Jail Bakers Stay Home to Join County Protest

The Pitchess jail in Castaic couldn’t have produced enough bread Wednesday for the old-fashioned punishment diet of bread and water. And never mind the donuts and muffins and cookies and cakes that today’s prisoners actually eat each day.

The ovens in the bakery at the Peter J. Pitchess Honor Rancho--which produces baked goods for all 21,000 inmates in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department jail system--were left cold as all but one of the 18 bakers stayed home in a union job action, sheriff’s spokesmen said.

Luckily for the inmates--and the jailers who must keep peace in the county’s 11 lockups--there was a surplus of already prepared baked items that headed off any disruption in the inmates’ meals.

The bakers are members of Local 660 of the Service Employees International Union, which represents about 40,000 county employees. As part of a “rolling thunder” strategy to win wage and benefits increases in 21 separate contracts, members of the union staged walkouts in a variety of county departments Wednesday.

“The bakers have walked out and that has caused the bakery to close down,” sheriff’s spokesman Fidel Gonzales said. “In the event that the bakery closure starts to affect our operations, there are contingency plans to purchase bakery goods from vendors.”

In addition to producing thousands of loaves of bread each day, officials said, the bakers make numerous other items, including donuts and cookies, which also are eaten by the deputies and jail staff workers.

In the short run, the work stoppage had no effect, said Capt. Jerry Skaggs, supervisor of the jail’s north facility. He said the bakery usually produces goods one to two days in advance of when they are needed.

“Shipments have already gone out and the deliveries were made,” Skaggs said. “So we’ve had no problem so far.”

The bakers who were off the job could not be reached for comment and it was not known by sheriff’s officials if they would be back at the ovens today. The walkout of union members was in part spurred by a walkout by county nurses that began Monday night. The striking nurses, however, voted Wednesday to return to their jobs after a Superior Court judge ordered them to go back to work, saying the walkout threatened public health.