When Strike Can’t Hurt Decision Makers

The sudden collapse of the strike by county service workers, coupled with the impasse in the transit walkout, demonstrates that unionized government employees’ major weapon--withholding services from the public--does not work when the public not being served is poor.

In both strikes, the constituency that is hurt turns out in low numbers at the polls, and its suffering has not been taken to heart by most people in the region’s middle class. Nor has the pain inflicted by the walkouts moved elected officials to settle with the striking unions.

“The world just obviously doesn’t care about poor people, and situations like this bring it front and center,” one Los Angeles County supervisor’s aide said Wednesday, while the service workers’ strike raged. “This is a sort of bearable amount of pain for the board and the constituency it cares most about”--middle-class voters.

Though many people encountering picket lines have expressed sympathy for striking transit and county workers, the public as a whole has been quiet. Some county supervisors--who sit on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s board in addition to having complete control over the county’s $15-billion-a-year operations--say their offices have had few calls urging them to settle with the strikers.

Certainly, withholding services from the needy is a double-edged sword, and part of the reason for the lack of public outcry about the disruption is that many see a mixed picture: working people depriving other working people of needed assistance.

Compare that somewhat muddled picture with the janitors’ strike this spring, which drew wide public support. The janitors’ work stoppage affected wealthy building owners and inconvenienced scores of professional and business people.

“We knew that we would not have the same dynamic, with janitors not making a living wage [versus] millionaires,” said Bart Diener, assistant general manager of Service Employees International Union, Local 660, which suspended its seven-day job action against the county Wednesday.

During the county walkout, which began as an escalating series of limited, single-day strikes last week before going countywide Wednesday, management repeatedly said the union’s threats to deprive the public of services would not change its position on the raises that the union sought.

And though the union argued Thursday that its strike had prodded the county to offer more money at the bargaining table, county officials flatly contradicted that assertion. They said they have not budged from their initial offer of 9% raises over three years.

“I have consistently said and believe, based on my conversations with the board over the past few weeks, that striking does not make any more dollars available,” the county’s chief administrative officer, David Janssen, said Thursday.

At the MTA, the board has accepted nearly a month of disruptions for low-income riders in the hope that the union will make concessions on its members’ pay, saving money for more transit projects.

The MTA strike is the seventh in 28 years by workers who provide Los Angeles’ public transit, which primarily serves the working poor. In contrast, New York City’s transit system, which has a huge middle-class ridership, has been struck only once in 20 years.

In New York, laws make it hard for transit workers to walk off their jobs, and the status of their customers creates political pressure to avert strikes.

“You certainly get all walks of life--doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers--riding with the people who bake the bagels and sweep up the floors,” said Al O’Leary, a spokesman for New York City transit.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina, whose Eastside district includes many people dependent on public transportation and county services, acknowledged that the dynamics of the MTA strike might be different, if the ridership were more affluent.

“If it affected more of the middle class and upper class, perhaps it would be a different scenario,” she said. “Both of us, both sides, are hurting the transit-dependent.”

Strikes are only one weapon public-sector unions have to win concessions for their members. Unions can usually flex sizable political muscle because they are among the few entities with money that also care about the day-to-day functioning of local government.

As the two strikes have demonstrated, that muscle is more effective when exercised on smaller bodies of government--city councils, school districts--than in the massive agencies that make up county government.

Los Angeles County supervisors represent districts more populous than some states, have huge campaign war chests and have not been seriously challenged for reelection in decades. Three ran unopposed this year.

The supervisors also sit on the MTA board, along with Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan--who is not seeking reelection because of term limits--and three of the mayor’s appointees, whose votes he controls.

Labor leaders have fumed openly at their inability to budge these elected officials, many of whom they have long supported and who say they support unions’ agendas.

“The Board of Supervisors seems to be immune to public opinion,” said Diener, the service union official. “If we were negotiating with another body of elected officials, say the Los Angeles City Council, where you have smaller districts and people who get challenged from time to time, you’d see a whole different dynamic.”

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky--a longtime labor ally who has become one of the most vocal critics of public employee unions during the last month--said the firm stance that he, Molina and fellow Democratic Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke have maintained during the two strikes shows that they are willing to make tough fiscal decisions.

“The fact that we have been willing to take the heat we are from our labor allies should speak volumes to how right we think we are,” Yaroslavsky said. He said he believes the public supports his position.

And would it if it were the middle class whose lives were disrupted by a strike?

Saying the region has seen too much labor unrest already, Yaroslavsky replied: “Hopefully, we’ll never test that proposition.”