NOTHING for us and a 0% COLA if LA County management has its way

Have you seen the latest budget report by the LA County Chief Executive Office? It’s full of fancy charts and graphs – and full of excuses.

The bottom line is that their way of thanking us, their essential workforce, is to give us NOTHING. They want NO job vacancies filled – NO inequities addressed – NO bonuses, not even for a job well done helping to fight historic fires that just raged through LA County this past January – NO raises for anybody – and NO Cost of Living Adjustment, or “COLA”.

The CEO and the Board of Supervisors claim that there is simply no money. But that’s not the complete picture.

Specifically:

They’ve been busy privatizing our jobs year after year – shelling out more than $6.2 billion to private firms in just one fiscal year – as detailed in our union’s landmark study, “Shining a Light on Contracting Out in Los Angeles County.”

They somehow found a spare $205 million (at least!) to purchase a massive skyscraper in the heart of downtown LA that will function as fancy new office space … for themselves.

It’s a point that SEIU 721 President David Green hammered home to the Los Angeles Times recently:

We’ve been in contract negotiations for MONTHS – and the entire time, county management has treated us with blatant disrespect, even going so far as to claim that the county’s bargaining team isn’t authorized to give us ANY response on economic issues.

Worse, they’re repeatedly breaking the law. We know because each time county management has broken the law, our union has documented the offense and filed an official Unfair Labor Practice charge. To date, we’ve filed 42 ULPs, which is a HUGE amount – and county management still hasn’t budged.

So, it’s clear to us at SEIU 721: We’re headed toward a ULP strike.

This is the reason why our union has been holding one Practice Picket after another at worksite after worksite across LA County. You can check them out on our website and on our social media feeds.

Make no mistake: We intend to fight the county’s nonsense with everything we’ve got – which is why we’ve scheduled more Practice Pickets in the coming weeks. If there is an upcoming Practice Picket scheduled at your worksite, JOIN US.

The cold, hard truth is that if we succumb to defeatism and do nothing, the county has already told us what we can expect to get: NOTHING, complete with a 0% COLA. The only way we have a chance at getting anything is to defend ourselves with everything we’ve got – to make it crystal clear to the entire Board of Supervisors, to the county CEO and to every single county manager from the Antelope Valley to Long Beach, from the San Fernando Valley to the San Gabriel Valley, that we know EXACTLY what we bring to the table and that they do NOT intimidate us.

Now is NOT the time to give up. Now is the time to FIGHT – and as we say at SEIU 721, when we fight, WE WIN!