Union Wants Formal Meeting With County

In its second emergency meeting over the holiday weekend, Orange County’s largest employees union voted Monday to ask the county for a formal meeting to discuss reinstating its labor contracts, and to appeal to department managers individually to use layoffs only as a last resort.

Still reeling from Thursday’s announcement that the county would immediately reduce its budget by $40.2 million and might lay off hundreds of workers, the leadership of the Orange County Employees Assn. decided on Christmas Day to authorize legal action against the county. Though the 19-member board met again Monday, it still had not decided whether a lawsuit or administrative appeals would work best.

“There is a profound sense of betrayal here,” said John Sawyer Jr., an attorney for the union, which represents 16 collective bargaining units. “The county has resorted to deception where candor used to characterize the relationship the county had with its employees.”

John H. Sawyer, general manager of the union, which represents 11,000 of the county’s 18,000 workers, said a decision on legal action would likely come next week. Union leaders are angry that the County Board of Supervisors on Thursday suspended collective bargaining agreements and gave county managers broad discretion over whom it can fire, regardless of a worker’s seniority.

Meanwhile, the union will seek “meet-and-confer” sessions with the county’s human resources department as early as Wednesday in hopes of renewing the collective bargaining agreements that the Board of Supervisors voided as part of its budget-slashing plan, officials said. Supervisors said the bankruptcy filing gave them the authority to set aside the labor contracts.

“It’s the worst thing we’ve ever faced in this county,” said Sawyer Sr. (who is the father of the union’s lawyer). Employees “had absolutely nothing to do with causing this bankruptcy, we don’t want to see them come to any harm,” said Sawyer, adding that county officials should have met with the union to discuss alternatives to widespread layoffs.

“The county is kind of picking the pockets of county employees to come up with some money to reduce their losses,” he said. “It’s petty cash, really, compared to the size of the investment loss. But it’s a lot of money to the individual employees.”

Supervisor William G. Steiner said the county was under extraordinary pressure to reduce spending immediately.

“There was an urgency,” he said. “We spend $7 million a week in salaries. By the time we had the process for meeting and conferring, talking about those who had seniority and who might be laid off, the whole thing could have lasted until May.”

Union representatives will also seek meetings with every department manager in the next two weeks to suggest job sharing, early retirement and leaves of absence as options. Department heads were told Thursday how much they needed to cut, but have until Jan. 10 to decide how to meet the goals.

“We want the county to prove to us the necessity of layoffs,” Sawyer Sr. said Monday. “They’ve blithely come along and said, ‘We have to lay off people.’ ”

But the union general manager said employees cannot support an across-the-board pay cut, as some labor leaders have suggested. “There’s nothing in our agreements that calls for reducing salaries,” he said.

The union’s board is scheduled to meet tonight at 6 with representatives of each of its 16 bargaining units. The union has also scheduled membership meetings at its headquarters Jan. 4, at lunchtime and in the evening.

Union representatives say they were never given warning that the county intended to slash millions from the budget this year and suspend the labor contracts, even the night before the Board of Supervisors approved the action.

As late as Wednesday night, the management council of Sheriff Brad Gates, Dist. Atty. Michael R. Capizzi and Health Care Agency Director Tom Uram had assured labor officials that despite the financial crisis, “They were not going to make cuts on the backs of the employees or take from the pockets of the employees, because it was not the employees’ fault,” Sawyer Jr. said.

Sawyer Jr. said that at the Wednesday night meeting with the management council, they wanted to put to rest two rumors: that the layoff of 800 employees was imminent and that the contracts would be set aside. They were told that neither would come to pass.

“I just don’t know what kind of good faith was there at that meeting,” Sawyer Jr. said.

In view of the fiscal calamity, union officials were expecting to be called into meetings and advised about county options for making cutbacks. Labor leaders say they probably could have created a plan that included no layoffs by working out a way to cut full-time jobs back to part-time work, offer leaves of absences, have employees share jobs, figure out who was eligible for early retirement and other options.

“We could have come up with $40 million without laying anyone off or reducing any public services,” Sawyer Sr. said. “Why did the county have to alarm the public so needlessly?”

Both Sawyers say the county has never done a good job of explaining how an estimated $2.02-billion loss in Orange County’s investment fund--which contains the savings of 187 school districts, cities and other public entities--translates into the need for $40 million in savings in the next six months.

County officials have said that nearly $30 million of that amount will come from slicing budgets in dozens of departments. The other $10 million will come from cash advances from federal, state and local sources.

Sawyer Jr. said the union has not decided precisely what legal avenue it wants to pursue but believes the county misapplied a law allowing a company in Chapter 11 bankruptcy to unilaterally abandon a collective bargaining agreement if revisions can’t be agreed upon. The county filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy.

Some legal experts believe the law is on the county’s side because Congress in 1984 prohibited employers from canceling labor contracts under Chapter 11 bankruptcies but said nothing about Chapter 9 filings.

Sawyer, the union’s attorney, disagrees.

“You can’t just blindly apply the law from one area to the other without the right parallels,” he said. “There are fundamental differences here and it is not responsible to say the law in one realm applies to the other realm.”

The Board of Supervisors voted on the budget cuts and labor contract suspensions just one day before the county’s 600 firefighters were due for a 3 1/2% cost-of-living pay raise. Ironically, the firefighters voted earlier this year to forgo the raise this past July so they could receive three raises between now and next December. Had they agreed to the raise in July, they would have received only one more next year in June, county officials said.

Also on Monday, the man who has launched the only recall effort against an Orange County supervisor in the wake of the bankruptcy crisis spoke out, saying he waited weeks for others to take action and when nobody stepped forward, did so himself because he believes the supervisors have threatened the future of schools countywide.

Felix Rocha Jr., 49, a board member of the Orange County Department of Education, says that in the wake of serving recall papers against Roger R. Stanton, he has received several calls from elected officials who cautioned against taking on Stanton.

Nevertheless, Rocha, who works for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization’s organized crime unit, said, “The county has suffered a major, major loss. Somebody had to do something.”

On Friday, Rocha set the recall process in motion when he filed a notice of intent to recall Stanton, the supervisor who represents the 1st District area of central Orange County where Rocha lives. But Rocha did not include a section of the California Election Code that advises the target of a recall that he or she has seven days to file a response to the notice with the registrar’s office.

He said he will return to Stanton’s office today to serve those papers.

Rocha, however, might be in for a little criticism of his own. The Orange County Department of Education was one of four school districts that last year borrowed $200 million for placement into the county’s controversial investment pool.

Rocha said he is not sure that he approved such a move, but if he did, “I’ll take whatever heat there is. Maybe I should have paid attention. Maybe I should be critical of myself.”