For County Temps, Nowhere to Hide

The temps stood outside the registrar-recorder’s office in Norwalk on Wednesday, huddling together on their morning break. It was raining, their co-workers were picketing, their bosses were pacing--every position they could take was precarious. So they huddled. What else could they do? They’re temps.

“You had any bad words from the strikers?” one asked.

“I got some dirty looks,” another confided.

“WHAT DO WE WANT!!” the picketers yelled. “FAIR SHARE!” Technically, the temps also are union members, but that was mostly trumped by the fact that they were, by definition, temporary. Hundreds get hired during election season to help the registrar-recorder through crunch time; their hope is that if they work hard enough they might get called back as permanent employees.

Their futures depend on the impressions they make, a burden made worse by the fact that this week they were the last line of defense between the November election and chaos. Eighty-thousand voter registration cards must be processed by Friday, not to mention 100,000 absentee ballot applications, and that’s just the beginning. The office has, for a month now, already been on a seven-day workweek that will by November stretch to round-the-clock workdays. Time lost in the behemoth electoral machinery of Los Angeles County had the potential to turn this entire presidential year ballot into a quagmire of lawsuits.

Thus it was down to the temps on Wednesday, in government as in so much of this new economy.

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“They was calling us ‘scab’ this morning,” one noted. She was a twentysomething mom who had commuted three hours from Rialto. “But”--she looked for the bright side--”it seemed like they was only playin’. I think they was only playin’. Don’t you?”

“This ain’t about me,” a guy behind her muttered, stalking back into the building’s lobby. “Up until two weeks ago, I wasn’t workin’. I’m tryin’ to keep this job, not throw it away.”

“My husband goes, ‘Whatcha gonna do, Strike Lady?’ ” Cynthia Campos, mother of four and county employee for all of two weeks, laughed nervously. “I’m like, ‘I don’t know.’ ”

She flipped back her long black hair and wrapped herself in her brother-in-law’s too-big overcoat. She’s all of 27. It’s been maybe a year, she figures, since she finally, finally went off welfare. Her supervisor told her she could come down on breaks to watch the picketing and still get paid as long as she didn’t join in. Her shop steward told her she didn’t have to picket if she didn’t want to, but the night-shift supervisor--a veteran county employee with her incarcerated husband’s name tattooed on one calf and pinups of professional wrestlers all over her cubicle--let it be known that the union would remember who had failed to stand with them. There was nowhere to hide, it seemed, from the downsides in this work world.

“Eight dollars and ninety-four cents an hour they pay me,” the scared ex-welfare mom told the crowd. “You have to understand. I’m trying to make a life. This is the first good job I ever had.”

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Haves and have-nots tend to be seen as creatures of the private sector. The world of government work, it is imagined, is a world apart. When sympathies are with them, government employees are seen as “public servants” running the machinery of civilization. In less popular moments, they’re “bureaucrats” ambling their way through tenured, career-long episodes of “Lifestyles of the Thick and Spineless.” Feeders at the public trough.

But economies don’t stop at the private sector, especially not here. Since the demise of the aerospace industry, the largest employer in Los Angeles County has been: Los Angeles County. With about 90,000 employees, its work force has quietly come to mirror the private sector’s job insecurity and two-tier compensation. One of the union’s favorite factoids has been that the head of the county health department makes more than President Clinton. Los Angeles County’s sheriff is the highest-paid elected official in America. After years of conservative carping, government has finally become, as they say, more like a business. At one end, a managerial aristocracy pulls down hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual salary; at the other, ever more crucial work, from the public’s health to its voting franchise, falls on an ever-widening sea of clock-punchers, toiling in poverty.

And as in the private sector, it has gotten harder and harder to tell the boss to take some job and shove it. Walk away and a legion of have-nots will be only too glad to take your place.

“FAIR SHARE!” the picketers bleated, looking hard at Cynthia Campos, shivering on the sidelines. But when her break was over, the temp returned, ever so promptly, to her desk.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.