Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a former union organizer and a longtime favorite of organized labor, angered some of his ideological allies last week when he asked the City Council for the authority to lay off and furlough thousands of city employees to close a $529-million budget deficit.
Union leaders are also feeling betrayed over the mayor's decision last week to jettison an early retirement plan that labor and city officials had been working on for more than a year. Early retirement would have been offered to workers within five years of retirement eligibility.
"The mayor is supposed to be a union-oriented mayor, but I don't see it," said Roy Stone, president of the Librarians' Guild, Local 2626, which represents city librarians. "We're feeling extremely disappointed, extremely betrayed. It's like being stabbed in the back."
Villaraigosa has cited the need for hard choices and "shared sacrifice" amid a profound fiscal crisis that is hitting local governments nationwide. He called the early retirement plan too costly.
"The unprecedented downturn in the national and regional economy, combined with the impact on our pension investments, has led the city to a fiscal crisis of growing and unanticipated proportion," Villaraigosa wrote last week in asking the City Council to declare a fiscal emergency.
Some say the mayor, who is widely believed to have gubernatorial aspirations, is faced with a difficult but potentially defining choice: taking a hard line with his friends in the labor movement or being seen as weak and indecisive in the midst of a deep financial crisis.
"If you're going to run for an executive office, at the end of the day you have to be able to make decisions for the greater good of the community, regardless of alliances and history and who's powerful at City Hall," said Raphael J. Sonenshein, a political science professor at Cal State Fullerton. "I don't think the mayor would purposely go out and get into a fight with organized labor. It's more a case of an economic necessity that, if it helps address the budget crisis, may also have some political advantage."
Despite angering some union leaders, the mayor still retains strong support in the influential and resurgent California labor movement. The state's public and private-sector unions, although far from monolithic, remain closely allied to the Democratic Party.
