The New Strategy: Y’all Come

Helen Bernstein, president of the teachers union, is threatening to start a Don’t Come to L.A. campaign if the school district keeps talking about a 17% pay cut.

The idea is to keep people away from the city by, in the words of one union officer, telling them the district sucks, a term often employed by prison inmates and irredeemable teen-agers to describe an unpleasant condition.

An effect of the campaign would be to so unnerve those whose economic welfare is derived from population growth that they would then put pressure on the district to let the union have its way.

This is labor’s newest method of jerking management around to its way of thinking. In this case, however, it might not result in the negative impact Bernstein had hoped for. Fewer people is exactly what the district needs.

In the old days, which is to say before riots and gang warfare, service unions threatened to strike and called for the resignation of the person at the top in order to make a point.

The teachers union, acknowledging this tradition, dutifully followed suit, but nothing happened.

In an era when every third person owns an Uzi and is willing to use it, being threatened with a strike isn’t all that scary.

So the union went to step No. 2 in the pre-1992 manual of collective bargaining and demanded the resignation of school Supt. William Anton.

However, this brought to mind recent (shudder) efforts to get Daryl Gates to resign, and no one wanted to go through that again.

Then someone in the union had what teachers would consider a thunderbolt of an idea: Urge everyone not to come to L.A.! You’d think they’d just invented recess.

There was dancing in the streets wherever teachers gathered, such was the degree of their joy at the idea of bringing L.A. to its dirty little knees.

They were remembering that the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union had pretty much done the same thing and it seemed to work.

The HREU produced a video called “City on the Edge” in the middle of its contract negotiations and ended up getting pretty much what it wanted.

The tape, sent to 2,000 tourist agencies, seemed to say that if you come to L.A. you’ll be killed and eaten.

Its tenor evoked images of Sarajevo and other fun places, where humans matter little more than cartoon blips on a game screen, swallowed by an electronic monster from whose maw they never return.

I’m not sure “City on the Edge” actually kept anyone from L.A. except maybe for Yankee (his real name) Klondike, a friend in Oakland.

I sent him the tape as a joke because he was planning a trip south. I haven’t seen Yank for a while and forgot how paranoid he is about being killed in a drive-by shooting.

I assured him drive-bys were currently out of vogue and gang members now preferred jumping from their cars and attacking stationary targets.

“You don’t have to worry,” I said, “as long as you keep moving.”

Yankee stayed home (forgive me), but I spoke to him recently and he is thinking once more of coming to L.A. I haven’t got the heart to tell him about the newest campaign.

On Yankee’s behalf, I telephoned the teachers union to ask specifically what the Don’t Come to L.A. business was all about.

The only person around authorized to speak to me was the treasurer, Jerry Solender. The others wisely ran from the office when they heard my name.

Solender said it wasn’t just a “screw you” effort aimed at destroying L.A.’s economy and forcing us all to live off the kindness of strangers. “It’s more sophisticated than that,” he said.

The sophistication lies in the message that while we have wonderful weather, the school district, which also used to be wonderful, sucks. Those voluntarily planning to move to L.A. should probably try Cleveland instead.

If, however, they ignore the warning, their children might turn out to be teachers or carwash attendants, lacking the ability to communicate beyond expressing their displeasure through the use of pubescent slang.

“It’s a dangerous strategy,” Solender said. I could almost hear him perspiring. “We’re trying not to poison the pot.”

The teachers need a lesson here. If they really want to threaten the city, don’t keep everyone out. Bring everyone in. Y’all come. Yankee too.

When the freeways come to a stop and lines for the simplest needs stretch to the ocean and classrooms require mezzanine seating and bars run out of vodka, then they can say, Now do we get to keep the 17%?

The message will be clear. Cutting a teacher’s pay does suck. Totally.