City Workers Talk Trash With Pickup Customers : Services: Responding to privatization threat, union sends refuse collectors out to collect signatures of support.

The woman in the Santa hat who was setting up a Mary Kay boutique in her home Saturday didn’t quite get it when her first caller was a guy in a green uniform who announced himself as an employee of the Los Angeles City Bureau of Sanitation.

“You mean like garbage pickup?” Rosemary Angelus asked.

“I am your refuse collection man,” Tony Williams replied with an understanding smile.

Williams was one of about 50 sanitation workers who took to the streets of the East Valley on Saturday to meet their customers face-to-face and ask a favor in return for all those years of taking away their trash.

It wasn’t for a tip that they held out their hands. In fact, they were careful to tell everyone they met that they don’t even want a raise--at least not just now with Mayor Richard Riordan trying to turn their work over to a private contractor.

Just a vote of confidence in their jobs would be fine for now, they said.

Angelus, like about 200 residents contacted by sanitation workers Saturday, signed a petition in support of maintaining trash collectors on the city payroll.

The signatures will be forwarded to the Los Angeles City Council, which must approve any privatization of municipal services.

In a recent letter to council members, Riordan announced that his office has begun reviewing half a dozen city operations, including trash collection, to determine whether companies could perform their services more cheaply than city workers. Riordan said any savings would be used to pay for more police officers.

Local 347 of the Service Employees International Union, which represents the city’s 750 trash collectors, contends that turning trash collection over to a private operator would cause fees to increase, service to decline and leave many city employees jobless or force them into lower-paying positions with the city.

The union’s plan to spread the word to East Valley residents got off to a rocky start Saturday when only about half the 100 canvassers expected showed up, many of them in a hostile mood.

At a pep rally in the city’s Sun Valley sanitation yard, several workers complained that their union leaders had given too little notice of the action, leading to many no-shows due to prior commitments.

Most of the rank and file said they were unhappy with the leadership’s strategy and demanded that the union buy newspaper ads to get its message out to the public. “These are desperate times,” shouted one worker. “We need desperate matters.”

When one member called for an impromptu vote, almost all thrust up their hands in support of an ad campaign.

Once the workers got into the field, however, many seemed encouraged by the warm response from those they called on.

Angelus, for example, realizing at last that she was speaking to the very man who collects her refuse, assured him that the service has been superb and she has no desire for a change.

Angelus said she would gladly sign, and did.

Afterward, union officials were so elated by the positive response that they plan to call out the workers again to canvass other parts of the city.