CFI :: Region 1 Strike Bulletin - September 18, 2007

It’s scary and it’s hard work being on strike, but CFI members and their supporters are proving themselves to be up to the challenge.

When we walked out on September 5, we calculated that 94% of our members walked with us. In addition, we had widespread support from opt-outs and independent contractors. Today, those figures are virtually unchanged. Only a couple of our number have spooked and crossed the line. Nearly an equal number of people who originally crossed our lines have since joined us.

When CFI president Silvia Barden announced those numbers to a meeting of the L.A. County Labor Council on Monday evening she was awarded with long and thunderous applause. Seasoned union activists all, the delegates recognized the exceptional solidarity of interpreters. So congratulate yourselves. You deserve it, and you deserve the respect you are fighting so hard to achieve. It’s only a matter of time until the Court recognizes that it can’t outlast us and gets back to serious bargaining. However many days it takes for them to figure that out, we’ll stay together one day longer.

And we’re not alone

Support from other unions keeps growing. So many ISD carriers are refusing to cross our picket lines that managers have been forced to hand deliver the court files and other documents the service usually handles. Interpreters have also been extraordinarily successful at stopping deliveries of food and garbage pickups. In an article in yesterday’s Daily Journal, court spokesman Allan Parachini admitted that deliveries have been interrupted, although he minimized the effect.

In the same Daily Journal article, Bob Aquino, the executive director of the Engineers and Architects Union, said, “We understand what they’re doing. When you have a situation where a new hire earns the same as an employee who's been there 15 years, that's not a good situation." The article also quoted Jack Fuller, a defense attorney in Long Beach, who doesn’t understand why the courts won’t return to the bargaining table. "I've been practicing 28 years," he said. "I would be offended if someone came in and was paid exactly the same amount I was. It seems like a pretty obvious concept to me."

“What’s happening in your courts?”

This is the verbatim reproduction of an actual email from an attorney to PDNET:

I had my first uncertified interpreter yesterday, qualified over defense objection for all the Spanish speakers on the calendar. She had civil experience and had passed only the written portion of the state certification exam, BUT NOT THE ORAL PORTION. She had also been “provisionally qualified by Judge Ito,” but her criminal experience was limited to “this week, since the strike.” She also got flustered and silently stopped interpreting for several minutes at one point in the proceedings.

Is the quality of these people this bad countywide? What’s happening in your courts?

Good questions, Counselor.

Officials turn up the heat

Los Angeles City Attorney Rockard J. Delgadillo and California Legislators from across the state are urging the LA Courts to return to the bargaining table and give their interpreters a fair contract.