MTA-Union Talks to Resume Amid News Blackout Optimistic officials proclaim breakthrough and agree to work for swift end to strike.

LOS ANGELES -- The Metropolitan Transportation Authority and union officials agreed Saturday to resume talks today under a news blackout and work toward a swift end to the crippling eight-day strike, the Los Angeles Times reported.

After meeting separately with state officials at the Pasadena Hilton, United Transportation Union head James Williams and the MTA board chairwoman, Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, sat down face-to-face Saturday afternoon for the first time since talks disintegrated a day earlier.

Assemblyman Herb Wesson (D-Culver City), who was appointed Friday as a fact-finder for Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg (D-Sherman Oaks) to determine whether the state should play a role in talks, called the agreement "a breakthrough." "We're optimistic we'll be able to get the buses rolling soon," Wesson said.

Wesson would not offer reasons for the news blackout.

The MTA continued its anti-union ad campaign Saturday with a radio announcement saying, "We will not allow our passengers to be held hostage by drivers who make more money than most drivers in the state."

MTA bus drivers earn the third-highest wages of all public transit bus drivers in California and the highest in Southern California.

One of the key issues dividing the sides is the MTA's demand that unions yield $23 million in overtime and other savings over the next three years to help make up for a deficit, projected to reach more than $400 million in 10 years.

However, that issue meant little to the small-business owners in ethnic shopping districts in and around downtown Los Angeles, most of whom are losing 25% to 70% of their business because of the strike.

On Saturday, businesses in Koreatown, Chinatown, Little Tokyo and downtown Los Angeles lacked the bustling crowds that usually pack sidewalks on weekends. Workers, themselves without transportation, complained of exhaustion after a week of trudging to work on foot.

At Grand Central Market downtown, merchant Michael Lopez said Saturday his family weathered the last transit strike by cutting prices on the food staples they sell, such as beans, rice and coffee.

It may also come to that this time, Lopez said.

"We get enough business to make payroll, but barely," he said. "We can survive maybe three weeks more. Then we'll have to do something."

Across Broadway Avenue, merchant Paolo Lopez said she has had to walk an hour one way from her Pico Union neighborhood to work at the Mexicana Discoteco Libreria. When she arrived at the record store, however, customers were scarce. Next week, at least one employee may be laid off temporarily because of slow business, she said.

In Koreatown, weekend food shopping became a labor-intensive chore Saturday as weary shoppers trudged home, loaded down with bags.

"Our lives are upside down," said Soon-Ok Kim as she carried two small plastic bags of groceries.

Before the strike, she stocked up on sale items, but now she buys what she can carry.

"I can only buy a few apples and pears and some vegetables at a time," said Kim. Around the corner, Shi-Kyo Kim and his daughter-in-law, Young-In Cho, walked home from Hannam Supermarket along Olympic.

"I'm exhausted from walking," complained 65-year-old Kim as he wiped his forehead. His grandson's stroller was loaded with vegetables.

"I've been walking everywhere this past week, and I don't know how much longer I can manage," he said. Kim said it takes him one hour each way to take his 4-year-old grandson to Childrens' School at 8th and Kingsley streets.

He said, "Please tell those people at the bus company, little people like us are suffering."

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Anxious Striker Sees Pile of Bills Coming In long workdays as an MTA driver, a single mother has pulled her family into the middle class. She fears an end to overtime could reverse her gains.

LOS ANGELES -- For the first time in months, Lydia Reeves has been able to catch her breath: No rush hour traffic or abusive passengers or 13-hour work schedules, the Los Angeles Times reported.

But as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's strike completed its seventh day Friday, Reeves--a bus driver and single mother of four--was eager to return to work. She and her 4,400 fellow drivers have so far lost a week's pay during the strike that has stalled the nation's second-largest public transportation system.

On a picket line at San Pedro and 16th streets, Reeves, 39, gripped the $900 paycheck--for two weeks of work--that will have to carry her family until she is back behind the wheel. Striking drivers got their last full paycheck Friday morning.

"When the first comes up, how am I going to pay rent?" she wondered.

It is a question that will be asked with greater urgency as the MTA strike continues and unpaid bills begin to pile up. Many of the MTA's drivers make far less than the average pay of $50,000 per year, a figure that includes the overtime the strikers stand to lose if management prevails during the ongoing labor dispute. (About 1,500 drivers make less than $45,000 and roughly 330 make less than $25,000, MTA figures show.)

With a 16-year-old bound for college next year, and 9-year-old twins and a 4-year-old to care for, Reeves said her struggle has been hard enough without the MTA's proposal to take away overtime pay. Reeves, who has been a driver since 1998, has earned about $18,000 so far this year.

With the extra hours of overtime, Reeves said, "I was just starting to get on my feet." Before the strike began, she said, "We were just starting to taste life" after living in poverty for so long.

For the Reeves family, the steady pay translates into an occasional trip to the movies, a dinner at a Denny's and, maybe, a trip to a store besides Payless Shoes or Kmart.

The pleased look on her 9-year-old son Steven's face when she bought him a pair of Nike Air Jordan sneakers "felt really good," said Reeves, who lives in north Long Beach.

Those are the rewards that have kept Reeves going, despite only five hours of sleep each night, unwanted advances from male passengers and long hours away from home.

"Usually, when I get home my babies are sleeping and when I get up to go to work they're sleeping," she said. "They ask me, 'Can't you take off Saturday?' But I can't."

A religious woman who believes in sacrifice, Reeves said the stressful life of an MTA bus driver has been the cost of climbing the bottom rungs of the middle class. She sympathizes with the roughly 450,000 bus riders who have been inconvenienced by the strike. But she fears she will lose what little gains she has made under the MTA's contract proposal.

Reeves said a brief stint on welfare during the late 1980s made her determined to make a better life for her family. She joined the MTA, in part, because it offers family health benefits, which were not offered at her previous job, which was driving a school bus in Long Beach. But because she lacks seniority, Reeves said, her unpredictable schedule makes child care difficult. She works six, sometimes seven, days a week.

The twins, Steven and Stephanie, are usually taken to a local YMCA about 6:30 a.m. They return there after school until about 6 p.m. Four-year-old Domanique spends 12 hours with a local baby-sitter, costing Reeves about $420 a month.

And 16-year-old Latanya cares for her younger siblings when Reeves is not around. "It's been hard," Reeves said.

So is her job, she said. Although she is friends with many of her regular passengers, a few riders have been outright scary. Some passengers refuse to pay the $1.35 bus fare, she said, challenging Reeves to demand payment.

"You can tell from their body language when you should just keep your mouth shut and let them on," she said. "But we'll get in trouble if a supervisor sees us do that."

Others have flirted with her, touching her braided hair. Once a man sat opposite Reeves as she drove, with his pants pulled down.

"I didn't know what to do at first," she said. "I told him: 'Sir, you can't do that on my bus.' And he said: 'Sorry, ma'am' and got off."

Her mother says Reeves should write a book. But Reeves hopes she won't have time for that.

"I need to get back now," she said, worrying about saving enough to help Latanya go to college and buying her other children school clothes. "I want to get back on that bus."

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Labor woes spread as county workers prepare to strike With the government at last free of lean times, the main bargaining unit wants more than the offered 9%.

LOS ANGELES -- If 4,400 striking bus and rail operators have disrupted Los Angeles County's daily business, wait until they are joined on the picket lines by 10 times as many government employees--including ambulance drivers, welfare clerks and nurses, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Forty-seven thousand county workers are gearing up to strike on Oct. 2, barring a last-minute compromise this week. The county's main union is pushing for far more than the offered 9% pay raise over three years, saying its members need to make up for pay cuts they accepted during the recession.

The county's worker unrest, coupled with that at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Los Angeles Unified School District, where teachers are also threatening to walk out over pay, shifts Los Angeles' labor battles from impoverished janitors to middle-class public employees, who say they have been left to struggle in the midst of an economic boom.

"There's all this pent-up demand," said Michael Dear, director of USC's Southern California Studies Center. "There's a long waiting list of people to share in this money." But that demand is colliding with the push for local government to be fiscally cautious, even as its coffers brim with surplus tax dollars. Los Angeles' major governmental institutions were racked with financial problems during the cash-poor mid-1990s and criticized for not operating in a more businesslike manner.

Now political leaders, stung by memories of near-insolvency, are singing the tune of fiscal conservatism and tight payrolls, even as the region's labor movement feels its oats after a string of victories.

Los Angeles County's massive government is now the region's largest employer, with 55 different bargaining units representing its 87,000 employees. The largest of those by far is the influential Service Employees International Union Local 660, which represents 47,000 workers who do everything from driving ambulances in unincorporated areas of the county to shuffling papers inside the Hall of Administration in downtown Los Angeles.

Local 660's members range from part-time library workers, who lack health insurance and make $7 an hour, to nurses earning $53,000 a year. But 60% of them earn less than $32,000 annually, union officials say.

Though many other county unions--including those representing firefighters and sheriff's deputies--have accepted the county's offer of a 9% pay boost spread over three years, Local 660 for more than a year has vowed to strike unless it gets more, because it says its members are either shut out of, or slipping out of, the middle class.

"They are the largest employer in the county. They need to be an example for other employers," Annelle Grajeda, Local 660's general manager, said of the county government.

Alejandro Stephens, Local 660's president, added, "We're talking about our members who made a sacrifice in the '90s. Now that there's this unprecedented prosperity, we want our money."

Especially galling, union officials say, is that supervisors got a 12.5% pay boost from the state Legislature this year, hiking their pay to $133,000.

Union officials say that, by their calculations, it would take a 15.5% raise over three years to bring their members' inflation-adjusted pay back to its 1990 level, before they spent nearly four years without raises as the county skirted bankruptcy. They also oppose a county plan to have workers pay a $10-$15 health insurance co-payment when visiting a doctor.

Local 660, whose membership voted during last month's Democratic National Convention to approve a strike, is slated to negotiate with the county through Friday, when the current contract expires. But if there is no agreement by noon of that day, union leaders say, their members will strike.

Although they have not disclosed details, the strike is expected to begin as "rolling" job actions, moving from one county facility to another. A strike calendar circulating in the Hall of Administration shows job actions starting Oct. 2 at the registrar-recorder's office and the Department of Animal Control, moving to the district attorney's office--where Local 660 represents child support workers and clerical employees--and county hospitals, before building to a general strike by Oct. 11.

Local 660 leaders say they will try to minimize the effects on residents who depend on their members for health care, child support and welfare. And county officials say they would pursue a court order to force striking nurses and doctors--whose union is enmeshed in its own labor dispute with the county and coordinating with Local 660--to return to work.

"It'd be totally unfair for us to do anything outside" a 9% raise, Supervisor Don Knabe said, adding that he believes a strike is less likely because relations between the county and Local 660 are much better than those between the MTA and its three unions.

County Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen said the union's concerns about its members' sharing in the economic growth and making it into the middle class are not relevant in the hard world of county budgeting.

"The county can't afford to use that rationale to grant salary increases," Janssen said. Conservative budgeting has become a mantra at the Hall of Administration since 1995, when a $1-billion federal bailout--secured with the aid of Local 660's political clout--was needed to stave off bankruptcy.

As the economy has revived over the last three years the county has begun to generate modest surpluses, but supervisors have mostly spent the money on one-time projects such as repairing crumbling government buildings, even while weaning themselves off some of the questionable financing schemes that got them into financial trouble in the first place.

Looming over every budget decision is a projected deficit that begins at more than $150 million in three years and opens to half a billion dollars by 2006.

The fiscal caution shown by supervisors can conflict with their rhetoric--especially that of the three Democrats who are the majority and have often spoken of the growing gap between Los Angeles' rich and poor. For example, those three--Supervisors Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, Gloria Molina and Zev Yaroslavsky--last year pushed a living-wage law requiring county contractors to pay workers at least $8.32 an hour. But they did not extend the requirement to part-time workers, including their own county employees.

This month, they also gave a lower raise to county home-care workers--who will now make $6.75 an hour--than virtually all other counties that have adopted financial structures allowing home-care workers to unionize. Supervisors said that they could not afford larger raises and that the wealthier state government needs to step in to help.

Janssen said the county is mindful that some of the employees represented by Local 660 may need more than a 9% raise and that those people can be taken care of by targeted increases. And supervisors say they are optimistic that the dispute can be settled before this week's end. Indeed, some say Local 660 leaders have confessed that building to a strike is a useful organizing tool.

A strike, Molina said, "will be hard on employees as well as the people who use the county's services. . . . If you look at all we have [in county benefits and retirement], L.A. is not a bad place to work."

Still, analysts say, labor has many reasons to be aggressive nowadays.

"You've got a booming economy, you've got Democrats at every level of state office" that unions helped get elected, said Fernando Guerra, head of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. "How much stronger can they get? If they can't do it under these situations . . . this is the time to strike--no pun intended."

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