MTA Talks Resume; Strike Affecting Businesses
Both sides call session a step in the right direction. Economists worry about 
long-term impact as shops, restaurants report drop in customers.

LOS ANGELES -- As residents and businesses in working-class neighborhoods continued to suffer, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's drivers union and management met face to face for the first time in three days Tuesday, but the best they could do was agree to meet again today, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Despite the failure to address meaningful contract issues, the top negotiators for the two sides left the Pasadena Hilton after a 90-minute meeting smiling and shaking hands.

Julian Burke, the MTA's chief executive officer, and James Williams, head of the United Transportation Union, described Tuesday's session as a step in the right direction.

"We are very pleased to be back at the bargaining table," said Williams, whose 4,400-member union walked out of talks and called a strike that began at midnight Friday.

While MTA management and the unions weighed their respective positions, the MTA's 450,000 daily riders--most with no alternative to public transit--struggled to come up with some way of getting around.

With the drivers on strike and members of MTA unions representing mechanics, clerks and supervisors refusing to cross picket lines, the walkout has idled all but a few of the MTA's 2,000 buses, along with the Red Line subway, and Blue Line and Green Line light-rail systems.

Business and residents of the Eastside, Central and South-Central Los Angeles are bearing the brunt of the strike, with shoppers who use mass transit unable to get to stores and workers putting together patchwork commuting schemes. Schools, hit by high absenteeism Monday, reported that attendance was better Tuesday.

Pacific Boulevard in Huntington Park, a commercial stretch considered Los Angeles County's busiest Latino shopping district, is one of the areas being hurt by the strike.

Up and down the half-mile strip of restaurants, clothing stores, music outlets and other shops, merchants said business has been down by 50% since the walkout began.

"Today is even worse than yesterday," said Louis Delgado, manager of a novelty and costume shop. By mid-afternoon Tuesday, he said, he had sold $100 worth of merchandise--a fraction of his usual sales.

"I'm looking out at the street and I only see about 30 people walking around," he said. "I guess people are just going to work and then going home. No one wants to find transportation to go shopping."

At the normally chaotic Gallo Giro eatery on the corner of Pacific Boulevard and Florence Avenue, the lines to order plates of tamales, tortas, burritos and carne asada were either nonexistent or composed of only two or three people.

The outdoor tables that are usually filled with customers were all but empty. Only three tables were in use during Tuesday's lunch hour.

Louis Rivera, the assistant manager, said business has dropped at least 50%, most noticeably in the morning, when many customers stop for coffee or a pastry on the way to catch a bus.

"All the people around here stop for a taco or coffee on the way to the bus," he said. "Without the buses, we don't have that."

He worried about the impact the strike could have on his workers, many of whom have been taking taxis to work because of the walkout. Rivera said his workers can't afford to pay for taxis all week.

Over at the Whittier Boulevard shopping district in East Los Angeles, some business owners said their earnings have dropped by about a third since the buses stopped running Saturday.

Chin Chin, who has owned a thrift store on the block for 10 years, said most of her customers are arriving on foot.

"It has been slower," she said while ringing up some hardware items for a customer. "But not too slow."

Still, Chin said, "it would be good for them to finish [negotiations] quickly. One of my workers was an hour late the other day because she couldn't catch a bus."

Up a few blocks, Angelus Hernandez stood inside an empty dress store located behind a now-quiet MTA bus stop. Hernandez said commuters usually head straight toward his window displays as soon as they get off the buses.

"We're not operating too well," he said. "People have no way to get here. Hopefully, this won't last too long."

Crowds did gather at terminals where the buses and trains that are still operating were picking up passengers. The Metrolink commuter trains and eight municipal bus companies are still serving Los Angeles.

Demand for service from Union Station to the Westside was so great that Santa Monica's Big Blue Bus line added six to 10 buses to its downtown Los Angeles express service during peak morning and evening commuting hours.

"They are coming back with standing room only loads," said Cynthia Gibson, a spokeswoman for the Santa Monica bus company. She said buses with seats for 38 passengers were carrying nearly twice that many riders. Eighty or so people were crowding into the larger 51-passenger buses.

She said Union Station was packed with passengers vying for space on the Big Blue Buses. "We can't get enough buses in there," she said.

Another busy Big Blue Bus terminal was located at Rimpau and Pico boulevards. Passengers there said they normally take the MTA line to jobs on the Westside, but were forced by the strike to get rides to the terminal.

Substitute teacher Robert Kahlil, 37, said every day during the strike has become an odyssey for him. He said Tuesday that he was lucky enough to catch the Big Blue Bus from his home in West Los Angeles to Queen Anne Place Elementary School in the Mid-City area.

Today Kahlil is assigned to a school in Hollywood.

"It's going to be interesting," he said. "I have my cellular phone. I'm going to take a bus to La Brea and then call a taxi. It's cheaper than renting a car."

The exhausting commutes are being closely watched by Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. He said the longer the strike lasts, the deeper the impact on the local economy.

"Most people think this is an inner-city thing, but I think there is going to be a back flow to the Westside that will affect restaurants and the service industry if it continues," he said. "The first week, people are trying hard to get to work. But if there is a second week, people may consider how long it takes to get to work and may just start to drop out. It will be just so draining to keep it up."

Elsewhere, the California Highway Patrol and Caltrans said traffic was heavy Tuesday, but not unusually so.

The strike appeared to have only a modest impact on schools.

Administrators at Washington High School in South Los Angeles, for example, reported near-normal attendance Tuesday but said tardies were up because students had to walk or find other means of transportation.

Local community college administrators said students were trickling back to school Tuesday after a significant drop in attendance at some campuses the day before.

"People seem to be adjusting and finding ways to get to school," said Lynn Winter Gross, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Community College District.

The resumption of face-to-face meetings Tuesday was applauded by both sides, although neither the MTA nor the drivers union indicated how far they were from settling their deep differences.

When the two sides sit down again to resume negotiations, they will have a full plate of unsettled issues in front of them.

The MTA is still waiting for the union to respond to a comprehensive contract offer it made last week that covered pay raises, pension benefits, scheduling and work rules.

Facing huge operating deficits in coming years, the MTA has been demanding a 15% reduction in overtime pay for drivers and wants extensive changes in work rules that are favorable to unions.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to urge the unions to resume negotiations and called on Gov. Gray Davis to personally intervene in the talks to help settle the labor dispute.

Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, who wrote the motion calling for a resumption of negotiations, said many city employees have complained that the strike has interfered with their ability to get to their jobs.

Steve Smith, director of the state Department of Industrial Relations, would not respond directly to the City Council's request that the governor get personally involved.

Smith did say he believes "there is some very slow progress" being made.

"The administration is committed to doing everything we can do because it is certainly not a good thing for the taxpayers or the people who rely on mass transit," Smith said.

Miguel Contreras of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor announced that organized labor will hold a mass rally in front of the MTA's Gateway Center headquarters Thursday to underscore its support for the striking drivers.

"This strike of the MTA workers is a strike that belongs to all of labor," he said.

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MTA Strike Finds Liberals at Odds with Labor Allies

Politics: Three key supervisors are thrust into the unusual role of backing the transit agency.

LOS ANGELES -- You wouldn't normally cast Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke as the heavy in a labor dispute, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The first African American on the powerful Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, the 68-year-old Burke has enjoyed the backing of organized labor throughout her long political career. While on the board, she has pushed a law requiring a "living wage" for county contract employees and recently supported striking Los Angeles janitors.

But as chair of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, she and the other two traditionally liberal Democratic supervisors--Zev Yaroslavsky and Gloria Molina--this week have publicly castigated bus and rail operators who essentially are striking to maintain their right to an eight-hour workday and overtime.

It's just one way that the transit strike has opened a window on the twilight zone of Los Angeles politics, where traditional ideologies melt away and yesterday's allies are today's antagonists, where bureaucratic necessity must be served and public sentiment counts for very little.

Tuesday, there was grudging, incremental progress in the four-day labor action, with a 90-minute meeting in Pasadena concluding only with an agreement to meet again today. Even though negotiators seemed more optimistic after three days without talks, there remain political obstacles to a swift agreement.

Anecdotally, at least, there is evidence to suggest that popular sympathy is with the drivers. Historically, overtime and the eight-hour workday are such pillars of American labor orthodoxy that it is hard to imagine even lukewarm members of the pro-union Democratic Party quibbling with them.

But this is Los Angeles and the MTA is, well, the MTA.

The majority of the 13-member MTA board is composed of elected officials who are as immune to a strike's political pressure as politicians can be: Mayor Richard Riordan, a lame-duck moderate Republican nearing the end of his term, who has been nearly invisible during the strike, controls four votes. Five others belong to county supervisors who represent districts so massive that they are virtually invulnerable to a challenge at the polls.

And the strike may actually be the path of least resistance for the members of the MTA board. Unless it wrings concessions from its workers, it may have to scale back politically appealing transit construction programs that are strongly supported by the state legislators and congressional representatives upon whom the county depends for its own operating funds.

"What you're seeing is an overlap of politics and practicality," said one MTA board member who spoke on condition of anonymity. "If the negotiators don't cut costs [by tightening labor contracts], there's no service. . . . And politically, no cost saving, no construction project in my district."

In traditional Los Angeles fashion, the MTA board is a frighteningly complicated entity, composed of 13 members: the five county supervisors, the mayor of Los Angeles and three of his appointees, and four representatives of other, smaller Los Angeles County cities.

Usually the board is as fractured politically as it is geographically, with representatives battling each other for construction projects in their own districts. But it has been surprisingly unified during the strike, attacking the union for leaving low-income passengers stranded.

Liberal board members have been the most vocal, casting themselves not as anti-union, but as protectors of the downtrodden.

"What you've seen over the last week is pretty much a wall-to-wall coalition," said Yaroslavsky at a news conference Sunday, at which he was flanked by liberal and conservative MTA board members. "You've got the people who have supported labor . . . who will just not tolerate this kind of hostage-taking when it comes to public services."

Such talk outrages organized labor, especially the 4,400 members of the United Transportation Union who struck Saturday rather than accept a 15% cut in overtime for its bus and rail operators. Drivers say their overtime, combined with base salaries of $10 to $20.72 an hour, leaves them barely clinging to the middle class.

"Labor is going to fight for middle-class jobs," said Miguel Contreras, executive director of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor.

He said he was especially disappointed in the liberal supervisors--Burke, Yaroslavsky and Molina--all of whom endorsed the high-profile janitors strike earlier this year.

"Over and over, all three of them have come to labor's table asking for help and support," Contreras said. "And over and over again, they've proven a disappointment to the union movement."

It is not just the MTA strike that has labor riled at county supervisors. The main county union is gearing up for a strike when its contract expires Oct. 1, upset at the 9% raise over three years supervisors have offered.

County doctors may join nurses, ambulance drivers and clerical workers on the picket lines because their benefits are being slashed. And Los Angeles is the only county in the state that declined to give a $1.25-an-hour raise to unionized home care workers, who earn $6.75 an hour.

Burke, a former assemblywoman and congresswoman as well as onetime partner at the blue-chip law firm of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, said she's comfortable on the other side of the picket line.

"Primarily, I'm a manager," said Burke, adding that she hoped her political ties to organized labor could facilitate negotiations. "My main responsibility at the MTA is to make that into an efficient operating entity."

In that parlance, an efficient MTA is one that cuts payroll costs in favor of new transit projects, which are more politically profitable.

On the side of new transit projects are politically connected contractors and middle-class voters who are potential riders. Most important are lawmakers in Sacramento and Washington, who want more transit projects for which they can claim credit. Indeed, when Yaroslavsky backed a countywide initiative two years ago to halt subway construction, he was attacked from Sacramento and Washington.

Unions, on the other hand, have limited weapons available against the MTA. The inconvenience of a strike pales in comparison to the consequences of state and federal legislators withholding money from your agency.

And labor's electoral clout is diminished because of the composition of the MTA board. With no incumbent supervisor having been ousted in 20 years and three running with no opposition this year, county supervisors have little to fear. Riordan, who was backed by the County Federation of Labor in his last race, is prevented by term limits from running again.

Finally, the mayor of Los Angeles--the traditional locus of political leadership in the region--has kept a low profile during the strike, surprising observers who recall his active role mediating the janitors walkout.

Riordan's quiet role in this dispute is dictated, in part, by two personal political imperatives: As one of the architects of the first so-called "transit zone" to break away from the MTA--Foothill Transit--he is committed to expanding such experiments in low-cost regional bus service, something the unions strongly oppose in the current negotiations. Moreover, the mayor personally recruited and has supported MTA chief Julian Burke, a veteran corporate turnaround specialist.

The mayor is "100% engaged" in the strike, said Associate Mayor Jaime de la Vega, one of Riordan's MTA appointees, but is allowing the MTA management--led by Julian Burke--to take the lead in negotiations, along with Supervisor Burke. "Rationalizing" the transit agency's labor costs would be an important part of Julian Burke's--and, therefore, Riordan's--legacy to Los Angeles.

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