LABOR-LA ‘09/’10
By Julie Butcher (Special to CityWatch)
In 2009, LA city workers saved the City of Los Angeles.
Next year the hard work begins: figuring out how to provide the quality
of public services the citizens of Los Angeles deserve without the
hearts, hands and minds of the 2,400 workers retiring—stepping down so
that their younger brothers and sisters can keep their jobs and support
their young families.
This will be difficult, but it will impact city services less than the 3,000 layoffs and up to 43 furlough days CAO Miguel Santana projected if the Early Retirement Incentive Plan hadn’t passed.
Those 3,000 would have been the youngest workers, the ones most likely to be in the streets filling potholes and picking up trash, in the parks cleaning sandboxes and restrooms and scanning the horizon for fire.
Early retirement reaches every level of the city workforce, from some direct service workers on the frontlines, to the top reaches of management. It thins the org chart from top to bottom and cuts away bureaucracy as a value-added feature of the program.
But it’s up to city management to manage. And to the City’s political leadership to paint a responsible vision of a city focusing on its truly essential core services, living within its means, engaging labor, management, and the public we serve to go forward in the smartest way possible, with the least negative impact on city services—not just preserving their quality but increasing it.
The City’s engineers, criminalists, chemists, and microbiologists voted to join SEIU recently. Last week elected bargaining teams went to the table to meet with the City to bargain a new contract. The essence of their proposal is for the City to treat them as the valued professionals their wages, experience, and education suggest.
Engineers want to design this City’s structures and facilities – not sign off on vendor bills for expensive, connected contractors who count on the work of city engineers to hone their product.
At LAX the whole tenth floor of headquarters was cleared for contractors. Not long ago the city gave a consultant a 15-year pin before realizing he wasn’t employed by the city.
These engineers and other city professionals know that the economy is bad. They know that times are rough for the city. That’s why they’re demanding that the city use their expertise. Use them for what the taxpayer pays them for.
The city’s engineers build bridges that don’t fall down. Let them help engineer runways that will launch people smoothly out over the ocean before that first turn.
They have a good resume, and every city has their phone numbers. After the bond measure passed to build libraries, the Library Department partnered with Engineering in Public Works to design and build the new public libraries. Have you noticed how each one blends with its neighborhood, how each one is different, but how beautiful they all are? Efficient, light and airy and friendly. And without cost overruns, amendments and change orders, the City built new neighborhood libraries so efficiently they saved enough on the project to build an additional library.
As these libraries live in LA’s neighborhoods library usage in the City has doubled. That’s what LA’s workers stand for: spending city resources without spilling a drop, enhancing the lives of all of the people of Los Angeles.
LAPD Criminalists suggest, in fact, that the City could contract in the scientific work done at the City’s new state-of-the-art Crime Lab at CSULA. Once the backlog is managed, with the new focus of the work by the new COP, these professional police scientists suggest the City further contract in work – from paying municipal clients – as does the Orange County lab, as an example of entrepreneurial government that works for everyone.
Meanwhile, the golf course workers in Rec and Parks have been operating a golf cart concession at one city golf course for a tidy profit, while it was found that the contractor in the other courses was doing a cash business with questionable management oversight. Is this what we want for our city?
A union steward in GSD emailed the Mayor today, outraged to be paying a $15,460 invoice from the Union Ice Co.
The 2010-11 budget letter from the Mayor calls upon city departments to propose wide schemes to privatize city services. While some public-private partnerships make sound public policy sense (the Zoo association raises funds and runs the concessions, leaving the city’s world-recognized professionals to care for the animals), privatization is not the answer.
In city after city privatization is seen as an easy way out, a quick fix, but bitter experience and study after study shows that in the end citizens lose. Accountability and quality suffer, and it all ends up costing more in the end.
Angry people in Chicago took baseball bats to their parking meters this summer after they were sold to the highest bidder; the City’s financial crisis looms still.
The City of LA spent hundreds of millions on contractors and consultants last year—much of it for things city workers can do.
The DWP has been paying a private contractor to trim its trees for years. Recently the Board of DWP Commissioners approved an agreement with the City’s Bureau of Sanitation to pick up some of DWP’s trash – an agreement that makes economic sense for the DWP and allows Sanitation to provide excellent service to City scale.
LAWA is looking to expand a lucrative contract with Parsons to inspect public construction projects at the Airport rather than relying on more cost effective and competent construction inspectors already working for the City in Public Works, far enough away from the hen-house to ensure the public’s ultimate safety. Port management plans on using engineering consultants to design the waterfront, not experienced city engineers.
Shouldn’t we work as one big city? We must, to get through this economic recovery and come out the other end leaner, more efficient and still leading on the environment and innovation—like with the city’s Green Retrofit Ordinance, which will use federal stimulus dollars to update city buildings to the most efficient energy and environmental standards, while training Angelenos for these cutting edge jobs.
That’s why the agreement between the City and the Coalition of City Unions finalized this year -- early retirements, deferred raises, short-term cuts this fiscal year, increased contributions to bolster a recovering LACERS pension fund – anticipates the entire City coming together as one to face the immediate crisis and the future beyond.
(Julie Butcher is SEIU 721 Regional Director. She can be reached at
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CityWatch
Vol 7 Issue 105
Pub: Dec 30, 2009
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