Labor Plans Campaign to Bring Back Cal-OSHA

Organized labor and its allies will start a ballot-initiative campaign this fall to restore the state’s occupational safety and health program.

The announcement was made by the head of the state labor federation on Monday at the 41st annual Labor Day breakfast of the Catholic Labor Institute in Los Angeles.

John F. Henning, executive secretary of the California Federation of Labor, said petitions will begin circulating the first week in December, leaving five months to collect enough signatures to put the initiative on the ballot in November.

Henning and several other speakers at the breakfast blasted Gov. George Deukmejian for eliminating $8 million from the state budget that would have been needed to continue Cal-OSHA, the state’s worker health and safety program.

“It’s incredible that a governor who prides himself on prudence would do this to save $8 million out of a $41-billion budget,” Henning said.

Trouble in Orange County

In Orange County, Labor Day arrived amid stalled contract talks involving several public employee unions and two of the county’s larger employers, Orange County and Santa Ana.

Labor-management relations have been particularly tense among the 12,000 county employees, including 1,100 sheriff’s deputies who have staged slow-downs to underscore their frustration and are talking seriously about a walkout.

“From what I can tell, we don’t see any breakthrough” in negotiations, said Mary Yunt, central council executive secretary-treasurer. “They have met several times. Some (public employee unions) have extended their contracts through the end of the month.”

Hundreds of union members, their families and friends gathered Monday afternoon at a picnic at Irvine’s Heritage Park to celebrate not only Labor Day, but the 30th anniversary of the charter application of the Orange County Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO.

“The purpose of the picnic,” Yunt said, “is for working men and women to get together and meet each other. That’s the purpose of solidarity. When you are asking for help, it’s a little different when they know each other.”

Generally, however, local unions have gradually improved their lot in recent years, Yunt said.

County’s ‘Blessings’

“We definitely have blessings in Orange County,” she said, citing increases in union membership in recent years.

Orange County union membership amounted to about 12% of the work force in 1980, increasing to about 15% in recent years and is continuing to grow, she said.

“That’s a good percentage for this county, given the structure, particularly the governmental structure,” Yunt added.

Union members living in Orange County numbered about 150,000 in 1984, the last year for which figures are available, Yunt said. However, 2,500 new union members have been organized in the past year by the Service Employees’ International Union, as well as other smaller organizing efforts in the private sector.

Picnic organizers were unsuccessful in finding the seven original unionists who signed the council’s application for a charter on Sept. 10, 1957, Yunt said. Nevertheless, representatives of the 15 unions listed on the application were on hand to receive certificates, commemorating the anniversary.

Yunt said although national figures show more Americans holding jobs than ever, “From what I am seeing, they are low-paying jobs. We’re also seeing a lot of part-time work, even in the unions.”

In many cases, she said, there are “two part-time people working . . . and neither one earning a living wage.”

The council’s Labor Day activities began Monday with about 60 people attending a Mass and about 100 gathering for a breakfast at the Grand Hotel in Anaheim. The day concluded with hundreds romping and relaxing amid balloons, live music and volleyball under a warm, clear sky in Irvine.

At Los Angeles’ Labor Day breakfast, several speakers, including Archbishop Roger Mahony, urged the nearly 1,000 people at the Hyatt Regency Hotel to continue their support for an increase in the minimum wage, which has been $3.35 an hour since 1981.

The state’s Industrial Welfare Commission is scheduled to discuss a possible increase at a meeting Friday in San Francisco and at a public meeting Oct. 24 in Los Angeles.

Mahony said the minimum wage must be raised to a point where it would provide “a good standard of living that enables all members of a family to grow and prosper.”

He said that henceforth no job in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles will have a wage of less than $5 an hour, an announcement that brought considerable applause from the audience.

Deukmejian first disclosed that he planned to eliminate Cal-OSHA in January, as a cost-saving measure. He asserted that the state’s workers would be just as safe under the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration as they were under the state program.

That contention was disputed by many labor, public health and business leaders, but the governor could not be persuaded to change his position. So in July, federal OSHA assumed jurisdiction over all private-sector worker health and safety programs in California. The California Department of Industrial Relations remains responsible for protecting state and municipal workers against job hazards.

Support for a ballot initiative to restore Cal-OSHA was also voiced at the breakfast by many labor, political and religious leaders, including Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and Los Angeles County Federation of Labor chief William R. Robertson.

“The governor’s decision to unilaterally destroy Cal-OSHA was hardly an act that would ensure domestic tranquility,” Van De Kamp said, referring to the breakfast’s theme of linking the activities of labor with the U.S. Constitution’s Bicentennial.

“It would appear we have to write worker safety into law where the governor can’t touch it,” he added.

As is the custom, several awards were presented to local labor, political and business leaders at the breakfast.

One award was presented to the Rock Products and Ready Mixed Concrete Employers of Southern California and Joint Council 42 of the Teamsters Union and seven of its locals for creating good, long-term labor relations in that industry.

A special award was presented to David Sickler, director of the Los Angeles-Orange County Organizing Committee of the AFL-CIO, for his decade-long role as the coordinator of the Coors boycott. Last month, the AFL-CIO announced that it was ending the boycott, having secured an agreement from the company that it will not oppose attempts to organize its workers and pledging that union laborers will be utilized in building a major new brewery in the southeastern United States.

“The Coors victory is symbolic of the renaissance of people power by the trade union movement in this country,” said Bradley, presenting the award to Sickler.

Indeed, labor leaders around the country on Monday expressed more optimism than they have in several years.

“Labor Day, 1987, is a brighter holiday for American workers,” said AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland in his annual Labor Day statement. “On every front since last year, a revitalized and resurgent labor movement has been moving strongly ahead.”

Kirkland pointed to the recent decision of the nation’s air traffic controllers to be represented once again by a union, six years after President Reagan crushed the union during an illegal strike.

Labor Secretary William E. Brock praised a growing spirit of cooperation between labor and management in an interview on NBC-TV’s “Today” show Monday morning. He said that the relative labor peace of the last year was due to “an understanding that labor and management can’t spend all their time kicking each other in the shins and competing with the Japanese, the Koreans, the Brazilians and the French at the same time.”

A few hours after Brock spoke on NBC, guests filing into the breakfast saw a sign telling them that NBC news personnel were unwelcome at the event. The National Assn. of Broadcast Employees and Technicians is in the 11th week of a strike against NBC, protesting changes the company wants to impose in its contract with the union.

Monday was mostly a calm day for labor at parades and picnics from Wilmington to Buffalo. However, in San Francisco, 33 members of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union were arrested after staging a sit-in at the offices of the Bohemian Club.

A union spokesman said the workers were protesting attempts by the club to lower wages and reduce medical benefits. Reagan and several members of his Cabinet are members of the club.

And in Bridgeport, Conn., it was a day of remembrance. The city unveiled a memorial for 28 men who died in the April 23 collapse of an apartment complex under construction.

Mayor Thomas W. Bucci said the L’Ambiance Plaza memorial was dedicated “with the hopes that reforms would be forthcoming in monitoring the construction industry and construction projects such as this on both the state and federal levels.”