Labor Woes Spread as County Workers Prepare to Strike

If 4,400 striking bus and rail operators have disrupted Los Angeles County’s daily business, wait until they are joined on the picket lines by 10 times as many government employees--including ambulance drivers, welfare clerks and nurses.

Forty-seven thousand county workers are gearing up to strike on Oct. 2, barring a last-minute compromise this week. The county’s main union is pushing for far more than the offered 9% pay raise over three years, saying its members need to make up for pay cuts they accepted during the recession.

The county’s worker unrest, coupled with that at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Los Angeles Unified School District, where teachers are also threatening to walk out over pay, shifts Los Angeles’ labor battles from impoverished janitors to middle-class public employees, who say they have been left to struggle in the midst of an economic boom.

“There’s all this pent-up demand,” said Michael Dear, director of USC’s Southern California Studies Center. “There’s a long waiting list of people to share in this money.”

But that demand is colliding with the push for local government to be fiscally cautious, even as its coffers brim with surplus tax dollars. Los Angeles’ major governmental institutions were racked with financial problems during the cash-poor mid-1990s and criticized for not operating in a more businesslike manner.

Now political leaders, stung by memories of near-insolvency, are singing the tune of fiscal conservatism and tight payrolls, even as the region’s labor movement feels its oats after a string of victories.

Los Angeles County’s massive government is now the region’s largest employer, with 55 different bargaining units representing its 87,000 employees. The largest of those by far is the influential Service Employees International Union Local 660, which represents 47,000 workers who do everything from driving ambulances in unincorporated areas of the county to shuffling papers inside the Hall of Administration in downtown Los Angeles.

Local 660’s members range from part-time library workers, who lackhealth insurance and make $7 an hour, to nurses earning $53,000 a year. But 60% of them earn less than $32,000 annually, union officials say.

Though many other county unions--including those representing firefighters and sheriff’s deputies--have accepted the county’s offer of a 9% pay boost spread over three years, Local 660 for more than a year has vowed to strike unless it gets more, because it says its members are either shut out of, or slipping out of, the middle class.

“They are the largest employer in the county. They need to be an example for other employers,” Annelle Grajeda, Local 660’s general manager, said of the county government.

Alejandro Stephens, Local 660’s president, added, “We’re talking about our members who made a sacrifice in the ‘90s. Now that there’s this unprecedented prosperity, we want our money.”

Especially galling, union officials say, is that supervisors got a 12.5% pay boost from the state Legislature this year, hiking their pay to $133,000.

Union officials say that, by their calculations, it would take a 15.5% raise over three years to bring their members’ inflation-adjusted pay back to its 1990 level, before they spent nearly four years without raises as the county skirted bankruptcy. They also oppose a county plan to have workers pay a $10-$15 health insurance co-payment when visiting a doctor.

Local 660, whose membership voted during last month’s Democratic National Convention to approve a strike, is slated to negotiate with the county through Friday, when the current contract expires. But if there is no agreement by noon of that day, union leaders say, their members will strike.

Although they have not disclosed details, the strike is expected to begin as “rolling” job actions, moving from one county facility to another. A strike calendar circulating in the Hall of Administration shows job actions starting Oct. 2 at the registrar-recorder’s office and the Department of Animal Control, moving to the district attorney’s office--where Local 660 represents child support workers and clerical employees--and county hospitals, before building to a general strike by Oct. 11.

Local 660 leaders say they will try to minimize the effects on residents who depend on their members for health care, child support and welfare. And county officials say they would pursue a court order to force striking nurses and doctors--whose union is enmeshed in its own labor dispute with the county and coordinating with Local 660--to return to work.

“It’d be totally unfair for us to do anything outside” a 9% raise, Supervisor Don Knabe said, adding that he believes a strike is less likely because relations between the county and Local 660 are much better than those between the MTA and its three unions.

County Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen said the union’s concerns about its members’ sharing in the economic growth and making it into the middle class are not relevant in the hard world of county budgeting.

“The county can’t afford to use that rationale to grant salary increases,” Janssen said. Conservative budgeting has become a mantra at the Hall of Administration since 1995, when a $1-billion federal bailout--secured with the aid of Local 660’s political clout--was needed to stave off bankruptcy.

As the economy has revived over the last three years the county has begun to generate modest surpluses, but supervisors have mostly spent the money on one-time projects such as repairing crumbling government buildings, even while weaning themselves off some of the questionable financing schemes that got them into financial trouble in the first place.

Looming over every budget decision is a projected deficit that begins at more than $150 million in three years and opens to half a billion dollars by 2006.

The fiscal caution shown by supervisors can conflict with their rhetoric--especially that of the three Democrats who are the majority and have often spoken of the growing gap between Los Angeles’ rich and poor. For example, those three--Supervisors Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, Gloria Molina and Zev Yaroslavsky--last year pushed a living-wage law requiring county contractors to pay workers at least $8.32 an hour. But they did not extend the requirement to part-time workers, including their own county employees.

This month, they also gave a lower raise to county home-care workers--who will now make $6.75 an hour--than virtually all other counties that have adopted financial structures allowing home-care workers to unionize. Supervisors said that they could not afford larger raises and that the wealthier state government needs to step in to help.

Janssen said the county is mindful that some of the employees represented by Local 660 may need more than a 9% raise and that those people can be taken care of by targeted increases. And supervisors say they are optimistic that the dispute can be settled before this week’s end. Indeed, some say Local 660 leaders have confessed that building to a strike is a useful organizing tool.

A strike, Molina said, “will be hard on employees as well as the people who use the county’s services. . . . If you look at all we have [in county benefits and retirement], L.A. is not a bad place to work.”

Still, analysts say, labor has many reasons to be aggressive nowadays.

“You’ve got a booming economy, you’ve got Democrats at every level of state office” that unions helped get elected, said Fernando Guerra, head of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. “How much stronger can they get? If they can’t do it under these situations . . . this is the time to strike--no pun intended.”

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Contract Issues

Los Angeles County’s contract with its largest labor union, SEIU Local 660, expires Saturday, and the union has threatened a strike if its demands are not met. Here are the key issues and positions:

*

UNION

* At least 15.5% raise over three years

COUNTY

* 9% raise over three years

*

UNION

* Maintain current health benefits for full-time workers *

COUNTY

* Add $10 to $15 co-pay per medical visit and extend them to part-timers

UNION

* County should create fund to help workers pay child care

COUNTY

* No fund considered

* MTA TALKS RESUME TODAY

With many feeling a pinch from the bus strike, union and MTA officials agreed to talk. B1