Public hospitals diverted ambulances. Beach crews cleared wildfire debris without heavy equipment. Libraries closed. Thousands of nurses stayed home.
A two-day strike in Los Angeles County kept some 55,000 unionized public employees off the job on Tuesday, as workers gathered at an enormous rally that clogged streets in downtown Los Angeles.
The walkout by the public employees union, SEIU Local 721, came as contract negotiations between the nation’s largest county and the county’s largest union snagged in the face of intense budget pressures. Both the city and county governments in Los Angeles have struggled in recent months to deal with an onslaught of financial problems, including huge legal liabilities, threats to federal funding under the Trump administration and the cost of the January wildfires.
Last week, city officials — who stretched last year to grant their unions generous pay raises — traveled to Sacramento to ask state legislators for help with a projected shortfall of nearly $1 billion. Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles warned that without a state rescue, the city might have to lay off some 1,650 workers.
Los Angeles County, a much larger entity that acts as the social safety net for millions of Southern Californians, announced this month that its financial stressors were also mounting.
Among them: projected wildfire-related costs approaching $2 billion; hundreds of millions of dollars in health grants that have been jeopardized by the Trump administration; and a $4 billion settlement for thousands of sex abuse claims brought by former wards of the county’s foster care and juvenile detention systems, dating back decades.
The financial hits have come as the county, which employs more than 100,000 workers and serves nearly 10 million people, is negotiating its contracts with its mostly unionized labor force.
SEIU Local 721 represents social, clerical, public health, and parks and recreation employees and has members in all but two of the county’s 38 departments. Union leaders said this strike, which ends on Wednesday at 6:59 p.m., was the first to include all of the local’s members. Their contract expired in March.
Leaders charged that the county had “stalled” negotiations and violated dozens of labor laws, including surveillance of workers and retaliation.
“They thought we would never strike,” David Green, a social worker who is the local’s executive director and president, said in a statement. “They thought wrong.”
By Tuesday morning, libraries from Compton to Catalina Island had shut down because of a lack of staffing, and maintenance crews who had been cleaning up wildfire debris were making do without unionized operators of bulldozers and other heavy equipment. Residents hoping to reclaim or adopt pets were warned to expect delays at county animal shelters. Portable toilets were set up on county beaches where striking workers had left some restrooms closed.
Fesia Davenport, the Los Angeles County chief executive, said she was most concerned about the human toll to the county’s sprawling health care system, such as disruptions in care for children with severe physical and intellectual disabilities who relied on mobile therapy units.
On Monday evening, she noted, an ambulance carrying a teenage victim of a shooting in East Los Angeles was diverted to an emergency room nearly 10 miles away in Pasadena because the strike had affected the staffing at the nearest hospital, Los Angeles General Medical Center. In a statement, the county health services department confirmed that ambulances had been diverted from the hospital on Monday, where 150 union members had been picketing.
“I think this is going to be very disruptive,” Ms. Davenport said. “We serve folks who are really vulnerable and often don’t have options to go and receive services at other places. We are the service provider of last resort.”
She said the county had met “almost every single day” for more than a month with the union and had recently offered cost-of-living raises and one-time bonuses to employees. But, she said, at least some of the union’s dissatisfaction appeared to stem from the raises that the City of Los Angeles agreed to last year with its politically powerful unions, including significant increases for the police and firefighters.
She noted that the credit rating agency S&P Global Ratings recently downgraded the long-term rating for general obligation bonds issued by the city, citing its personnel costs, among other issues.
Los Angeles County’s high credit rating from S&P is crucial, Ms. Davenport said, because the county’s plan to pay the multibillion-dollar sex abuse settlement hinges in part on a large bond issue. Higher interest rates could increase borrowing costs by millions of dollars.
“We are trying to manage our obligations in a way that we don’t negotiate into a structural deficit,” she said.
Shawn Hubler is The Times’s Los Angeles bureau chief, reporting on the news, trends and personalities of Southern California.
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