BIG PAY HIKE FOR L.A. CITY WORKERS; COUNCIL OKS DEAL FOR 16% RAISE OVER 4 YEARS.

Byline: Patrick McGreevy Daily News Staff Writer

In a first-of-its-kind universal agreement with seven unions, the Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to approve pay raises totaling 16 percent over four years for nearly 20,000 city employees.

In exchange for the $120 million raise package, leaders of the new City Coalition of Unions pledged to try to reduce workers' compensation costs to the city by 20 percent by the 2001-02 fiscal year. Such costs currently total $43 million a year.

At the end of the contract, the average annual salary of the covered city employees will be more than $42,000, about $20 an hour.

``It's an excellent package,'' said Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg. ``It buys us four years of labor peace.''

Goldberg, who chairs the council's Personnel Committee, said the pay raises will ``probably be a little bit higher'' than most public and private employees receive in the near term, but will likely match the private sector in four years if the economy improves.

The council is banking on that economic recovery to help pay for the contract, officials said.

The contract covers 19,452 of the city's 22,000 full-time civilian employees, not including the Department of Water and Power.

Under the contract proposal adopted by the council, city attorneys, engineers, managers, building inspectors, trash truck drivers and other employees represented by seven unions would receive steady pay raises up to 2001.

The contract would provide employees with 2 percent pay raises every six months starting July 1 and ending Jan. 1, 2001.

Joel Fox, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, said he is troubled that the raises are being provided without guarantees that the city can afford them over four years or that workers' compensation claims actually will be reduced 20 percent.

``I'm concerned about it,'' Fox said. ``It's easy to negotiate with someone else's money - the taxpayers'.''

He noted that a recent study by the Rose Institute found that public employee wages and benefits increased 16 percent over a five-year period, while private sector wages and benefits only increased on average by 6 percent during that period.

``The public employee wages and benefits have outstripped the average wages of the taxpayers who support those public wages,'' Fox said.

For the first time, the contract was negotiated by a united group of seven unions, representing the vast majority of the city's civilian workers, who offered to put their clout behind an effort to reform the city's workers' compensation package, according to Julie Butcher, a representative of the Service Employee International Union, Local 347, which represents about 10,000 blue-collar employees.

``For the first time in a long time, the unions are working in concert on a contract,'' Butcher said.

Although both sides have tentatively agreed to the terms, city officials said the contract still must be finalized and signed before it is official.

The contract, which has been endorsed by Mayor Richard Riordan, will increase the city payroll for the workers by $120 million to $822 million by the end of the four years. The pact represents a $24 million increase over a proposal made by city officials.

To make up some of the difference, the unions agreed to participate in a new Joint Labor Management Committee for Worker Safety and Health, which will seek to rein in the city's skyrocketing workers' compensation costs.

The unions say the reductions can be accomplished by giving each city department more direct responsibility for controlling workers' compensation payouts, establishing incentives for worker safety and establishing a back-to-work program for injured city employees.

Goldberg said the union commitment to reform workers' compensation makes the lucrative pay pact justifiable.

``That's significant because that's an area where we've been trying to get a handle on a problem,'' Goldberg said. ``They (unions) can probably do a lot of things with peer pressure that we can't do with ordinances.''

Besides the SEIU, the unions covered by the contract include AFSCME Council 36, Municipal Construction Inspectors Association, Los Angeles Professional Managers Association, Los Angeles City Attorneys Association, the Engineers and Architects Association and the Los Angeles County Building and Construction Trade Council.