Capitol Paint Job Leads to Picket Lines

Trouble is, they’ve got labor trouble right here at the state Capitol in River City, the political heart of the union movement in California.

The trouble became a public spectacle Wednesday when union members from throughout the state came to Sacramento, which calls itself River City, for their annual lobbying conference.

They immediately discovered that the north side of the golden-domed Capitol was getting a fresh coat of paint from nonunion painters of River City Painting Co.

A picket line was thrown up at a north entrance to the 127-year-old building, an unheard-of action in the nearly four years that labor-friendly Democrat Gray Davis has occupied the governor’s office and Democrats expanded their majorities in the Legislature.

The line, whose picketers numbered several hundred Tuesday but diminished to two dozen Wednesday, shut down the project when union employees of scaffolding and iron installers refused to cross it, a company executive said.

To lengthen their picket line, the plumbers union easily drew recruits from labor delegates to the lobbying conference. The line seemed to stop few people from entering the building, especially hundreds of energetic schoolchildren who paid more attention to the Capitol Park squirrels than to the picketers.

But a few committee hearings were canceled or delayed Wednesday in the Assembly. In the Senate, a Labor Committee hearing was postponed until next week.

At one point, Senate President Pro Tem John L. Burton (D-San Francisco), a familiar figure on picket lines across California, joined the marchers to protest the award of the $2.45-million painting contract to River City Painting Co.

Burton said he opposed hiring a nonunion contractor, contending that there was a “grave question” about whether the company was complying with health and safety laws. Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson (D-Culver City) said through a spokeswoman that he would have preferred the hiring of a union contractor.

A spokesman for the Department of General Services, which oversees the project, said the contractor submitted the “lowest responsible” bid of two received. The second was $3.7 million.

The state spokesman said River City employees, who were giving the building its first paint job since its restoration in 1981, were being paid the equivalent of union wages under the state’s “prevailing” wage law. The law requires government entities to pay nonunion workers the prevailing rates they would have received if they had been union members.

In the Senate, Chairman Richard Alarcon (D-Sylmar) postponed a scheduled hearing of his Labor and Industrial Relations Committee. He said he called off the session when he and two other committee Democrats decided not to attend and more than 50 witnesses from out of town refused to cross the picket line.

Alarcon’s action triggered a tongue-lashing on the Senate floor from Republican Sen. Tom McClintock of Thousand Oaks, who accused him of capitulating to a “special interest.”

“No private special interest should ever be permitted to disrupt the public’s business,” McClintock said later. “This is an unprecedented act. The central question is whether committees of the Legislature are meeting only at the sufferance of private special interests.”

Alarcon moved his committee staff to an office building across the street so it could work, he said.

By day’s end, however, Wesson’s office announced that District Council 6 of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, had agreed to disband the picket line at the Capitol for a week while negotiators attempted to work out a settlement.

*

Times staff writer Miguel Bustillo contributed to this report.