Workers Strike South Coast Refuse

About 40 drivers and other workers at South Coast Refuse Corp. have gone out on strike against the trash hauler as negotiations over a new union contract stalled and each side accused the other of negotiating in bad faith.

Teamsters Local 396 in Covina, which was certified as the employees’ bargaining unit in October, led the workers out Thursday after claiming that South Coast operator Madelene Arakelian began negotiating individually with her drivers.

Arakelian denied such activity and said the union simply hasn’t negotiated.

The company continues to operate with supervisors and nonunion workers. Arakelian said she is hiring drivers to help her with her biggest account, daily pickups in Leisure World Laguna Hills, as well as with work in Costa Mesa, Newport Beach and Irvine.

Leisure World spokeswoman Tanya McElhaney said the gated community hasn’t been affected yet by the strike.

Arakelian accused the Teamsters of conspiring with major regional and national trash haulers to squeeze out small family operations like hers.

“Though I’m a Democrat and running for the 38th state Senate District, the unions can go to blazes when they do this to small business,” said Arakelian, long an outspoken figure in Orange County. “I have been a generous employer.”

But Raul Lopez, the local’s secretary-treasurer, contends that workers have gone through “several years of abuses”--mainly low hourly wages, no overtime pay and no medical benefits for workers’ families.

“She threatened not to give employees their paychecks today” and to replace strikers permanently, he said Friday as he headed to the company’s Santa Ana truck yard where pickets were set up.

Arakelian denied the accusations.

She said that drivers’ wages are nearly at the union scale level, that overtime is paid and that workers and their families had health benefits paid entirely by the company until last year, when the company required weekly deductions of $20 to $25 to cover increasing health care costs.

Drivers’ helpers are paid about $6 an hour, she said, but it’s a low-level position that most trash haulers don’t even have.