Unions

After a seven-hour closed-door debate over how to resolve a $405-million budget gap, the Los Angeles City Council put off a decision Tuesday on a controversial worker retirement plan, hoping to work overnight with employee unions to find new cost-cutting measures. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa promised to veto any decision that preserved the costly plan to allow 2,400 city employees to retire up to five years early with full benefits. Even that threat failed to break the logjam.

Federal authorities investigating alleged union corruption have been examining a labor coalition's backing of Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas' 2008 campaign and whether his supporters illegally used city property and a nonprofit group in his earlier runs for office, people familiar with the matter say. In addition, investigators have questioned people about whether Ridley-Thomas played any improper role in the hiring of a longtime...

In what Los Angeles school district officials hope is the first of several concessions by labor unions, bus drivers have agreed to take six unpaid days off this fiscal year, officials said Tuesday. The deal is the first time in recent history that a school district union has agreed to furloughs. Last year, the district approved -- but never required -- four unpaid days off for most employees in an attempt to offset a budget shortfall. The Los Angeles Unified School District is facing a nearly $200-million budget shortfall this fiscal year.

After a day's work cleaning one hotel room after another, Maria Valdivia says she's often too fatigued to play with her three children once she gets home. "It pains me to tell my kids I don't have time for them," said Valdivia, a housekeeper at the Hyatt Regency in Long Beach. "But sometimes I'm so tired and so achy that I'm just worn out." Valdivia was among the hundreds of hotel workers and labor activists who took to the streets of Long Beach last week to launch a national campaign dubbed Hope for Housekeepers, designed to spotlight what union leaders call substandard working conditions at Hyatt hotels nationwide.

Re "Power in the union," Opinion, Jan. 26 Robert B. Reich writes of unions as potential saviors for our current economic downturn. At 64, I am old enough to remember growing up in Fairless Hills, Penn., a town constructed by U.S. Steel in the early 1950s to house workers for a new steel plant near Philadelphia. The Steelworkers Union then obtained great benefits for its members. A menial job at "the mill" for a high school graduate paid double what my father, a high school teacher, earned.

Authorities Thursday identified a body found on the coast near Montecito as that of a kayaker missing since Jan. 25. With a friend, Daniel Zembrosky, 24, of Santa Ana tried to swim ashore from a capsized kayak, according to the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's office. The friend made it to land and called for help from his father's home nearby. Rescue personnel searched futilely for two days but did not recover Zembrosky's body until it was spotted in the ocean Wednesday.

A California nurses union will join with two others across the country to create what they say will be the nation's largest registered nurses union. The new group, the United American Nurses-National Nurses Organizing Committee, will merge United American Nurses, the Massachusetts Nurses Assn. and California Nurses Assn./National Nurses Organizing Committee, which together represent 150,000 nurses. Rose Ann DeMoro, president of the 85,000-member California Nurses Assn., said the move is meant to capitalize on labor's longed-for passage of the proposed Employee Free Choice Act, which would revamp labor laws to make union membership easier.

Unions: An article in Sunday's Section A about union infighting said Nelson Lichtenstein was a labor historian at UC Berkeley. He is the director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy at UC Santa Barbara.

Re "The flaw in 'card check,' " editorial, March 29 Your proposal for a secret ballot for employees would be fine in an ideal world. In the real world, however, the forces of intimidation available to employers are too strong to make fairness possible. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 removed the "countervailing power" required to offset the control of corporations over workers. That law flattened unions in this country and flattened manufacturing. There is no more urgent need than to put money in the pockets of workers by strengthening unions.

The Capitol's usual political alliances are being tested by the state's severe financial problems as interest groups scramble to hold onto as much as possible of the state's shrinking coffers. The relationship between Democratic leaders and some of their labor benefactors has turned particularly frosty: Many of the programs union members rely on for paychecks -- and the unions rely on for dues -- have been slated for deep cuts. For example, there are pledge forms being passed around to lawmakers by a major labor union that might have attracted takers in budget battles past.