L.A. County Workers to Start 1-Day Strikes

By SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON

Sept. 30, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

The first of 47,000 Los Angeles County workers will strike beginning Monday in a series of walkouts that will escalate each day unless management offers higher raises, union officials announced Friday after talks broke down.

First on the strike list are the county registrar-recorder’s office in Norwalk and animal control offices countywide, said Annelle Grajeda, general manager of Service Employees International Union, Local 660.

For the record:

12:00 a.m. Oct. 1, 2000 For the Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday October 1, 2000 Home Edition Metro Part B Page 3 Metro Desk 1 inches; 26 words Type of Material: Correction
Teachers union--A story in Saturday’s Times said a Los Angeles teachers’ strike is pending. Union members have merely authorized their leaders to call a strike if negotiations fail.

The local represents a wide variety of county employees, from part-time library workers and clerks in various departments to ambulance drivers and nurses.

The number and impact of the one-day strikes are expected to grow each day as union employees in targeted departments stay home. Agencies from child protective services to county jails to hospitals, including King/Drew and Harbor City-UCLA medical centers, are on the list for later in the week.

The union has given the county an Oct. 11 deadline to make a higher offer before a general strike by its entire membership begins, an action that would wallop a county already struggling with a strike by 4,400 public bus and train operators and a threatened walkout by teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Despite the rolling walkouts, the public’s safety and welfare will be protected, said county Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen. He said affected departments plan to stay open by shifting nonstriking workers around as much as possible.

“Health departments will also have contingency plans,” he said, including contracting for services.

Local 660 members voted overwhelmingly last month in favor of a strike if negotiations over a new contract broke down by the deadline of Friday afternoon, set because of the start of the Jewish holiday Rosh Hashana. The workers’ contract expires tonight.

“What this campaign is about is all of us getting our fair share,” Grajeda said Friday to wild applause from the crowd of union members, who wore purple T-shirts and chanted, “Ask the board, ask the board” of supervisors about why talks broke down.

But Janssen said it was union negotiators who walked away from the table in the midst of discussions Friday afternoon. Janssen said the county had offered a good package of pay and benefits, including a 9% raise over three years. That’s 6.5% less than the union is calling for.

“They need to come back to the table,” he said, adding that a strike would be illegal because of a contract provision that requires both parties to go to impasse mediation and fact-finding.

“We hadn’t completed bargaining,” Janssen said. “They literally finished and walked. They weren’t serious about negotiations today.”

Union spokesman Mark Tarnawsky disputed that assessment.

“As of tomorrow midnight, there is no contract and we don’t need to go through any other process. We can stop work,” he said.

No new talks are scheduled.

The county workers’ action, coupled with the strike by drivers for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the teachers’ pending walkout, highlights how middle-class public employees feel they are struggling financially despite a thriving economy.

They “sacrificed during the 1990s to help the county pull through a fiscal crisis. They went four and five years without raises,” Grajeda said of her members, 60% of whom make less than $32,000 annually. “Now we have real prosperity. . . . It’s time for a fair share for L.A. County’s working families, and Local 660 members are determined to get it.”

The three-year, $98-million raise the union seeks would account for less than a third of the surplus the county has had in its recent budgets, Tarnawsky added.

Janssen disagreed that the county is flush with cash. “Anybody who understands counties knows there is no such thing as good times. There are poor times and not quite so poor times,” he said.

He said the county faces a $184-million deficit in its health system over the next three years because of declining support from the federal government. Because the county depends on funds from Sacramento and Washington to cover its costs, “we have to be very careful signing multiyear contracts,” he said.

Tarnawsky said that the union understands the problems the county faces with its health care system and that members will continue to fight for adequate funding. Still, “that doesn’t justify holding back the wages of the county employees,” he said.

Grajeda said county leaders would have to show “movement” before the union will meet with them again. She said it will take a 15.5% raise over three years to bring workers’ inflation-adjusted pay back to its 1990 level.

Los Angeles County’s massive government is the region’s largest employer, with 55 bargaining units representing 87,000 employees. The largest is Local 660.

Times staff writer Jeffrey L. Rabin contributed to this story.

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Strike Schedule

A series of one-day strikes throughout Los Angeles County will begin Monday. Following are the departments that will be affected and the days walkouts are planned:

Monday

* Registrar-recorder

* Department of Animal Control

Tuesday

* Department of Public Social Services

* Department of Children and Family Services

* Department of Public Works

Wednesday

* Civic Center

* Sheriff/jails

* District attorney

* Public defender