Labor Day In California... A Dan Walters Update...

Published: Monday, Sep. 7, 2009 - 12:00 am

This is not a celebratory Labor Day for California's workers, and that includes government employees who believed that labor contracts and civil service rules gave them bulletproof job protection.

California is mired in one of its worst economic recessions, with unemployment approaching 12 percent and likely to rise higher, but even those with jobs are often pinched by wage freezes and reductions, furloughs and cuts in fringe benefits.

The jobless rate is twice as high as it was a year ago, the California Budget Project points out, and the recession has wiped out the state's employment gains in the last four years. The 57.5 percent of working-age adults who have jobs is the lowest rate in three decades, reflecting both the recession and the ever-growing retiree cohort.

The fact that California has been hit extraordinarily hard has sparked an intense, even bitter, public debate about whether the state has crippled itself for the long term and will not see a return to prosperity even when the rest of the nation recovers.

Conservatives point to the state's high taxes and penchant for regulatory overkill as making it what one state commission called a "job-killing machine." But liberals contend that allowing the state's infrastructure, schools and colleges to erode by reducing spending has made California less innovative and attractive to investment.

The debate rages on the airwaves and in legislative chambers; just last week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed, for the third time, legislation that would allow the United Farm Workers union to organize with "card checks" rather than elections.

Even public worker unions are finding the going tough in these recessionary times. Furloughs have become common. The once-impregnable California Correctional Peace Officers Association is losing a battle against sharp cuts in prison spending. The California Teachers Association has been unable to block deep school reductions. Last month, trustees of the giant Los Angeles Unified School District, defying its teachers union, voted to massively expand charter schools.

As the 2009 legislative session comes to a close, unions are engaged on several fronts. While the Service Employees International tries to win ratification of a state worker contract that would limit furloughs, local government unions are pushing a late-blooming bill to make municipal bankruptcy (such as Vallejo's) more difficult and other labor groups are trying to raise long-frozen benefits for injured workers.

The California Commission on Health and Safety and Workers' Compensation has proposed a tuneup in the system that would, it says, save as much as $1.4 billion a year in employer costs, largely by overturning a decision by the Workers' Compensation Appeals Board that undermined some of the 2004 reforms that cut costs sharply.

Labor's price for enactment of the new reforms, in whole or in part, would be a boost in benefits for injured workers.