Building Up a Head of Steam in Striketown USA

Am I the only one in Los Angeles who’s still going to work?

Of course, this is a modest exaggeration on my part. The coffee lady was there to take my money this morning. And the most annoying person in the office always manages to show up.

So let’s have a show of hands by those who’ve walked off the job, or are about to, here in Striketown, USA.

* MTA drivers, about 4,300 of them, left the bus lanes two weeks ago, effectively taking a good many of their 450,000 riders off the roads with them.

* About 47,000 Los Angeles County employees could start one-day rolling walkouts, by union, on Monday. These “bureaucrats” are the nurses and interns in county emergency rooms, the librarians who help your kids with their homework, the clerks who fingerprint inmates coming into jail and the deputy probation officers who monitor them when they get out.

* Nearly as many teachers, 43,500, could strike the Los Angeles Unified School District some time around Thanksgiving, thrilling more than 700,000 students and driving their parents nutty.

* The actors who make TV and radio commercials are still on strike at five months and counting. Big checks have been dropped in their strike fund bucket by big stars. Maybe the marquee-toppers can also see their way clear to spare some bucks for the humbler striking unions, as preached by the labor movement’s St. Joe Hill with his mantra of “one big union.”

Contract talks are like a geyser: enough steam builds up over time, and it’s liable to blow. Before the economy began stoking up a ferocious head of steam, the unions were met with belt-tightening homilies about all of us being together in sharing the pain of hard times, until labor, too, was ready to blow.

Now it gets ugly, mortgage costs vs. operating costs, Stingy vs. Greedy, and no matter which side of the table you sit on, the folks opposite have managed to grow horns and forked tails.

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It began with the janitors’ strike earlier this year, an action which earned them higher wages and even higher public approval ratings. Somehow, this strike season, the unions have managed to look disciplined and monolithic, and it’s management that seems to be in disarray. The MTA and the school board have been assailed for years for profligacy and a want of accountability. Los Angeles County, stiffed out of its own tax money by the state’s fiscal version of three-card monte, is pleading poverty even louder than its employees, which is quite a feat when six in 10 of their employees earn less than $32,000 a year.

And contract talks have an odd, flimsy feel to them, as if the family 8-year-old was negotiating with the 12-year-old over who gets to use the car: The older kid may win, but he may not be able to deliver the goods.

Consider who’s calling the shots in L.A. these days:

The Feds have strapped one of those house-arrest ankle bracelets on the entire Los Angeles Police Department. The MTA is living under a federal consent decree about bus service. A state mediator has been called in on the MTA strike. Even Compton has disbanded its police force and asked the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department in to do the job.

And Gov. Gray Davis, who ordered a cooling-off period in August so neither he nor L.A. would be embarrassed by a transit strike during the Democratic National Convention, has been called upon to play Solomon with a pen.

By Saturday, Davis must decide whether to sign a certain law. That law would require that if you spin off a smaller transit system from the MTA “mother system,” as in the San Fernando Valley, you have to honor the “mother system’s” union contracts. The drivers’ union likes the bill, of course, and the MTA says it would doom any attempt at crafting smaller, more efficient transit districts.

And it’s funny, really--people like Mayor Richard Riordan who support the transit breakup notion and the union breakup to go along with it stand foursquare against the city’s varied secession movements. The bus system is too big, but the city isn’t. Go figure.

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Rideshare Week begins Monday, and never in its 15 years has it been needed more. Rideshare wants you to call its toll-free number, (800) 286-RIDE, to arrange car-pooling matchups, which in this town is tougher matchmaking than a singles service.

I’m phoning in my car-pool suggestion: Lock the MTA leaders and the union negotiators in the same car on the Santa Monica Freeway, and don’t let them out until they agree.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.