Union Seeks to Block City's Early Retirement Pact
Bob Aquino must feel a little besieged these days. Not only has the Los Angeles city employees union he heads been the target of membership raids by a rival union, but now his members find themselves on the municipal chopping block as the first municipal employees facing layoff notices.
The story has its roots in Aquino's Engineers and Architects Association's bitter feud with Local 721 of the Service Employees International Union, a union long allied with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. SEIU 721 and the Association of Federal, State, County and Municipal Employees are the dominant players within the Coalition of L.A. City Unions, the umbrella organization that since 2008 has been negotiating with the city's Chief Administrative Officer to shield as many of its 22,000 constituent members as possible from the current budget meltdown.The EAA is not a member of the coalition.
The coalition has pressed the city to allow its members to retire early, rather than force them out through layoffs and furloughs. Although Villaraigosa had seemed to backtrack last March on pledges to consider early retirement, on Monday the two sides reached a tentative agreement embracing early retirements. When the pact was announced, however, it also became clear that members of EAA, which was not a signatory to the deal, would be the first city employees laid off. Today, EAA lawyers are going to court to try to block the agreement, contesting the legality of unilateral furloughs.
"It's completely related," EAA's executive director said, and then outlined his version of SEIU's alleged raiding war against EAA, a dispute in which SEIU encouraged Aquino's members to decertify from EAA and re-affiliate with SEIU.
"The mayor was underwriting SEIU's attempt to take over EAA," Aquino said. "The mayor had city management support SEIU - supervisors directly told [our] members to vote for SEIU. He gave city office space and telephones to SEIU. He used to work for SEIU and derives a lot of political capital from SEIU."
SEIU 721's regional director, Julie Butcher, denies Aquino's charges.
"If there's such a thing as union malpractice," Butcher says, "he's guilty of it. We've been helping [EAA's] members escape to find a union that respects their work. His animosity towards the city overshadows his ability to represent his membership."
It's no secret that over the past year deep fissures have broken out in an American labor movement first split in 2005 when the SEIU and its international president, Andy Stern, led a walkout of six other large unions from the AFL-CIO. This has been followed by open warfare among unionized healthcare, hospitality and service workers belonging to SEIU locals and rival unions. In a remarkable decision, the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, whose actions are largely spearheaded by SEIU locals, passed a resolution in April condemning SEIU interference in the affairs of other L.A. unions.
Yet EAA is hardly without its own critics. Aquino and his union often find themselves at odds with the rest of the local labor movement, some of whose leaders view EAA as an enclave of highly paid white-collar workers who don't feel sufficiently motivated by labor solidarity. (For a description, see Jeffrey Anderson's 2005 L.A. Weekly article, Second Banana.) Last year, for example, EAA came out against Measure R and its half-cent tax hike -- while the rest of L.A. labor, led by the County Fed, mobilized its members to ensure its passage.
Its prickly relations with other unions may explain EAA's refusal to join the coalition, whose other unions include Teamsters Local 911, Laborers' International Union Local 777, International Union of Operating Engineers Local 501 and the L.A./O.C. County Building and Construction Trades Council. Aquino claims that its board of governors decided not to join the coalition because EAA would not have voting representation proportional to its size. Beyond this, he says that additional nonstarters included the other unions' willingness to accept "reopeners" - mechanisms that permit contracts previously hammered out with the city to be renegotiated during times of economic emergencies. Aquino told the L.A. Weekly that, like other city unions, EAA had agreed to consider wage freezes, but would not part with a three-percent cost of living raise it had won in its last contract with the city.
Here again, though, memories of his union's fights with SEIU 721 may have played a role in Aquino's unwillingness to participate in those negotiations.
"721 is not a union," Aquino says flatly. "SEIU doesn't argue with management - all their leaders want are dues."
"The bottom line," says Barbara Maynard, a spokeswoman for the coalition, "is that we saved the city a lot of money and saved jobs for our members."
Even now, with EAA's lawyers trying to derail the still-unratified agreement between City Hall and the coalition, Aquino sounds conciliatory.
"We're still willing to negotiate," he said.
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