Gas Utility Employees Plan to Strike Today : Labor: One-day walkout is in response to use of contract workers. The company denies safety would be compromised.

Most of Ventura County’s 190 Southern California Gas employees are expected to hold a one-day strike today in protest over a company plan to replace full-time staff with contract workers, union officials said Thursday.

Pickets are planned at both service bases in Simi Valley and Oxnard this morning before workers board buses and trains to join a larger protest in downtown Los Angeles. A skeleton picket crew was to be posted at the Oxnard bill payment office throughout the day.

The gas company, which was notified in advance of the strike, plans to staff telephones and payment desks with supervisors and management employees.

Managers will respond to service calls where there is a safety concern, a spokesman said.

The company will postpone such routine calls as appliance adjustments until next week and has contract workers on standby for any large emergencies.

Members of the Utility Workers of America, Local 132, who are in a contentious labor contract dispute with their employer, say the company plan compromises the safety of its 700,000 customers in Ventura County and 4.6 million customers throughout Southern California.

Union officials charge that the contract workers, who are already used on a limited basis within the company, will not be as well-trained as gas company employees and will not have the same commitment to safety.

“We have shown the company mistakes that the contractors have made and that we have to fix,” said Dale Viot, president of Local 132 and a 25-year company employee.

In addition, customers count on the company to be trustworthy, allowing employees into back yards and homes, and even leaving keys for them to enter homes unsupervised, union officials said.

“We feel we’ve worked hard to get a reputation for honesty and integrity,” said Randy Adachi, area officer with the union representing Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties and a dispatcher with the company for 21 years. “People trust us. We feel that will be tough to maintain once they hire contract employees.”

But the gas company says its plan to reduce its 9,200-employee force to 9,000 by 1995 will cut costs without cutting service. Under the plan, Ventura County would lose about 20 jobs, slightly more than 10% of the company’s county work force, said company spokesman Marty de los Cobos.

“We would never compromise the safety of our customers,” he said. “We have used contractors extensively in the past, and this is just an extension of that.”

The company’s 6,000 union employees have been working without a labor contract since July with the issue of outside workers at the center of the debate.

The company plans to implement “competitive benchmarking,” a process in which it accepts bids from its union as well as outside contractors for specific segments of business, de los Cobos said.

The categories targeted for benchmarking now include meter reading, data entry, mail payment processing, storeroom and warehouse activities, auto mechanic services, print shop, pipeline location and marking, and mapping, he said.

For instance, the company will call for bids for meter reading. If an outside contractor can do the job for less cost than the company now pays its employees, that contractor could be hired to replace company workers.

But, de los Cobos said, the union could also be the low bidder.

“It’s not an automatic thing,” he said. “If the union can find ways to meet the lowest bid, there would be no need for contract employees.”

Hiring the contract workers at lower prices will “affect every fabric of our society,” said Dale Viot, president of Local 132. “These people come in and work at half the price. Their wages cannot buy homes or cars.”

More importantly, he said, they are not properly trained.

“The guys from the gas company go to school for three months and then they are on probation” and strictly supervised for the first year, Viot said. Contract employees, he said, would not receive the same level of training.

Earlier this summer, union officials charged that the gas company had already begun to compromise customer safety by failing to properly notify residents in 34,000 dwellings in Ventura and the Ojai Valley of possible safety hazards.

The hazard was created when the company piped impure gas into the area two years ago. The gas, which carried higher than normal levels of nitrogen oxide, made some rubber components brittle, possibly feeding too much gas into the home and into indoor appliances.

The gas company has a program under way to check and replace the regulating devices in all of the affected homes before November. That effort has fallen behind, but de los Cobos said the team of 80 workers would make up the lost time and complete the project by the target date of Nov. 1.

The affected area includes the Ojai Valley and Ventura west of Victoria Avenue. Workers have been spot testing homes and businesses in Montalvo, Somis and Oxnard, but have found no evidence of any damage in those areas, de los Cobos said.

Although the company has not notified customers directly, it sent announcements to area newspapers, company officials said.