ORANGE COUNTY IN BANKRUPTCY : Groups Unite for a Bigger Say in Crisis : Coalition: They seek court appointment as a creditors committee to gain a greater voice in county decisions.

For years they behaved like feuding brothers, these 10 labor groups representing some 16,000 organized employees of Orange County, baring their teeth more at each other than at their common adversary.

With vastly different cultures and personalities, these organizations for lawyers, janitors, plumbers, doctors, clerks and firefighters each went their own way, sometimes pursuing contrary goals and playing into the hands of county management.

But in the wake of Orange County’s bankruptcy, and management’s rush to slash about 600 jobs to meet budget demands, these unions and employee associations have joined hands for the first time. After a series of secret meetings that began Jan. 6, they forged a no-name coalition in an effort to aggressively defend the interests of all county employees.

It is a fragile coalition, full of doubts and uneasiness. But it is also an angry one, determined to stick together to fight county management plans to cut more jobs and to privatize services.

“They have put county labor organizations in a position where we are acting collectively, and we’ll act with unity and with purpose,” declared Robert MacLeod, general manager of the Assn. of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs, who took the lead in bringing the 10 labor groups together.

“We’ve never been able to accomplish that,” MacLeod said, noting that until now there was never a compelling need to band together. “It took the county to help us out.”

The coalition’s immediate strategy is to win appointment in federal bankruptcy court as an official creditors committee--a standing that will give organized labor a greater voice in county decisions, including the distribution of funds.

The labor coalition says it has that right because its members have tens of millions of dollars tied up in the county’s retirement plan--which invested in the ill-fated pool that lost more than $2 billion--as well as deferred salary raises and other compensation.

But Charles Axelrod, senior partner at the county’s bankruptcy firm, said the county and both existing creditors committees oppose such an appointment.

“Labor should be dealt with the way labor normally is dealt with--through their collective bargaining representatives,” said Axelrod, who is with the firm of Stutman, Treister & Glatt. “If there’s now a labor committee, what’s going to be the next committee that comes along?”

The county has about 20 separate contracts with the coalition’s 10 member groups.

In the last week, lawyers for both sides have held talks about this issue with U.S. Trustee Marcy J.K. Tiffany. Attorneys said Tiffany, trustee for the bankruptcy proceedings, was not inclined to grant the labor coalition’s request. A decision is expected soon.

Regardless, the coalition plans to bring a separate action in Superior Court on Tuesday to halt county layoffs, according to John H. Sawyer, general manager of the Orange County Employees Assn. and chairman of the new coalition.

“The (labor) committee can probably have access to the courts more effectively and more expediently than individual groups filing miscellaneous lawsuits,” Sawyer said. “It minimizes the number of lawsuits.”

The suit will challenge the county’s suspension of key contract provisions that would have protected more senior employees from layoffs and cite alleged unfair labor practices, violations of state law and constitutional issues, said Marc Beilinson, the bankruptcy attorney acting as spokesman for the new labor committee.

So far, the county says it has issued pink slips to 186 employees. But it has also disclosed plans to lay off more than 400 additional workers and slash every worker’s pay by 5%. County managers have selected those to be dismissed based upon their productivity and other factors, bypassing union seniority rules--a move they maintain is legal for an entity in bankruptcy.

Lawyers for the labor coalition disagree, and their suit is expected to argue that while it may be legal for a business in Chapter 11 reorganization to set aside labor pacts, there is no clear precedence for such action by municipalities in a rarely used Chapter 9 proceeding.

Whatever happens in court, concerns are surfacing among some county leaders about the abrogation of union contracts. At least two county supervisors--Roger R. Stanton and William G. Steiner--said publicly this week that they now favor reinstating seniority rules in labor contracts.

Other county officials declined to talk about labor relations or comment about the new coalition. “That’s their business,” said Judy Davis, head of employee relations for the county.

But it is the labor leaders who admit that they have misgivings about the new coalition, never having met in the same room all at once, let alone work together. Their very names reflect their differences. Four of the groups call themselves unions and are affiliated with the AFL-CIO; others consider themselves associations and have historically resisted links to the broader labor movement.

The size of these groups vary--from the 37-member Orange County Fire Department Chief Officers Assn. to the Orange County Employees Assn., which represents 11,156 workers and has 11 separate contracts with the county. And so does their pay: county janitors represented by the Service Employees International Union earn between $1,250 and $2,109 a month, while some members of the Orange County Attorneys Assn. make up to $7,940 a month.

“Over the years, there’s been a number of attempts to join together on some contract issue,” said Bill Fogarty, head of the Orange County Central Labor Council, an AFL-CIO umbrella group that includes the four unions in the coalition. But people had their own agendas and were more interested in protecting their turfs rather than working together, Fogarty and others said. “It has not been the greatest relationship.”

But what brought these groups together for the first time on Jan. 6 was a common threat and the need to pool resources and share hefty legal expenses that the coalition will face.

“We feel employees are being made scapegoats for the financial mismanagement,” said Dallas Jones, president of the Los Angeles County Firefighters, Local 1014, which represents 650 Orange County workers.

As one of three vice chairs of the labor coalition, Jones said he will be pushing especially hard to fight against the county’s privatization efforts. Though the issue is not new--private ambulance operators, for example, have been trying for years to assume the duties of firefighters--top county officials are now studying ways to contract out for a broad range of public services.

Despite the show of unity, the labor coalition has already showed signs of splintering. After that first icy meeting, in which 30 participants talked for seven hours over a lunch of red beans and brown rice, coalition members met again to draft bylaws, select officers and devise strategies. They also agreed to secrecy about their legal strategy.

But the Orange County Employees Assn.’s announcement that the coalition would file a lawsuit on Tuesday enraged a few committee members. And some members worry that individual labor groups will try to steal the spotlight and use the coalition as a means to woo members from other bargaining units.

Sawyer, the chairman, defended the integrity of the new coalition. “The meetings have been very good. They have been very cooperative. We have a common goal to defend.”

MacLeod, of the deputy sheriffs group, which has had a cordial relationship with most of the other labor groups, said disputes will naturally arise.

“It’s never been done before. I don’t think we see eye to eye now,” he said of the joining of the labor groups. “But we all recognize that we’re facing a problem beyond anything we’ve seen before. And we can either survive together or perish alone.”

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Orange County’s United Front

The county’s once-splintered labor organizations are attempting to create a united front. In the wake of the county’s bankruptcy, these 10 unions and employee associations have come together to protect the jobs and interests of county employees:

Total Notices Union members received American Federation of State, County and Municipal 1,271 0 Employees, Local 2076 Assn. of County Law Enforcement Management 66 0 Assn. of Deputy Marshals of Orange County 300 0 Assn. of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs 1,301 0 International Union of Operating Engineers, Local 501 123 4 Los Angeles County Firefighters, Local 1014 650 0 Orange County Attorneys Assn. 323 0 Orange County Employees Assn. 11,156 133 Orange County Fire Department Chief Officers Assn. 37 0 Service Employees International Union, Local 787 533 15

Sources: Individual organizations, County of Orange; Researched by VALERIE WILLIAMS-SANCHEZ / Los Angeles Times.