Striking Workers

* How dare Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky accuse Service Employees International Union, Local 660 of “using the working poor as a pawn” in the dispute between the county and SEIU over hospital staffing and wages (“County Workers Launch ‘Rolling Strike,’ ” Oct. 3)! Yaroslavsky and the supervisors sit on the MTA board. The MTA board has spent thousands of public dollars on attorney fees to fight a consent decree providing for increased bus service desperately needed by the working poor. The Board of Supervisors, despite a large county budget surplus, last month voted down a plan that would have finally provided health insurance to county home-care workers earning poverty wages.

It’s no wonder that the low- and moderate-income workers represented by SEIU and the United Transportation Union have needed to go on strike to get what they deserve from a Board of Supervisors that has shown such indifference to the needs of working people in this county.

LISA PAYNE

Los Angeles

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County workers: “Shut the county down!” Excuse me? I thought we taxpayers were paying you to provide us with services, not to shut things down. I believe that you should receive a fair pay for fair service, but when you started chanting “Shut the county down,” you told me that you couldn’t care less about doing your job, about serving the people you are charged with serving, and you completely lost my sympathy.

RICK VAN DUSEN

Pasadena

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Mayor Richard Riordan, the MTA board and the UTU are all callous cowards. Instead of owning up to the mess they’ve created and ending it posthaste, they insult us with rhetoric and finger-pointing while decent, hard-working people are having their lives destroyed.

I moved to Los Angeles from New York. After what I witnessed the past two weeks, I want to click my heels together three times and say, “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.”

TRACY MILLS

Los Angeles

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Once this strike is over, Mayor Riordan and his MTA cronies need to ride the bus for a week, if they can hack it. If this rider can bus from Vernon to the shores of Santa Monica daily and happily without the adeptly staffed yet woefully neglected MTA eyesore, then who needs it and its higher fares?

What the MTA wants to do is what security, retail and other industries have done: strip the tried-and-true workers of their dedication and replace them with desperate, eager-to-work youngsters who would earn relatively nothing and receive zero benefits, in turn eventually lowering its standard of service. All in the name of (trying to save) money, under a pall of embarrassment from overspending on a public rail system that goes nowhere and does nothing to change the face of the post-Red Car, de facto segregation of this city via modern public transportation.

The MTA clearly needs cash; it wouldn’t rent out the lobby of its lavish headquarters for bad movies and cheesy music videos if it didn’t. Asking concessions of its backbone, its already-compromising drivers, however, isn’t the way to seek it.

STEVEN IRVIN

Los Angeles