NURSES NEXT TO KICK BUTT VS. ARNOLD?

Byline: THOMAS D. ELIAS

IT'S not easy bucking the immense popularity of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who reminded California's nurses' union recently that when it comes to interests which oppose him, he generally ``kicks their butt.''

Still, once in awhile someone manages to plant a boot on Schwarzenegger's own keister.

It happened to him last year, when he tried to knock about $40 million from the state budget by eliminating subsidies for caretakers of the elderly and the extremely ill. Thousands of middle-class Californians protested that one, and the governor was forced to restore the caretakers' funding.

Most politicians would learn something from this and take great care in areas essential to large groups of ordinary Californians.

But apparently not Schwarzenegger and his staff. And so, just two weeks after telling the nurses that he routinely kicks special interests in the rear, one of those interest groups rose up and kicked him back.

This happened in early December, when the governor declared a state of emergency and had the state's Division of Labor Standards and Enforcement quickly issue new regulations eliminating a legal requirement that businesses give workers a lunch break sometime before the sixth hour of their shift.

Labor unions - which Schwarzenegger often lumps in with casino Indian tribes as his idea of California's most pernicious special interests - instantly rose up in protest.

They loudly wondered what kind of emergency existed to justify not even holding a public hearing before changing regulations that no one has touched since 1947.

And they accused Schwarzenegger of engaging in ``pay-to-play'' governance, the very tag Republicans applied so often and so effectively to the practices of ousted Democratic Gov. Gray Davis. Noting that among the biggest beneficiaries of the Schwarzenegger action would be scores of large businesses that have contributed heavily to his causes, union leaders accused him of acting illegally to benefit his donors.

``Apparently there is no free lunch unless you are a big-money friend of Gov. Schwarzenegger,'' said Art Pulaski, executive secretary-treasurer of the California Labor Federation. ``He has taken more big corporate special-interest money per hour than any governor in California history - now he's trying to take away a law that's already on the books to help Wal-Mart and other large businesses that could be on the hook for millions of dollars in legal damages for cheating their employees out of meals and rest breaks.''

In fact, meal breaks are now the focus of a major class-action lawsuit that sees Wal-Mart employees charging that their managers routinely deprived them of the breaks. About 200,000 workers could be affected by the suit.

Schwarzenegger aides replied that all he aimed to do was give workers the choice of taking a lunch break or working straight through so they could go home earlier. Unions rightly wondered how this question could be considered an emergency - for anyone but Wal-Mart.

Just 10 days after presenting the planned new rules, Schwarzenegger backed down, his aides instead scheduling a series of nonemergency public hearings on the proposed lunch-break changes. That will give unions and others plenty of time to organize large protests.

So Schwarzenegger has now backed down at least twice. His next test will come as he reacts to a lawsuit by the California Nurses Association, filed as it tries to kick back at the bumptious, braggadocious governor. About the time he was trying to end the lunch-break rule, Schwarzenegger also declared a hospital emergency and moved back from this year to 2008 state rules calling for hospitals to maintain a nurse-to-patient ratio no worse than 1-to-5.

``There is no emergency,'' said Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the 60,000-member nurses association, which seeks to restore the 1-to-5 ratio mandated by a 1999 state law. She called Schwarzenegger's action a ``special-interest payoff,'' noting that big health care companies are among the governor's chief political donors.

If the court rules for the nurses, finding Schwarzenegger abused his authority to declare emergencies, it will be a third major butt-kicking for the governor.

And it would reinforce the point already made by the labor federation, which demonstrated that even with a 65 percent popularity rating, Schwarzenegger still can't act like a dictator and willy-nilly suspend any rule or law that offends him or his backers.