As County Strike Looms, Both Sides Tell of Hardship

Yvette Pope has $50 to get her and her two children through the week.

Edwina Walker had to drop out of adult school to pay for her son’s college education.

At age 42, David Robinson finds himself living in a studio apartment in Hawthorne, debts eating away at his solidly middle-class salary.

Life as a government worker was supposed to be different for these three county employees. So, Pope, Walker, Robinson--and 47,000 other county workers represented by Local 660 of the Service Employees International Union--are so frustrated at the small, incremental improvements in their standards of living that they are gearing up to join a countywide strike Wednesday.

The employees who belong to the striking union range from receptionists at welfare offices, who make so little that they themselves qualify for food stamps, to highly educated nurses and medical workers who earn more than $50,000 annually.

With the majority of their union’s members earning less than $32,000 a year, the economy booming and the county supervisors just having received a $15,000 pay hike, county workers are nervously agitating for more money--even though county officials say the funds for a greater raise aren’t there.

“I have just enough money to go from paycheck to paycheck,” said Pope, a single mother of two and a clerk in the Panorama City welfare office, who earns about $22,000 annually. As Pope sees it, the supervisors “don’t even want to budge. I don’t understand that. If I had only $5 in my pocket and my friend had only a dollar, I would give her half of what I have.”

County officials on the other side of the table say they too face difficult times. In three years, their massive health department will run a deficit of $184 million. It was just five years ago that a similar hole in the budget nearly bankrupted the county.

“We are not doing well,” said county Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen. “The Board of Supervisors in 1995 went through almost a meltdown in the county. . . . They’re not going to let it happen again.”

The county has offered a 9% increase over three years to all its employees--and several other county unions have accepted the deal. But Local 660 says a 15.5% raise over three years is needed to bring members’ pay back to the inflation-adjusted 1990 level, before the recession froze county salaries and triggered the near-collapse.

There are additional disputes over benefits. County workers enjoy healthy pensions, do not have Social Security costs deducted from their checks and enjoy numerous other benefits. But the county’s effort to implement a $10 to $15 co-pay for medical visits has angered Local 660.

Negotiations broke off Sept. 29, the day before Local 660’s contract expired. The union--which represents more than half of the county’s work force--launched a series of single-day strikes last week, crippling hospitals, child-support and welfare offices. The latest of these strikes hits County-USC Medical Center and three other public hospitals today.

Separately, the union representing the 200 pharmacists that give out prescription drugs in county hospitals and health centers said it would engage in a two-day strike starting today to try to win more pay from the county. “I don’t understand what it is, unless the Board of Supervisors has to show the public they can pinch every penny,” said Ralph Vogel, president of the Guild for Professional Pharmacists.

Barring a last-minute settlement, Local 660 vows to launch a countywide strike Wednesday, a possibility that unnerves some of its members almost as much as it does county officials.

“I said to the union, ‘Look, I want to go on strike, I know I need more money, I know what the cause is, but I’m a single mother,’ ” Pope said. “I have to work.”

Pope cannot afford disruptions in her already-thin cash flow. Right now she has only the $50 she borrowed from a friend last week. Her next paycheck arrives Friday.

She lives in a two-bedroom North Hollywood apartment with broken interior doors and a carpet she describes as looking “like a patchwork quilt.” Pope has worked for the county for about 30 months, landing her job through the county’s welfare-to-work program.

When she got the post, Pope was thrilled to have a full-time job and leave her years on welfare behind. But even now, she says she makes only $300 a month more than the maximum she could get on welfare. Carless and stranded by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s 3-week-old strike, she relies on her baby-sitter to drive her to and from work.

Still, when Pope discusses why she thinks she should get more money, she gets fired up citing the same thing mentioned by county union members across town--the supervisors’ $15,000 pay raise, which when it takes full effect next year will raise their salaries to $133,000.

The supervisors do not control their salaries. Their pay is pegged to that of Superior Court judges, which is determined by the Legislature. Though union members invariably describe the supervisors as “giving themselves a $15,000 raise,” the board never took any direct action to win the 12.5% hike. It was granted as part of the state budget, signed by Gov. Gray Davis in May.

The supervisors’ raise, eye-catching as it is, is only one instance of high salaries for some county managers that generate pressure for more money for the lower-earning end of the county work force. The sheriff of Los Angeles County, for example, is the highest-paid elected official in the nation, earning $209,000. The board this year approved a 39% raise--$51,500--for the next district attorney, who will earn more than the attorney general of the United States. The director of the massive health department makes more than President Clinton.

A 1993 study found one in 89 county workers earning more than $100,000, a higher rate than in the city of Los Angeles. A 1995 Times survey identified more than 1,000 members of the $100,000 club in county government.

County managers say it’s misleading to focus on the pay at the top. “We can take the dollar amount of the five supervisors’ raise and divide it among 47,000 employees,” Supervisor Don Knabe suggested rhetorically last week.

But Local 660 members are skeptical.

“The county has got to have some money somewhere,” said Robinson, citing the supervisors’ pay raises.

A microbiologist in the health department who analyzes samples to check for communicable diseases, Robinson makes clear that he’s not suffering--he pulls down about $47,000 a year for his post. He says he is concerned more with the lower-paid Local 660 members, who have families and are barely scraping by.

Still, Robinson wouldn’t mind an improvement in his standard of living. He resides in a Hawthorne studio apartment and drives a 5-year-old Ford Windstar, cutting back on expenses to pay off the debts accrued in a recent divorce. “It’s not like I’m driving a Lamborghini,” Robinson said. “We all can use a raise. Los Angeles is an expensive town.”

Walker, 47, had first-hand experience of that.

She recently had to drop out of night school, where she had hoped to earn a degree that would have helped her advance in her job as a clerk at the treasurer-tax collector’s office. Instead, she is using the money to pay for her son’s education at a local college. But Walker says that with her $29,000-a-year salary she does not know how she will pay for his textbooks.

“I hope and pray the Board of Supervisors hears us and gives us what we’re asking,” Walker said at a rally outside the county Hall of Administration last week. She began to detail 15 years of career stagnation--unable to win promotion without degrees that she can’t afford to earn, the $120 monthly parking costs that eat into her paycheck.

“I came to work for the county because I thought it’d be a secure job and I’d have a chance to advance,” she said. Then she heaved a sigh and returned to the crowd of county workers, most garbed in purple shirts bearing stickers proclaiming:

“Ready to strike for our Fair Share.”