Court Opinion

ID: 9718769
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 07:33:30.227732+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:24:01.584868
License: Public Domain

BUTLER, J .
I concur in the result. The issue of discrimination should be addressed because the county attempts to penalize employees who exercise their right to seek better terms and conditions of employment than those offered by the county.
The 1981-1982 memoranda of agreement expressly provide employees with paid holidays for Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. Both fell on a Friday. The memoranda add as paid holidays any other day of national celebration proclaimed by the board of supervisors and on which county offices are closed. The memoranda bind the county and the signatory employee organizations until successor memoranda are adopted. The 1981-1982 memoranda survived their termination dates and were effective between the county and those organizations which failed to enter into memoranda for the 1982-1983 fiscal year. Thus, when the county adopted the challenged salary ordinance on November 16, 1982 and, indeed, through New Year’s Day 1983, the memoranda between the county and the organizations which declined to sign continued to be in effect, i.e., Christmas Day and New Year’s Day were paid holidays.
The majority opinion holds the 1981-1982 memoranda call for the observance of Christmas and New Year’s holidays on the two Fridays, December 24 and December 31, 1982, for payroll purposes. It follows the county’s enactment of the salary ordinance extending the olive branch of paid holidays to those organizations signing memoranda of agreement before December 24, 1982, is a classic exercise in coercive tactics intended to result in a loss of benefits to members of those employee entities who chose to fight rather than sing Christmas carols at the doors of members of the board of supervisors. A penalty is imposed upon those employees because their bargaining units had not come to terms with the county. This is a clear violation of Government Code section 3506. Despite Uriah Keep1 contentions to the contrary, the county’s conduct is destructive of the purpose and intent of the Meyers-Milias-Brown Act—to prohibit public agencies in their relations with their employees from intimidation, coercion and discrimination. (Campbell Municipal Employees Assn. v. City of Campbell (1982) 131 *1133Cal.App.3d 416, 422 [182 Cal.Rptr. 461].) As the work of government is the business of the public, we should illuminate these darker rooms to be sure the actors may be seen.
A petition for a rehearing was denied August 24, 1984, and the petition of appellant County of San Diego for a hearing by the Supreme Court was denied October 3, 1984.

 “I am well aware that I am the ‘umblest person going. . . . My mother is likewise a very ‘umble person. We live in a numble abode. . . . We are so very ‘umble.” (David Copperfield, eh. 16, 17, Charles Dickens, Oxford Diet, of Quotations (2d ed. 1953) p. 174.)