Jail Trusties to Replace Workers One Day After Vote on Union

The 117 low-wage civilians who provide laundry and food service at the county’s Pitchess Honor Rancho will vote today on whether to join a union.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department plans to replace them Wednesday with inmate workers.

That sounds like union busting to the union seeking to represent those employees, the United Food and Commercial Workers, Local 770. Union leaders plan to take their concerns to the county’s Board of Supervisors today--the same day the board is expected to adopt a “living wage” ordinance to improve exactly the kind of jobs the sheriff is eliminating.

“They’re all family men,” Jim Rodriguez, vice president of Local 770, said of the workers whom the sheriff plans to displace. “They’ll be out on the streets.”

Although union rallies in support of the living wage are scheduled at the county Hall of Administration for this morning before the board meeting, the Pitchess workers will come in the afternoon for a protest march. Rodriguez said they cannot risk missing a day of work, especially during the election.

“This is the last chance for us,” said Wilfredo Estella, 53, who works with his three brothers in the jail’s laundry. “We don’t have any other choices. How will we make ends meet?”

Cmdr. Steve Day of the Sheriff’s Department said the problem is that the employees all work for a private company that contracts with the county. That contract expires Wednesday and the company, Interim Personnel, was demanding too many changes and too high a price for its extension, he said.

So the department opted to use jail trusties, as it has in the past, Day said. The displaced workers are being referred to the sheriff’s human resources division to find them other jobs, but Day acknowledged that the outlook for them is bleak.

“They’ve been good workers,” Day said. “We’ve been kind of caught in the middle of all this.”

It wasn’t complaints about the job--cleaning garments sometimes soiled with rotten food and human excrement--that led Estella and others to call the United Food and Commercial Workers in November, Estella said. It was the pay: $6.09 an hour and no raise for years.

The 117 workers at Pitchess, along with about 150 at the department’s other jail facilities, are employed by Interim Personnel, which has a $4-million contract with the county, Rodriguez said.

Interim had promised to provide health benefits to its workers but reneged on that pledge, and none of the employees have insurance, receive vacations or get other benefits, Rodriguez and other workers said.

A woman answering the phone at Interim Personnel said the company had no comment, then hung up.

The election was scheduled for today, and then Rodriguez said he and other organizers found out about newly elected Sheriff Lee Baca’s plans to replace the workers with inmates.

Rodriguez said that in meetings, the department pledged to work to avoid displacing workers on the eve of a union vote, but “they gave us false assurances. . . . We’ve kind of given up on the Sheriff’s Department.”

The National Labor Relations Board, which oversees union elections, plans to impound the ballots because there will be no bargaining unit the next day, Rodriguez said. As a result, if the same workers are hired under a different contractor they will not be unionized.

Rodriguez warned that the Pitchess case may set a poor precedent. “It could be used as a lesson to those who are working in the same situation as these people,” he said. “If you exercise your right to have a living wage, it could have negative repercussions.”

Carmen Sandoval is preparing to live with those repercussions.

The 49-year-old mother of two and her husband have worked for four years in the jail’s laundry. Their meager pay has not even been enough to feed the family and pay the rent on their Pacoima apartment. To make ends meet, Sandoval sells Nicaraguan food from her home each weekend.

“Now we don’t know how we’ll get by,” Sandoval said.

Sandoval has no doubts about why her family is now threatened: “It’s because the sheriff doesn’t want to pay us more than $6” an hour.

Jose Saavedra has worked at Pitchess for three years, and said he believes that complaints made by him and his co-workers have been ignored because they are Latinos.

Now, he said, they have one last hope--Baca, the county’s first Latino sheriff in decades. “That is why we’re asking him for help,” Saavedra said.