County Workers End Walkout

Responding to a dramatic intervention by Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, the union representing 47,000 county service workers late Wednesday agreed to end its walkout while negotiations for a new contract continue.

Mahony called for the union to suspend its day-old countywide strike, provided that the Board of Supervisors agrees not to retaliate against county workers who had joined picket lines. Some county managers have circulated memos warning of discipline for strikers, according to a grievance filed by the union.

Noting that county workers provide services to the most vulnerable members of society, Mahony said in a statement late Wednesday, “It is my firm belief that the issues raised by both parties will be resolved only through continuous, face-to-face, good-faith negotiations rather than through a protracted strike.”

Hours later, the union agreed to suspend its job action, which began last week at targeted offices and on Wednesday had gone countywide.

“We will temporarily suspend our strike with confidence that good-faith bargaining can produce a fair agreement that will allow our members to provide adequately for their families and their future,” said Annelle Grajeda, general manager of Service Employees International Union Local 660.

But one union member angrily stormed out of the closed-door caucus meeting at a hotel ballroom, saying angrily, “They sold us out.”

John Sandoval, an employee at a welfare office, said he would urge picketers there to stay out. “It’s not right, it’s not fair.”

County Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen welcomed the union’s decision.

“I am delighted that SEIU has chosen to respond to Cardinal Mahony’s request that they return to the table and that the county improve its practices in regard to the treatment of striking workers.”

But Grajeda, wiping tears as some members of her own negotiating team shouted at her during a hastily called 11 p.m. press conference, said the decision “does not rule out another strike if we’re not making headway and the county remains intransigent.”

Wednesday’s strike had disrupted services across the region but also led strikers to fret about its impact on their wallets. With the bitter, 4-week-old transit strike as a backdrop, numerous county workers crossed picket lines and others griped about the lack of a strike fund.

Even before Mahony’s statement, union leaders were talking of the possibility of limiting the strike.

“We are very sensitive to the fact that most of our members are on very tight budgets, and we don’t intend to push them farther than they can go,” Local 660’s assistant general manager Bart Diener said Wednesday afternoon, pointing out that the rolling strikes had been intended to minimize the impact on members’ paychecks.

The union’s strike fund, only created in August, was not available for the current action. A dues increase in January would bolster that fund for future strikes, Diener said.

At the county public works central yard Wednesday afternoon, a group of about half a dozen strikers grumbled about the absence of picketers.

“What few people we had left at 12,” said Hector Saenz, 35, who handles traffic signs. “We haven’t done enough, and a lot of people seem to be thinking of crossing.”

“And why is there no strike fund? Who is planning this?”

Even if some union members crossed picket lines Wednesday, thousands of others stayed off work, many picketing through the rain and cold weather and disrupting numerous county agencies.

Poor and homeless people were turned away from welfare offices, private hospitals were swamped with emergency patients diverted from shuttered county trauma centers and county hospitals were nearly empty of new patients, even though nurses reported to work under a court order obtained by the county Tuesday.

Some Offices Were Crippled

The strike had a crippling effect at many county offices. Sixty-three libraries closed. Without clerks to file paperwork, some sheriff’s stations barely took crime reports. Welfare offices looked nearly deserted. And the registrar-recorder’s office had a scare, being crippled less than a month before the presidential election. “It’s a disaster,” Registrar-Recorder Conny McCormack said of the strike’s timing.

The clouds of rhetoric churned up on both sides have obscured the fact that the difference between the county and its largest union amounts to about $66 million per year--or less than 0.4% of the county’s $15-billion annual budget.

But many familial feuds break out over relatively small matters, and the strike has caused quite a rift in what is known as “the county family.”

The influential union, which has poured money into supervisors’ campaigns and fought to secure extra state and federal funding for the county, thinks its members deserve to share in the county’s new wealth. It is pushing for a 15.5% pay increase over three years, which it says will make up for four years without raises during the county’s hard times in the mid-’90s. Sixty percent of Local 660’s members earn $32,000 a year or less.

But supervisors are still traumatized by the last time they needed SEIU’s help--during the county’s 1995 brush with bankruptcy, which was caused by a deficit in the county health department. It was only with the intervention of the international union, which then was headed by current AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, that supervisors won a $1-billion bailout from the federal government that kept them from having to close public hospitals and lay off more than the 2,500 workers they pink-slipped that year.

With a similar deficit looming three years from now, the board is carefully hoarding its money, even in the midst of an economic boom. To county supervisors, $67 million a year for raises, even in a $15-billion budget, is too risky. Instead, they have offered 9% over three years--the same deal accepted by county unions representing firefighters, sheriff’s deputies and social workers.

The clash between former allies has soured dispositions on both sides of the table.

“They are acting like private contractors--that same arrogant attitude that ‘we are the boss and we are going to teach you a lesson,’ ” Local 660’s president, Alejandro Stephens, said of the supervisors. “They have put at risk the relationship we have established over the last five years.”

Janssen, the county’s chief administrator, used similar language about Local 660. “We have worked very hard in the past four years to create an organization called L.A. County rather than a conglomerate of 37 departments,” he said. “A strike pretty much undercuts any attempt to create a collaborative culture.”

On the picket lines, strikers were both nervous and determined.

Outside the registrar-recorder’s office in Norwalk, Juanita Carpenter, 40, of Los Angeles, said she hoped the strike would end soon. A single mother, she said she has just purchased a car and has a 17-year-old son to support.

“I’m living paycheck to paycheck,” she said. “I’m not sure how I’m going to make it.”

But many said they were determined to tough it out.

“My bills will be late next month, and my credit history will probably be ruined, but we’re here to stick this out,” said Luisa Diaz-Bermudez, a child support worker picketing outside her department’s Encino office. “We have families we need to feed.”

Even a handful of the nurses who were ordered by a Superior Court judge to refrain from striking were on the picket lines Wednesday. In an Elvis-style pompadour, sideburns and glasses, nurse Glenna Wilson led a group of picketers at one of County-USC’s entrances.

“I know what the court said, but I’m still here,” Wilson said. “I’m out here with the union, and I’m not going to cross any line.”

Outside, she was joined by clerks, warehouse workers and nursing assistants. Their absence, said hospital staffers, meant that linens were slow to be changed, supplies were not delivered and doctors had to write out orders and dispense medicine themselves.

But picket lines were thinner than in prior days and strikers gave scattered reports of catching unionized employees reporting to work. Even in the Hall of Administration, Local 660 members staffed information windows at the treasurer-tax collector’s office, albeit with some wearing their purple and green strike shirts.

The county released figures Wednesday afternoon showing that only 13,000 of the 47,000-member union failed to report for work, but quickly acknowledged that its tally was incomplete. The union said it had strong turnout but acknowledged some members were working.

At Olive View Medical Center in Sylmar, picketers slowed incoming cars enough to scrutinize drivers and discern whether they were union members not covered by Tuesday’s court order who were showing up for work anyway.

Medical secretary Starlet Alexander called out those workers with a bullhorn in a tone that mixed playful bonhomie with denunciation.

“Is that Tommy? Tommy Thomas?” she yelled at one car. “Is Tommy scabbin’?”

At another: “Hey! You’re not a nurse! Get your sign.”

Alexander said she’d seen 30 or 40 workers not covered by the court order cross the line for the morning shift at the hospital, which was almost fully operational Wednesday after a near shutdown the day before. Tuesday, most clinics closed and emergency operations were seriously hampered.

“Apparently, they feel missing a day of work is not worth standing up for what they deserve,” Alexander said of the workers.

Private Hospitals See Surge in Patients

One area where the combination of rolling and general strike had a severe impact is the county’s ailing trauma network. County-USC, which was struck Tuesday, kept its trauma center shuttered until Wednesday afternoon. Severely injured patients were routed to private hospitals, including a 14-year-old girl who union members say was hit by a car in front of a picket line Wednesday, treated by striking nurses then shipped to Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena.

Private hospitals have seen a 30% surge in patients needing intensive care services at other hospitals in the county, said James Lott, executive vice president of the Healthcare Assn. of Southern California.

“A lot of ICUs are backed up, “ Lott said Wednesday afternoon shortly before County-USC reopened. “Many of these hospitals don’t have the nursing and physician staff at a level to take care of the increased number of patients they are getting.”

Adding to the crush in emergency rooms were patients with the first flu cases and respiratory infections of the season, Lott said.

“We got a trauma patient from Montebello”, said Nicky Carnes, clinical director for emergency services at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, the county’s busiest private trauma center, which is nearly 11 miles away.

“We’ve been holding critical care patients [in the emergency room] for 24 hours. . . . The ICU has been full for two days,” said Carnes, adding that the usual wait is no more than four hours.

At some hospitals, the strike not only led to an increase in admissions--it caused a delay in coroner’s services for patients who died.

“They have not picked up two bodies,” said California Hospital Medical Center spokeswoman Sylvia Robledo. The hospital has the refrigeration facilities to store the bodies, but at least one family from out of town was upset because the delay forced them to postpone funeral arrangements.

Said Robledo: “The family is not very happy.”

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Times staff writers Joe Mathews, Joe Mozingo, Julie Marquis, Beth Shuster, Patrick McDonnell and correspondent Richard Fausset contributed to this story.