PICKETING L.A. CITY WORKERS STRIKE OUT.

Byline: CHRIS WEINKOPF

IN preparation for last week's lackluster two-day strike, officials of the Los Angeles Engineers and Architects Association advised members to ``no longer be polite.'' If someone tries to cross the picket line, ``You should call them what they are at that point, a scab, and any other derogatory term you feel appropriate to use for an individual who is taking wages from you and your family.''

Now, this is not the way most of us try to earn a pay raise -- insulting our bosses and ridiculing our colleagues. But when it comes to public-employee unions, common sense and civility tend to go out the window.

A tribalistic sense of entitlement is unmistakable among certain union activists: Either you're with us, or you're irretrievably, irredeemably, against us -- and deserving of any sort of abuse we heap upon you.

So when Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a onetime labor organizer, crossed the EAA's picket line to earn his taxpayer-paid salary, the EAA brass went ballistic.

``Die-hard union activists like myself would never, ever, consider compromising such a fundamental principle of the union movement,'' said EAA executive director Bob Aquino. ``We can never compromise the principle of respecting a picket line.''

Really? Why?

It's one thing if the strike in question is just -- if, say, an employer is exploiting workers and strikers are demanding humane conditions and a fair wage. But what if what the union seeks is excessive or unwarranted? What if the union is being petulant, unrealistic or disrespectful of the public that pays it?

Why should anyone, least of all a mayor who's taken an oath to represent all the residents of his city, be obligated to honor a less than honorable work action?

EAA members have it good: An average salary of $74,500. Lifelong pensions and health benefits worth hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. Flexible work schedules. One holiday, on average, every month. A city government that wants to lavish them with a 6.25 percent pay raise.

Some 17,000 other municipal employees have already accepted this same deal, which an independent factfinder deemed fair and justified. Los Angeles city employees are among the highest paid in California, earning 10 percent more than most of their counterparts in other cities.

These aren't exactly sweatshop slaves we're talking about. And the people they seek to extract more money from aren't CEOs sitting atop umpteen millions in stock options, but the taxpayers of L.A. -- most of whom make significantly less than EAA members.

To put it in the EAA's terms, when public-employee unions undermine public services and win excessive compensation packages, they're ``taking wages'' from families -- the families of taxpayers who foot the bill.

Not even EAA members make the case that they're underpaid in any real sense of the word. They just complain that the retroactive pay raise the city has imposed on them goes back only to 2005, and not all the way to 2004.

That's to say, the strikers are mad that they're not being given an additional pile of cash -- above and beyond the paychecks they've already happily earned and cashed -- for work they did two years ago.

That, and they're bent out of shape that workers at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power got an even bigger pay hike last year.

But a call for parity has hardly the same moral heft as a call for justice. Just because DWP workers are grossly overpaid doesn't mean that EAA workers should be, too.

And absent a grievance more legitimate than pride or envy, it's hard to see what claim the EAA has on anyone's support. If the union wants to strike, that's its right and its business, but union leaders have no reason to expect that anyone should honor their picket line.

Labor organizers too often carry on as though their actions are immune to scrutiny: The union is always right, period. And a dismaying number of public officials -- like City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, who stayed out of City Hall on Tuesday and Wednesday -- seem to buy into this sort of simplistic groupthink.

Credit Villaraigosa for having the good sense to rise above it, even if that meant being called a ``scab'' by the impolite folks with the picket signs.

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Photo:

(color) Pickets representing the Los Angeles Engineers and Architects Association demonstrate outside City Hall as part of the union's contract dispute with the city.

Evan Yee/Staff Photographer