MTA Strike Finds Liberals at Odds With Labor Allies

You wouldn’t normally cast Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke as the heavy in a labor dispute.

The first African American on the powerful Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, the 68-year-old Burke has enjoyed the backing of organized labor throughout her long political career. While on the board, she has pushed a law requiring a “living wage” for county contract employees and recently supported striking Los Angeles janitors.

But as chair of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, she and the other two traditionally liberal Democratic supervisors--Zev Yaroslavsky and Gloria Molina--this week have publicly castigated bus and rail operators who essentially are striking to maintain their right to an eight-hour workday and overtime.

It’s just one way that the transit strike has opened a window on the twilight zone of Los Angeles politics, where traditional ideologies melt away and yesterday’s allies are today’s antagonists, where bureaucratic necessity must be served and public sentiment counts for very little.

Tuesday, there was grudging, incremental progress in the four-day labor action, with a 90-minute meeting in Pasadena concluding only with an agreement to meet again today. Even though negotiators seemed more optimistic after three days without talks, there remain political obstacles to a swift agreement.

Anecdotally, at least, there is evidence to suggest that popular sympathy is with the drivers. Historically, overtime and the eight-hour workday are such pillars of American labor orthodoxy that it is hard to imagine even lukewarm members of the pro-union Democratic Party quibbling with them.

But this is Los Angeles and the MTA is, well, the MTA.

The majority of the 13-member MTA board is composed of elected officials who are as immune to a strike’s political pressure as politicians can be: Mayor Richard Riordan, a lame-duck moderate Republican nearing the end of his term, who has been nearly invisible during the strike, controls four votes. Five others belong to county supervisors who represent districts so massive that they are virtually invulnerable to a challenge at the polls.

And the strike may actually be the path of least resistance for the members of the MTA board. Unless it wrings concessions from its workers, it may have to scale back politically appealing transit construction programs that are strongly supported by the state legislators and congressional representatives upon whom the county depends for its own operating funds.

“What you’re seeing is an overlap of politics and practicality,” said one MTA board member who spoke on condition of anonymity. “If the negotiators don’t cut costs [by tightening labor contracts], there’s no service. . . . And politically, no cost saving, no construction project in my district.”

In traditional Los Angeles fashion, the MTA board is a frighteningly complicated entity, composed of 13 members: the five county supervisors, the mayor of Los Angeles and three of his appointees, and four representatives of other, smaller Los Angeles County cities.

Usually the board is as fractured politically as it is geographically, with representatives battling each other for construction projects in their own districts. But it has been surprisingly unified during the strike, attacking the union for leaving low-income passengers stranded.

Liberal board members have been the most vocal, casting themselves not as anti-union, but as protectors of the downtrodden.

“What you’ve seen over the last week is pretty much a wall-to-wall coalition,” said Yaroslavsky at a news conference Sunday, at which he was flanked by liberal and conservative MTA board members. “You’ve got the people who have supported labor . . . who will just not tolerate this kind of hostage-taking when it comes to public services.”

Such talk outrages organized labor, especially the 4,400 members of the United Transportation Union who struck Saturday rather than accept a 15% cut in overtime for its bus and rail operators. Drivers say their overtime, combined with base salaries of $10 to $20.72 an hour, leaves them barely clinging to the middle class.

“Labor is going to fight for middle-class jobs,” said Miguel Contreras, executive director of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor.

He said he was especially disappointed in the liberal supervisors--Burke, Yaroslavsky and Molina--all of whom endorsed the high-profile janitors strike earlier this year.

“Over and over, all three of them have come to labor’s table asking for help and support,” Contreras said. “And over and over again, they’ve proven a disappointment to the union movement.”

It is not just the MTA strike that has labor riled at county supervisors. The main county union is gearing up for a strike when its contract expires Oct. 1, upset at the 9% raise over three years supervisors have offered.

County doctors may join nurses, ambulance drivers and clerical workers on the picket lines because their benefits are being slashed. And Los Angeles is the only county in the state that declined to give a $1.25-an-hour raise to unionized home care workers, who earn $6.75 an hour.

Burke, a former assemblywoman and congresswoman as well as onetime partner at the blue-chip law firm of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, said she’s comfortable on the other side of the picket line.

“Primarily, I’m a manager,” said Burke, adding that she hoped her political ties to organized labor could facilitate negotiations. “My main responsibility at the MTA is to make that into an efficient operating entity.”

In that parlance, an efficient MTA is one that cuts payroll costs in favor of new transit projects, which are more politically profitable.

On the side of new transit projects are politically connected contractors and middle-class voters who are potential riders. Most important are lawmakers in Sacramento and Washington, who want more transit projects for which they can claim credit. Indeed, when Yaroslavsky backed a countywide initiative two years ago to halt subway construction, he was attacked from Sacramento and Washington.

Unions, on the other hand, have limited weapons available against the MTA. The inconvenience of a strike pales in comparison to the consequences of state and federal legislators withholding money from your agency.

And labor’s electoral clout is diminished because of the composition of the MTA board. With no incumbent supervisor having been ousted in 20 years and three running with no opposition this year, county supervisors have little to fear. Riordan, who was backed by the County Federation of Labor in his last race, is prevented by term limits from running again.

Finally, the mayor of Los Angeles--the traditional locus of political leadership in the region--has kept a low profile during the strike, surprising observers who recall his active role mediating the janitors walkout.

Riordan’s quiet role in this dispute is dictated, in part, by two personal political imperatives: As one of the architects of the first so-called “transit zone” to break away from the MTA--Foothill Transit--he is committed to expanding such experiments in low-cost regional bus service, something the unions strongly oppose in the current negotiations. Moreover, the mayor personally recruited and has supported MTA chief Julian Burke, a veteran corporate turnaround specialist.

The mayor is “100% engaged” in the strike, said Associate Mayor Jaime de la Vega, one of Riordan’s MTA appointees, but is allowing the MTA management--led by Julian Burke--to take the lead in negotiations, along with Supervisor Burke. “Rationalizing” the transit agency’s labor costs would be an important part of Julian Burke’s--and, therefore, Riordan’s--legacy to Los Angeles.

Times staff writer Jeffrey L. Rabin contributed to this story.

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