Strike Halts Trash Pickup in Much of O.C.

Trash haulers across much of Orange County went on strike Monday, halting refuse collection for at least 350,000 homes and 25,000 businesses in what one union official warned could be a weeks-long walkout.

With no negotiations scheduled and hot weather forecast for the week, the first Orange County sanitation strike in 20 years could add the stench of rotting garbage to the usual smog. As many as 40% of county households could be affected.

Hundreds of drivers, mechanics and maintenance workers launched the action against four private refuse companies just days after rank-and-file members of Teamsters Local 396 rejected a new contract offer supported by the union’s leadership.

Although residential impact was only beginning to be felt, county health officials warned that a protracted strike could bring rodents and disease where trash service was discontinued or delayed.

But it did not appear that the strikers were in any mood for compromise.

“They’re keeping us down. Everything is going up but our paycheck,” said Richard Medina, a driver for Waste Management Inc., one of the companies hit by the strike. “This $1 an hour they want to give us for the first year--that’s no increase.”

Wearing gray T-shirts that read “No Contract, No Work,” dozens of strikers began assembling picket lines a few hours before dawn at county landfills, company offices and transfer stations, where refuse is loaded onto larger trucks for delivery to dumps.

They marched with signs that read “On Strike Against” in bold block letters, and then filled in the names of their respective companies. At the Rainbow Disposal Transfer Station on Nichols Street in Huntington Beach, about 80 pickets wearing blue work uniforms walked the line with signs all day, beginning at 4 a.m.

By early afternoon, the presence of pickets had created delays of as long as 1 1/2 hours for refuse haulers at county landfills and prevented at least 4,000 tons of refuse from being collected and sent to local dumps. The county’s three landfills usually accept a total of 20,500 tons of trash a day.

Besides major trash haulers, the county dumps and transfer stations are used by hundreds of independent contractors, including landscapers, drywall installers and roofers, as well as residents disposing their refuse.

Usually the wait is “zero--you just drive right in and wait at the scales,” said Steve Brow, owner of Brow Tree and Garden, who estimated that it took him 25 minutes to drive his 5-ton truck filled with tree trimmings into an Anaheim transfer station and dump it.

In an unincorporated area of Santa Ana, Doug Kim, 21, worried that he would have to pay someone to haul the trash from his house, but he was more worried about the smell in his neighborhood if the strike continues at a time when temperatures in the 80s and 90s are forecast for the week.

“It’s pretty stinking hot for October,” Kim said.

Meanwhile, most of the county’s largest generators of trash, such as Disneyland, had yet to feel the strike. The theme park generates about 15,000 tons of trash a year and recycles about a third of that. The park’s trash is picked up 15 times a day.

The companies say “they will do their best to pick up the trash so that our guests won’t notice any interruption in service,” said Disneyland spokesman Ray Gomez.

Union officials said Monday that it might take weeks to end the action against Waste Management Inc., CR&R; Inc., Rainbow Disposal and Taormina Industries. From 700 to 800 employees are involved in the strike.

Company officials estimated that the strike will affect 350,000 to 400,000 homes and 25,000 to 35,000 commercial customers in at least 15 of the county’s 34 cities. Also affected are unincorporated areas, primarily in north and central Orange County.

Service was halted Monday in Anaheim, Brea, Fountain Valley, Fullerton, Garden Grove, Huntington Beach, La Habra, Orange, Placentia, Santa Ana, Stanton, Tustin, Villa Park, Westminster and Yorba Linda.

Buena Park, Costa Mesa, La Palma and Newport Beach have municipal haulers and were unaffected by the strike. Other cities using contractors not involved in the strike include Cypress, Dana Point, Los Alamitos, Laguna Beach, San Clemente and Seal Beach. Irvine has a “no-strike” clause in its contract with Waste Management. Most of South County was unaffected.

In the affected cities, trash haulers were scrambling to restore service to priority customers, such as hospitals, industrial sites, restaurants and businesses that produce a high volume of refuse. They estimated that 30% of their services had resumed, but it would take at least a week to catch up with collections in residential neighborhoods.

Company officials said they are bringing in scores of supervisors and other employees to do the work of the striking drivers and mechanics. They also said they will be hiring replacements in the days ahead. Waste Management, a national company, said that it has replaced about a third of its 220 workers who are participating in the job action.

The stage for a strike was set Friday, when the rank-and-file of Teamsters Local 396 voted down a proposal that would have given them a 33.5% raise over five years, starting with a $1-an-hour increase the first year.

Union members rejected the package although the leadership of Local 396 encouraged them to approve the new contract. Striking workers have been talking about pay increases of up to $6 an hour over five years.

Waste Management Vice President Bob Coyle, a negotiator in the talks, said the companies would withdraw the rejected contract offer if it is not ratified by the union members by midnight tonight--an unlikely turn of events, given that no vote was scheduled.

When bargaining resumes, Coyle said, “we’ll be starting from scratch.”

Under the expired contract, drivers were paid $12.90 per hour, plus benefits. With drivers averaging 15 hours a week of overtime, most were paid about $42,000 per year, Coyle said.

The rejected offer would have raised wages by $1 per hour in the first year of a five-year contract, followed by smaller increases bringing the hourly rate to $16 per hour. Hence, a driver working a 55-hour week would earn about $53,700 a year.

The average Orange County wage for trash haulers--$15.10 an hour--is slightly below that for clergy, at $15.99 per hour, and above bus drivers, at $14.10 per hour. Social workers, by comparison, average $15.87 per hour and sales representatives $28.09 per hour, according to federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data for 1999, the most recent year available.

One driver said that under their current work schedule, workers have little time for their own families. Jorge Gomez, on strike against Waste Management of Orange, said his income is too low to afford a home in Orange County, so he commutes from Riverside.

“I’m working sometime 60 hours a week,” Gomez said. “I leave the yard at 5 in the morning and some days I don’t get home until 8:30 p.m. or 9 p.m. at night, and my son is in bed asleep.”

Danny Bruno, a negotiator for the Teamsters, said even with the rejected wage offer, local drivers still would have fallen well behind trash haulers in other California metropolitan areas.

“They just want to make up a little bit of the ground,” he said, adding that strikers were asking residential customers to call their city halls and urge municipalities to raise rates 50 cents a month.

The rejection also was weighted by the Teamsters’ own internal struggles over the future direction of the 1.4-million-member union. In the weeks preceding the vote, local drivers were visited by members of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a reform-minded organization seeking to wrest control of the union from James P. Hoffa, son of the missing labor leader who embodied the Teamsters for many Americans.

“They started telling people that they got $6 raises and they could do it here too,” said Armando Duarte, 25, of Huntington Beach. “They were people from a different political group. We were all new in the union at the time, so we weren’t sure what was going on.”

Until the strike ends, haulers are recommending that businesses and residents bag and store their trash. County and city officials in the affected areas also requested that garbage not be placed in recycling bins.

“We would prefer that people simply take their trash and tie it up in plastic bags,” said Garden Grove City Manager George Tindall. “That can help us avoid confusion.”

In the unincorporated area of Rossmoor, where trash was scheduled to be picked up today, residents were wondering whether they’d have pickup as usual. Bob and Julie Tessenear, who live on Wallingsford Road, had several bags and two containers near the curb ready for pickup.

“I’ll haul it away before I let it sit out here and rot,” Bob Tessenear said.

At Seal Beach City Hall, Pamela Arends-King, director of administrative services, had a worried look after learning about the discontinuation of refuse collection in Huntington Beach, where she lives. Her family’s trash was put out Monday morning.

“I guess we’ll have to go buy some more garbage cans” if the strike lasts more than a few days, Arends-King said. “What else can we do?”

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Contributing to this report were Times staff writers Stan Allison, Jerry Hicks, Scott Martelle, Dave McKibben, David Reyes, Janet Wilson and Kimi Yoshino.