership of UTLA has chosen to personalize the issue. The superintendent has proposed solutions and has offered true leadership.”

Bernstein’s speech provided the most dramatic evidence to date of the deterioration in the relationship between Anton and the union, which represents about 35,000 teachers, counselors, school nurses and librarians.

When Anton took over the nation’s second-largest school district two years ago, he and Bernstein spoke optimistically of creating a new era of cooperation. But after several rounds of contentious budget-cutting, they stopped talking to each other, and Bernstein and other union leaders have begun attacking him publicly.

Bernstein’s speech was her first formal call for Anton’s removal, either by resignation or ouster by the school board’s seven members.

Anton, the first Latino to head the district, has been praised by supporters as a knowledgeable, credible insider who can pull the troubled district together. But critics have said he is too beholden to the school system to reform it.

Bernstein said the union also is preparing other attention-getting strategies in the fight against the teacher salary cuts. They include:

* Having members attend real estate “open houses” to distribute leaflets outlining the district’s problems.

* Notifying mortgage holders and other creditors that teachers will not be able to repay loans if the salary cuts go through.

* Creating billboards that describe Los Angeles as home to “35,000 unhappy teachers” or “650,000 unserved students.”

In addition, Bernstein promised to crank up the heat on school board members and to drop out of a business-backed coalition working for school district reform if the group’s leaders do not oppose the pay cuts. The group, known as LEARN, is headed by former Assemblyman Mike Roos and includes business, community, and school district leaders.

Munatones said salary cuts are necessary and that teachers are not the only ones who will suffer. “We have 70,000 employees, and we are asking all of them to share the brunt of this budget crisis,” she said. “These cuts that have been proposed are designed to keep all of our people employed.”

Some teachers have said they want to strike as early as September, but others have said they fear that such an action would gain them nothing but public animosity. Munatones said union leaders and the district will continue their negotiations Wednesday.