CAMARILLO : Workers Picket at State Hospital for Insurance

About 60 maintenance workers at Camarillo State Hospital picketed their work site Thursday in protest over the state’s refusal to provide them with health care insurance.

Although medical and other personnel at the hospital have health care benefits, the maintenance workers do not because they work under contract for ServiceMaster, a private company with an $11-million-a-year contract to maintain the state’s six development centers.

Lenny Herrera, a maintenance worker for two years at Camarillo State Hospital who was on the picket line during lunch Thursday, said workers need the benefits to take care of their families.

“A lot of people already have families, but I’m just starting mine,” he said. “I would like to know that if something happened, I would have something to fall back on.”

Herrera, who with his wife is expecting their first child in April, said the delivery will be covered by his mother-in-law’s insurance. But after that, the family has no coverage for health care. They plan to apply for MediCal benefits, he said.

Jesus Arroyo, who has worked at the hospital for four years, said he takes his family members to Tijuana when they get sick.

“It’s cheaper there for the doctors and medicine and rooms, everything,” he said. “But other workers have health care. Why not us?”

Arroyo said he plans to walk the picket line again next week when the action resumes.

The Camarillo demonstration was one of six at California Developmental Centers statewide to call attention to the plight of the workers, said Leo Valenzuela, spokesman for the Laborers’ International Union office in Oxnard.

For three years the union has tried to get funding through the state budget for health care for the contract workers. But Gov. Pete Wilson rejected the provision each year, he said.

“The state is still paying for it because these people are using the county facilities and clinics and MediCal,” Valenzuela said.

The union is scheduled to meet for the second time with a federal mediator in Sacramento on Thursday.

“We’re trying to put pressure on them so they will soften up and start negotiating with us,” Valenzuela said.