Three months after a two-day strike failed to win better pay for its members, the union representing engineers, architects and other professionals who work for the city of Los Angeles is trying again, beginning with a walkout Sunday at Los Angeles International Airport.
The Engineers and Architects Assn., which represents more than 7,500 city employees, said this week that it is planning small, targeted strikes at different city departments on different days in the weeks ahead.
Sunday's planned one-day strike by about 200 members at LAX appears designed to gain maximum publicity while costing the union little. The strike may involve many office employees who are not scheduled to work Sunday. The most essential EAA workers at LAX, including 41 operational personnel who work on runways and 37 people who are involved in information technology, are barred by a court order from walking off their posts.
But EAA officials are planning picketing at the airport that could affect travelers. Members have been told to gather at a crosswalk near the entrance to Terminal 1. Their presence could slow traffic into and out of the airport on one of the busiest travel days of the year, union officials said.
Robert Aquino, EAA's executive director, declined to disclose dates or locations of future walkouts, but said similar one-day strikes would follow unless the city agreed to improve the pay of EAA workers.
The union represents accountants, chemists, forensic scientists and other technical professionals making from $36,000 to $126,000 annually, with an average income of $74,500.
"Things are going to start Sunday," Aquino said this week. "We still don't want to strike the city, and we understand Sunday is the busiest travel day at LAX because of returning flights from Thanksgiving. But once again, the city has to understand that there are consequences to its inactivity."
This summer, after EAA members had worked two years without a contract, the City Council implemented its final offer to the union: a 6.25% pay increase over three years, from 2004 to 2007.
The union strenuously objected to the action, including terms that gave members no raise at all for 2004, the first year covered by the terms. The city responded that unions representing 17,000 other civilian city workers accepted a contract with identical salary increases.
The union had sought increases of about twice that, matching those granted Department of Water and Power workers. Union officials said that they reduced their financial demands in recent discussions with the city, but that the city was not willing to compromise.
Publicly, city officials expressed little concern about Sunday's walkout. Matt Szabo, a spokesman for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, said that all critical employees will be in place at LAX on Sunday and that the city Transportation Department "is fully prepared and ready to respond" to any traffic problems near the airport or in other parts of the city.
Szabo declined to comment on negotiations with EAA, saying he was unable to reach officials who knew details.
EAA's leaders have a record of failing to deliver on threatened disruptions in the city. Before a two-day strike at all city offices on Aug. 22 and 23, the union suggested its walkout would force the closing of runways at LAX, send sewage from the Hyperion sewage treatment plant into Santa Monica Bay, and create gridlock in downtown Los Angeles. None of those problems materialized.
Even as Aquino called city workers who showed up for work, including Villaraigosa, "scabs" for crossing the union's picket lines, thousands of workers represented by EAA ignored the strike. At the time, the union reported that 4,500 workers did not show up for work and 2,000 joined picket lines. The city maintained that a little more than 2,000 were absent from work and 861 joined picket lines.
At the end of the strike, Villaraigosa all but officially declared victory. "There has not been a massive job action here, let's be clear about that," he told reporters.
But Aquino said the walkout was successful because it attracted public attention and had some effect on city operations, including a three-hour closure of the Port of Los Angeles and a delay in construction on a new runway at LAX. And the union chief says he has strengthened his hand for the new strike.
Last month, EAA won an official strike sanction from the politically powerful Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. EAA had not sought such a sanction before the August strike.
Privately, county federation officials indicated that while they wonder about Aquino's tactics, they had little choice but to grant the sanction once his union requested it.
