Mayor seeks notice of strikes

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa pledged Wednesday to go to court to stop the union representing architects, engineers and other professionals working for the city from staging strikes without advance notice.

The Engineers and Architects Assn., which represents more than 7,500 city workers, has launched a series of small, one-day strikes targeting different departments.

Union employees went on strike and put up picket lines Sunday at Los Angeles International Airport, on Tuesday at the Hyperion sewage treatment plant and on Wednesday at the Port of Los Angeles and five offices of the Building and Safety Department.

The union says its pickets and walkouts have caused traffic tie-ups and forced delays in city operations. City officials called those claims of disruption baseless. But the lack of notice, they said, violated the law.

At a news conference, Villaraigosa said he had directed the city attorney to file an unfair labor practices complaint with the city Employee Relations Board demanding notice 60 hours in advance of future strikes. Since the board cannot act immediately and the strikes are ongoing, the city attorney’s office this morning will go to Los Angeles Superior Court to seek a temporary restraining order imposing the 60-hour rule.

“I believe that these continuous labor actions are violations of city and state law in that the EAA is required to provide notice of upcoming job actions,� Villaraigosa said.

The union’s executive director, Robert Aquino, said the union had given the city notice of its intention to stage walkouts in October. “There’s no legal basis for a restraining order to be issued,� Aquino said. He called on the mayor to negotiate with the union and reach a contract deal.

Though other city unions signed new contracts in 2004, the engineers union never reached accord with the city. This summer, the City Council voted to impose the terms of its last contract offer, which would give union members a 6.25% increase to cover the years 2004 through 2007. The union objected, noting that the terms provided no raise at all in the first year. City officials point out that unions representing 17,000 other city workers agreed to identical terms.

The engineers union staged a two-day strike in August and conducted some talks with the city this fall, but no agreement was reached.

On Wednesday at the port, where 400 engineers union members work, picket lines were up by 6 a.m. and were honored at first by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.

But in a meeting later in the morning called by the Pacific Maritime Assn., which represents shipping lines and terminals, an arbitrator ruled that the picket lines were not valid under the terms of the Pacific Coast Longshore Contract Document. The dockworkers returned to work, according to a statement released by ILWU Local 13.

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Times staff writer Duke Helfand contributed to this report.