Guardian UK: Workers unite in City of Angels

Workers unite in City of Angels
Faced with yet more cuts, LA's public workers are getting more active in union efforts to publicise the impact of the fiscal crisis

Sasha Abramsky
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 April 2010


The streets of south-central Los Angeles are lined with small, pastel-colored, cinder block bungalows. Most have iron-barred doors and windows, the surest visual indicator of an impoverished neighborhood in LA. And many of the remainder are boarded up, their owners victims of a foreclosure epidemic that has fallen peculiarly hard on poor, minority, communities. On the streets, a shocking number of homeless people pick through the garbage, many carrying their life possessions in shopping cars.

Amid the hardship, the Algin Sutton Community Centre is a bright spot; it has large, well-maintained grounds – on which homeless people often sleep, to be rousted early mornings by the gardening crews – a recreation centre, a daycare and after-school programme, and a team of dedicated city-paid employees. But, as LA's fiscal woes worsen, so it has become harder to keep such programmes afloat. Balancing the city's budget through cuts to these programmes means not just hardship for city employees but real rollbacks in services to the poverty-stricken neighborhoods most reliant on them and least able to seek alternative services in the private sector.

Fifty-six-year-old Dorothy Young, a gardener and Service Employees International Union Local 721 member, drives up on her huge lawnmower; kills the engine, and starts to explain the implications of the cuts: the summer daycare programme, that in good years provides much-needed daycare to between 200 and 300 kids, ranging in age from four or five through to 13, will likely shutter its doors this summer; the childcare programme in the recreation centre has had to lay off its part-time staff; the gardening crew has been reduced from four full-time and four part-time staff to one full-timer and two part-timers; the daycare centre lost one of its two cleaners, meaning that from 10am each day until six the next morning there's no one on hand to clean up messes.

All told, the parks and community centres in the area, says Dorothy, have been hit by huge reductions in the numbers of maintenance staff: as people retire, their positions are simply eliminated – leading to about 100 fewer gardeners and janitors being on hand. And, for those city employees who have kept their jobs, working conditions have worsened: Dorothy has lost about $300 a month through having to take furlough days, she hasn't had a cost-of-living pay increase since early in 2008, and the union has agreed to forgo such payrises until at least 2012. ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/apr/20/los-angeles-public-workers-union-efforts