UNION VOWS MTA STALL HALT THREATENED AS TENSIONS RISE.

Byline: Alexa Haussler Staff Writer

Union leaders across Los Angeles County escalated tensions Monday over MTA labor talks, vowing to shut down the transit agency's bus and train lines if no agreement is reached by Friday.

The county Federation of Labor said if there's a strike, now set for 12:01 a.m Friday, members of other unions would be encouraged to join transit workers on picket lines, to halt work at construction sites and refuse to make deliveries of gas and other products to MTA sites.

``We are going to shut it down. We are going to shut down the MTA,'' said Miguel Contreras, executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Labor Federation, AFL-CIO.

Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials responded to the threat by accusing the unions of stalling negotiations and warning that a secondary strike by other unions could halt even limited service, which the agency hopes to provide by staffing 100 buses with supervisor drivers.

``We were certainly disappointed that a day when we thought a lot could get accomplished in bargaining ended up not being worth anything,'' said MTA Chief Operating Officer Allan Lipsky. ``We think it's another example of the unions' failure to take negotiations seriously.''

The dispute is less about wages and benefits than MTA's insistence that work rules be eliminated that put its operating costs as much as 50 percent higher than other bus services in the county.

The unions defend the work rules and have made imposing the MTA contracts on the proposed Valley transit zone the key issue they will strike over. A measure to achieve that was approved by the Democratic-controlled Legislature and is on Gov. Gray Davis' desk, but he has not indicated what he will do.

Transit zone supporters have suspended their planning efforts, saying the work rule issues and legislation make a separate bus agency under local control economically unworkable. They said they will honor existing contracts, but want the right to negotiate their own contracts in the future and to privatize expanded services if they can't reduce the costs.

Negotiators for the MTA and its three major unions have been bargaining for months on contracts for the 4,268 rail and bus operators of the United Transportation Union, the roughly 2,000 mechanics of the Amalgamated Transit Union and the 638 communications workers of the Transportation Communications International Union.

Union leaders accused the MTA of stalling negotiations to consult with San Fernando Valley and San Gabriel Valley leaders who are pushing for autonomous transit zones.

``The MTA is bargaining in bad faith, crippling the negotiations and hanging the public out to dry,'' said Neil Silver, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union which represents MTA maintenance workers and mechanics.

Lipsky said it was ironic that transit workers were asking other unions for support.

``They seem to be looking for the same support that the janitors had. We want to remind you that our bus drivers make an average $50,000 a year, where our bus riders make an average $15,000 or less,'' Lipsky said.

``The real victims of this strike by the union are in fact the MTA's bus and rail passengers.''

Lipsky said the MTA has plans to try to keep about 100 buses running during a strike. Management personnel would operate and maintain those buses.

But he acknowledged that striking union members might succeed in shutting down those lines, too, leaving many of the most transit-dependent passengers with few, if any, options.

``Even that, we aren't certain,'' he said. ``There's no question that a transit strike would mean that most of our passengers wouldn't be able to find alternative public transportation.''