Bring Your Rosary
The latest union ploy for prying money out of management is to threaten the source of company profit in a non-confrontational manner.
This can be accomplished by spreading bad news about the product: like the melons at Joe’s market are tainted or rat droppings have been found in Juan’s Coffee or the average life span of a tourist in L.A. is only 82.5 hours.
You do this by writing letters, renting billboards, making telephone calls or, in a more devastating syntax, by creating a video.
Producing a video about what’s rotten in L.A. is precisely what the Los Angeles Police Protective League is threatening to do unless the city comes through with a raise.
The idea the league is trying to get across is that it would be a lot less costly for the city to grant a long-overdue salary increase to its cops than to see its $8-billion tourist industry slide into hell.
They figure that a video depicting crime in the streets in all of its creative formats would cause thousands of tourists to either stay home this summer or go to places like Allentown, Pa., instead.
The prototype for a video depicting L.A. as Sarajevo comes from the Restaurant and Hotel Employees Union, which, in an effort to wring money from its employers, did the same thing 18 months ago. The contract was settled shortly thereafter.
Subsequent to that, the United Teachers-Los Angeles threatened to send out letters bashing L.A. if the school board didn’t stop talking about a 17% salary cut. They got a 10% pay cut instead.
And now we have the cops.
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There is something ominous about police telling you the city isn’t safe. I mean, if it isn’t safe for big guys with guns and radios, what’s it going to be like for my sister Emily from Oakland with only her rosary beads?
That, of course, is precisely the question the Protective League would want everyone to ask if it does send out a video. But then, one wonders, why would more money for the cops be better for the tourists?
“They’re going to have to be careful about that,” Helen Bernstein said the other day. She’s president of the teachers union.
“Their message confuses me. If the streets are unsafe because there aren’t enough of them, OK. But if the message comes across that they’re not doing their job, that’s no good.”
Choosing the right approach is important, she explained. The teachers spent days discussing whether billboards they rented should say they were unhappy or discontented. They finally chose unhappy, as in “L.A., the home of 32,000 unhappy teachers.”
Bernstein related that with such pride I didn’t have the heart to ask why it took days to decide. I’m just glad I made it out of the public schools before I was 30.
Police Protective League spokesman Geoffrey Garfield bristles at the notion that our boys in blue aren’t doing their job.
“No one can ever accuse us of holding back!!” he said with multiple exclamation points. “It was as if God himself had tested us after the Rodney King verdict!! We had fire, flood and earthquake, and we kept the city together!!”
Since the cops are asking for more money and not more cops, that still doesn’t explain why a raise for the league’s 7,500 members would make L.A. safer for tourism. Perhaps they would simply try harder.
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I’m for giving cops more money. No one has a tougher job in this town than the police, with the possible exception of newspaper columnists.
If workers at the Department of Water and Power can get a 9% pay hike for flipping switches and turning faucet handles, the men and women who protect and serve ought to get at least twice that.
Cops ought to be paid at least as much as the little thugs who make a bundle running dope. I just don’t think a video trashing L.A. is the way to go about it. Even at its worst it’s just another 60-minute episode on “Cops” and it’s not going to keep anyone away.
L.A. County has been torn by riots, ravaged by fires, drenched by storms, covered by floods and shaken by a killer earthquake, but still the tourists come in their colorful Hawaiian shirts and checkered shorts.
Does anyone seriously think the fear of ending up dead in front of an ATM machine is going to dissuade a guy who dreams of seeing Heather Locklear in person? No way.
The Police Protective League is going to have to come up with something better than a video urging everyone to stay away. Even with the chaos we’ve already had, my sister Emily is still planning a trip.
She’s just bringing along an extra set of rosary beads.
