L.A. labor must share in the pain

There’s nothing but bad fiscal news out of City Hall these days, and when Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa presents his new budget next month, it’s going to make for even uglier reading.

As mayoral Chief of Staff Jeff Carr puts it, “It’s simply a math problem: There’s a $485-million deficit, and no matter what some people say, there’s just not that much bureaucracy or waste to cut. So, to close the gap, you need to make massive layoffs, draconian cuts in services or get significant concessions from labor -- or some combination of those things.”

There are, of course, structural shortcomings built into the city’s finances, but resolving them in any serious way requires will and deliberation. This sharp and sustained economic downturn has forced the problems onto the civic agenda at a moment of maximum stress, when deliberative calm may be in shorter supply than dollars. The recession has had a catastrophic impact on L.A.’s revenues, and a further 4.7% decline is forecast for next year.

Even so, while the budget the mayor’s staff is preparing now assumes the necessity of throwing at least 4,000 city employees out of work and cutting services in ways that will make this city less convenient, livable and humane, it does not anticipate any concessions from unions.

That’s a tragedy that organized labor one day may come to regret.

Not long ago, Villaraigosa told a group of business leaders that he saw “no scenario where the city survives without layoffs or some concessions by the city unions.” In that and other conversations, he said he would ask the unions to take pay cuts of between 5% and 10% in the coming year. “We can minimize layoffs if employees agree to a cut,” he said.

The problem, Carr says is that the mayor’s call for shared sacrifice so far has been met with silence or rejection. But labor’s refusal to engage could have profound consequences on its members and the city. “A 10% across-the-board pay cut for everybody from the mayor down would save $300 million,” Carr explains. “That still leaves us with a $185-million shortfall, but with some of the revenue enhancements we’re considering, the problem goes from horrific to manageable. If everybody took a 15% cut, we’d be done. The problem would be solved, and we’d have saved 4,000 jobs and vital city services.”

Carr is an ordained minister who comes out of a community organizing background, and like the mayor -- a former union organizer -- he is realistic about what losing 15 cents of every dollar means to a working family. Nobody should minimize the sacrifice, but it would be a historic error for the city’s unions -- and organized labor nationally -- to look away at this moment. Solidarity -- as a social value, not just a tactic -- is one of organized labor’s moral underpinnings, and in this moment of crisis, L.A. needs its unions to demonstrate their commitment to that principle.

What’s required is a labor coalition, including police officers and firefighters, willing to put voluntary wage concessions on the table. If that were to occur, Carr said Friday, the mayor’s team would begin rewriting the proposed budget and demanding similar concessions from elected officials and nonunionized staff.

There are reasons beyond the obvious for the city’s unions to join in this sort of common-front initiative. California generally, and Los Angeles in particular, have been hospitable to organized labor at a time when unions are in retreat across most of the nation. Nationally, only 12% of American workers belong to unions. In California, 18% of the labor force is unionized, and in L.A., 17.5% of all working men and women carry a union card. Last year, while the percentage of all U.S. workers enrolled in unions fell 3%, California’s union rolls climbed by 2.3%. As dark as our local employment picture has been in the past year, union membership in metropolitan L.A. still increased 0.8%.

More to the point, while barely a third of all U.S. public employees are unionized, more than 50% of all the government workers in Los Angeles are. Unions, moreover, have played an integral role in minority progress -- particularly that of Latinos -- across L.A. County. If labor stands by and watches thousands of its members thrown out of work and into lengthy unemployment, those gains will be eroded in a special way, given that the city’s workforce historically is better integrated than the private sector. In contrast, a considered sacrifice by organized labor here would offer a national demonstration of labor’s farsightedness at this crucible moment.

Los Angeles and organized labor have been good for one another. Now they need to see each other through the bad times, so that when prosperity returns, the goodwill engendered by shared sacrifice will ensure that all share in the benefits.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com