Riordan’s Ties With Labor Warming After Early Freeze

Four years after first winning election despite the determined efforts of local union leaders, Mayor Richard Riordan enjoys surprisingly strong support among leaders of the city’s organized workers as he wrestles with a new batch of complex labor issues.

That unexpected alliance between many union leaders and the city’s multimillionaire mayor is partly the result of accommodation on both sides. It also reflects Riordan’s strategy of dividing, cajoling and compromising to win over key figures in the labor movement.

“We have a working relationship with this mayor,” said Miguel Contreras, executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. “That’s important.”

Both sides have benefited. Riordan has gotten support for high-profile projects, such as the downtown sports arena, and political backing that helped him trounce state Sen. Tom Hayden in this year’s mayoral race. Workers stand to gain thousands of jobs created by the arena, a new cathedral, possibly a new concert hall and the Alameda Corridor, a major rail project.

But both sides also have sacrificed. Riordan’s decision to back away from promises about overhauling the public work force has disappointed conservative and libertarian backers. Meanwhile, labor organizations have divided, sometimes bitterly, over the warming relationship with the mayor. While construction trades generally like Riordan, he remains a pariah among some unionized city employees.

“I haven’t seen this as an administration that’s friendly to city workers,” said Julie Butcher, general manager of the Service Employees International Union, one of the largest associations of city workers. “There have been a few positive things, but overall, this is not an administration that’s good to labor.”

The strength of Riordan’s labor ties will get its next test in the coming weeks, as Department of Water and Power General Manager S. David Freeman pushes ahead with a plan that could cost 2,000 city workers their jobs. That would be the largest municipal layoff in Los Angeles history. Normally, such a proposal would enrage organized labor; so far, the union reaction to it has been conspicuously muted.

Rather than condemn the prospective layoffs, Contreras and other labor officials stressed that the DWP’s belt-tightening was necessary. Even more noteworthy, Brian D’Arcy, the famously combative leader of the DWP’s largest union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, actually spoke out in support of the deal.

The employees slated for layoffs, D’Arcy said, were not hard-working field employees but white-collar managers and engineers who “spend all day playing solitaire on their PCs.”

For Riordan, the latest labor issue is both perilous and promising, a chance for him to sew up relations with some unions while sacrificing them with others. And the outcome of that battle will help define and clarify Riordan’s relationship with labor, a relationship that has gone from nonexistent to warily cordial.

When Riordan first sought public office in 1993, his background as a venture capitalist willing to fire workers in order to boost the bottom line frightened organized labor. And his rhetoric left little doubt about what he thought of city workers and the government that employed them.

“City government is too big and too inefficient to get results,” he declared in his campaign booklet, “Turning L.A. Around.” “It is time for a management revolution at City Hall.”

The revolution that Riordan advocated was highlighted by his call for privatization--contracting out government services to private companies. “Competition between public and private entities has several advantages,” he said at the time. “It encourages greater efficiency, forces monopolies to respond to the needs of their customers, rewards innovation and boosts the pride and morale of public employees.”

Privatization also very often costs public employees their jobs. And the unions representing those and other workers quickly lined up on the side of Riordan’s opponent, City Councilman Mike Woo. Labor leaders pronounced that campaign the most important in the recent local history of organized workers, then proceeded to lose it handily.

In the years since Riordan took office, however, he has turned out to be less terrifying than some workers had imagined. He did not follow through on pledges to privatize city garbage collection or street maintenance and repair services. He has trimmed the bureaucracy here and there, but far less dramatically than his campaign had led many observers to expect.

In fact, today’s city work force is barely 100 employees smaller than it was the year before Riordan took office complaining of the bloated bureaucracy.

That has disappointed some who hoped the mayor would act more boldly, but it also helped ease some of the early antagonism that labor leaders felt for Riordan. And Riordan’s record has been reinforced by his double-barreled effort to woo labor’s leaders, an approach that mixes social graces with hardball politics.

On the gentler front, Riordan has made it a point to invite labor representatives to his official residence once a year for dinner. Last year, city workers declined to attend and instead stood outside passing out leaflets; this year, the mayor faced some tough questions, but the atmosphere was friendlier.

Behind the scenes, Riordan’s political operatives have nursed the relationship in a different way. Realizing that construction trades favor growth because it means jobs for their workers, Riordan’s reelection campaign began working early this year to drum up support among leaders of those groups and to urge them to endorse the mayor over challenger Hayden.

By the time the area’s labor council gathered to consider a vote on the matter, Riordan had rounded up enough votes to keep Hayden from getting the same support Woo had, even though Hayden has devoted much of his life to issues involving workers and even though the senator was with labor on the year’s most contentious worker issue, the recently enacted “living wage ordinance,” which Riordan opposed.

“We blitzed Hayden,” one Riordan supporter said later. “Tom never saw it coming.”

Also taken aback were some city employee unions. They angrily rebounded and eventually were able to keep Riordan from getting a formal union endorsement. Instead, each labor association was allowed to back whomever it chose. By then, however, the damage was done, as anything less than a rousing labor endorsement of Hayden was perceived by both campaigns as a stunning victory for a Republican against a liberal Democrat.

In the aftermath of that battle, there were some hard feelings between building and trade unions and the unions representing city workers, an inevitable leftover from the Riordan camp’s successful strategy of dividing labor interests.

Contreras acknowledged that the issue of support for the mayor has sometimes been divisive.

“The city unions always have to have a wary eye on the mayor,” he said. “There’s naturally some suspicion. But if you’re in the construction trades, you look at the cathedral, the sports arena, the Alameda Corridor, the LAX expansion. There’s talk and movement on all those. And that’s a lot of jobs.”

And Riordan has found other ways to help the building trade unions while keeping the criticism from city unions to a minimum--at least when it suits other political goals. In the effort to rewrite the City Charter, for instance, Riordan not only declined to endorse changes in Civil Service rules, as city workers had feared, he in fact appeared before one charter commission this week and solidly proclaimed the need to protect worker rights.

In addition, Riordan backed off from talk of creating neighborhood councils across the city. The building trades fear that such councils would curb growth, and Riordan, who once talked favorably of such panels, left them entirely out of his slate of proposed charter reforms.

“That was a straight political gift,” said one local union leader. “That’s the mayor saying he doesn’t want to fight the building trades. He’d rather have a new charter.”

Still, the relationship between Riordan and local unions is not all accommodation and buffet dinners. It still has its rough spots, particularly when it comes to the living wage.

Riordan has tried to walk a fine line on that issue, urging companies to pay their workers fair salaries--and paying his own employees a living wage at the Original Pantry Cafe, a restaurant he owns. But he refuses to support the campaign to require companies that do business with the city to pay those salaries.

Most recently, Riordan’s administration has fought to keep the living wage from being imposed on airlines doing business at Los Angeles International Airport, while the mayor has personally pledged to union leaders that he will lobby the airlines to impose the higher salaries voluntarily. Without change, either voluntary or coerced, security workers and others at the airport will continue to be paid the minimum wage, without paid vacation or sick days, for jobs that protect the safety of tens of thousands of air travelers every day.

Few people believe that the mayor will succeed in that effort. After all, nothing is stopping the airlines from raising salaries now, and the airlines are not particularly fond of Riordan, who has tried to raise landing fees at the airport. As a result, Contreras, other labor leaders and members of the Living Wage Coalition all hope that once the mayor has made his pitch, he will come to realize the necessity of the ordinance.

No matter the outcome, it is a process labor leaders are watching closely.

“On this issue, Riordan talks the talk,” said one proponent of the living wage. “He hasn’t shown us that he walks the walk.”

All those issues are dwarfed by what is in many ways the most dramatic public sector labor issue ever to hit Los Angeles. The DWP, under its new leadership, is preparing the largest layoffs in municipal government history. And though it enters those talks faced with strong opposition from managers and engineers, the DWP has its own labor split to exploit.

Managers and engineers are ready to fight it out, not necessarily to save every job but at least to hold down the damage. Bob Duncan, executive director of the engineers and architects association, said he intends to take his case to the negotiating table this week.

But Duncan and his counterpart at the management association have two problems: the DWP’s huge financial woes and the political coalition that has massed against them. That coalition includes Republican mayor Riordan, liberal City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter and powerful union chief D’Arcy.

D’Arcy has been willing to confront Riordan in the past, going so far as to stage demonstrations and threaten strikes. But times and circumstances have changed. Now, he and the mayor are on the same side, a fact that has dramatically increased the chances of the restructuring going through.

“This is not rocket science,” D’Arcy said. “This is going to happen.”