Preliminary MOU Ratification Ballot Results
Friday, Jul 30, 2010
Ballots were cast individually by bargaining unit and are as follows:
MOU 1 Rejected
MOU 19 Rejected
MOU 20 Rejected
MOU 21 Ratified
* Third party independent ballot count.
LA City Workers.com
July 8th, 2010 Los Angeles, California
In response to the City of Los Angeles Contractual Violations, Illegal furlough implementation, and layoffs Coalition of City Unions represented employees responded by staging a Job Action on July 01,2010
This Job Action covered numerous departments and crippled LA City Services.
“After reviewing records, in our first job action with advance notice we crippled LAPD dispatching, reduced the number of sweeping routes, reduced illegal dumping removal by half, and numerous other services were slowed, reduced, or completely eliminated on July 01,2010.”
We look forward to showing our worth in our next job action which will involve more classifications and will bring the message home to the council people. No further advance warning will be given to the city, and job actions will be planned to achieve maximum impact.
Coalition of City Unions are prohibited from Officially Backing Job Actions, Employees are still highly encouraged to participate.
Communications Director Paul Castro said, “Union employees are the heart and soul of LA, our Council members and mayor have chosen to increase fees and taxes on the public at the same time they cutback the services people are paying for, it’s inexcusable, we have a contract in which the city must attempt to bond around the loss prior to implementing furloughs and layoffs yet they have ignored our contract and issued pink slips to our members, we are a dedicated workforce and we will now be bringing the fight to the council unless we see an end to the furloughs.”
Currently more then 20,000 civilian workers are employed by the City of Los Angeles and are subject to up to 26 furlough days.
Lacityworkers.com is a website run by and for City of Los Angeles Workers to keep abreast of city business offering discussion forums and blogs as they relate to the City of Los Angeles. Currently over 20,000 visitors a month visit the website for news and information relating to there employment.
Website: http://www.lacityworkers.com
Contact: Director of Communications
I said it; Eric Garcetti is an idiot, and I’ll say it again.
I am not your union leader polite and tactful that is Julie Butcher or any one of the polished Union speakers we parade in council chambers.
I’m much more a teamsters loud blue collar steel worker type, ask Mike Hernandez he felt my wrath when I called him out on his B.S. two months ago when he claimed ” we won’t be able to make payroll in june if you don’t giveback”
Guess what My paycheck cleared!
I called him out on it and asked him if we needed to hold job actions to get our point across that we are not giving anything back, Fast Forward to today’s headlines having Eric Garcetti act like he hasn’t heard our NO GIVEBACK message yet calling us out and telling us we will give in to him and the council demand we give up All of our pay raises Completely, asking those with families to pay 50% of the cost of medical insurance, I guess they don’t understand the definition of benefit.
I guess the time is closing in on us to show what WE are made up of, are we going to roll over and give in to council demands and empty threats?
Is this power struggle something a short staffed city workforce needs to get shoved down their throat?
I think it is time that the City Council and the CAO along with the public get a taste of what laying off workers really means.
What would happen if most city workers stayed home or called in sick and didn’t show up for work?
Ask the council and they say not much, I beg to differ, this is Los Angeles home to the world champion Los Angeles Lakers and some 5 million other people, without us La doesn’t work, it would Fail.
We have civilian employees that handle vital mission critical duties in the city and those who don’t still provide quality of life service.
Without us Los Angeles would suffer, I think it is time we share “a day without a city worker” with our council people. In turn our friends at the LAPD and LAFD can call a tactical alert, and handle the work we do on a daily basis.
At the end of the day I bet we can get council to rethink the empty threats and take a second look at the budget presented to them and quit looking at us as a bank account they can make deductions from at their whim.
We work to hard and have already made our sacrifice, even when half of the council has yet to match our sacrifice.
Maybe I am just old school and think a coalition of unions as big as ours can actually look to it’s membership and say stay home and we can have an impact.
I’m looking forward to calling Eric Garcetti on his bluff and having a short work week very soon maybe this budget illness will spread!
But when you read this quote maybe it makes you as mad as it made me.
City Council President Eric Garcetti said “I think that the closer we get to the 11th hour, the more people will be willing to make concessions,” Garcetti said.
In this piece Mayor Villaraigosa lends his support to Marcos Aguilar, a close friend of Juan Alvarez who killed 11 innocent people in the second deadliest commuter crash in Metrolink history.
How can anyone trust a Mayor with such radical anti American views?
Mayor Recall should stop taking over the LAUSD and allowing his friends school to continue when it is clearly failing, much like his leadership!
Mayor Osama Bin Villaraigosa Failed Terrorist sympathizer.
Bob Schoonover makes it clear in this piece he wrote, LA City Workers are done with concessions not just this budget year but next as well!
Read his great piece below.
Don’t Give Up on LA
LABOR
By Bob Schoonover
As of today, city workers are the only stakeholders who have taken aggressive and effective action to address the budget shortfall. Fitch’s last observations about the City’s finances note the coalition agreement as structural, substantive budget action. Even the LA Times begrudgingly acknowledged that LA’s frontline service workers have good ideas about delivering quality cost-effective services.
The labor agreement reached last fall with 22,000 city workers delayed four contractually obligated raises to workers in jobs as varied as these: librarians, refuse drivers, 911 police civilians, recreation & parks workers, sewer & wastewater workers, street services workers, zoo workers, police & fire mechanics, building trades workers, engineers, chemists, criminalists, and crossing guards to name a few.
We eliminated millions in overtime, agreed to limited unpaid hours off this year, and to increase our pension contributions. The immediate budget savings are $153 million this year, $323 million in the first two, and $2.12 billion over five years.
Since our members approved this agreement, the City has overspent budgeted expenditures by $98.7 million and approved raises to DWP workers that now endanger the utility’s ability to meet its commitment to the City of Los Angeles.
Some businesses propose a fire sale of City assets to themselves, and a reduction of City employee pay, benefits, and pensions to match what they would like to offer their own employees.
The CAO’s three-year budget proposal seeks to privatize the City’s Zoo, golf courses, parking lots, parking meters, maintenance including safety equipment and vehicles, Convention Center, ambulance billing, tree trimming, street sweeping, engineering, park maintenance, childcare services, arts, culture, & El Pueblo.
The City does not provide these services and maintain these facilities for profit. These are services and facilities that the public and the business community expect from a major city. LA workers will not stand for commercialization of municipal services, conversion of self-sustaining City assets to corporate cash cows, and loss of the facilities the City owns to line the pockets of LA’s richest suits.
The people of Los Angeles pay dearly for quality cost-effective city services and the workers of LA gave city management the tools they needed to make city government work the way it should – efficiently, publicly, focused and essential.
We expected retirements to occur randomly and all across the top levels of city government. Given that, we’ve encouraged smart, strategic consolidations of city functions.
Does it really make sense that seven different city departments trim trees – that LAWA contracts out tree trimming for a cost of $800 a tree while the CAO is proposing to offload tree trimming onto the fiscal backs of us home owners?
Now, I’m pretty conservative, but I believe trees belong to the whole City. It’s work that enhances public safety and the quality of LA life. The response of LA’s urban forestry workers during recent rains reminds all of us why it’s critical to have professional arborists and skilled city tree surgeons who cost considerably less than private tree work and provide reliable service.
Contracting just 10% of the tree work DWP contracts out would keep every city tree crew working for a year.
On Friday, the Mayor addressed union leaders at the County Federation of Labor. He was pressed by Cheryl Parisi, chair of the Coalition of City Unions, AFSCME 36 head: “You come here to the House of Labor, talking about unavoidable layoffs. Yesterday, when you spoke in the Cathedral of Business, did you ask them to pony up with a 10% across-the-board cut to the $2.5 billion in private business done with the City of Los Angeles?”
He answered that in response to a question from David Abel, he announced that he was calling for a 20% cut in contracts. That’s good news because that’s worth $500 million. That matches the $400 – 600 million in reported outstanding debt owed to the City.
After the staff of the CAO’s office worked hard to process thousands of early retirement applications, LACERS dragged its bureaucratic feet then rewarded GM Sally Choi with a raise.
Last week, the LACERS board’s mayoral appointees hired an additional Assistant General Manager, not even affording that opportunity to someone struggling on the City’s beleaguered general fund.
Retiring all ERIP applicants within 30 days saves $22 million this year. Encouraging the retirement of an additional 300 applicants adds $10 million savings this year.
For 15 years traffic officers have advocated that the collection of parking tickets should be in-sourced. Two hundred twenty million of the City’s uncollected debt is uncollected parking ticket revenue. ACS, the company responsible for collecting parking tickets for the City, still owes the Department of Transportation $141 million in services and technology products.
City Attorneys represented by SEIU 721 will be meeting this week in part to identify ways they can help bolster collections. Ideas put forth by city workers are worth hundreds of millions in city services.
LA’s unions did not create this emergency, yet we are the first and only responders. The City has misinterpreted our forceful and massive relief effort as weakness. The City’s agreement with its unions protects coalition members from being laid off this fiscal year. The Mayor’s decision to devastate city services as he formulates his 2010-11 budget will cost the City added millions in deferred raises.
Our members have voted to give all they can afford to give. They say, “No more. We are tapped out.”
As a leader of these workers, I say, “NO MORE FROM US!” We have given the City the flexibility, the tools, and the materials necessary to get this job done.
We don’t want to hear that we are now expendable and should be laid off. We want to see sensible actions and programs that use the City work force to get this city back on its feet.
(Bob Schoonover is President of SEIU Local 721; Heavy Duty Equipment Mechanic, General Services — 31 years)
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