Nearly 500 Orange County public workers walked off the job before dawn Tuesday, setting up picket lines outside county facilities as possible delays loomed for landfill, road, and parks services across a county that serves three million residents. The strike by Teamsters Local 952 members came after months of stalled contract talks and a rejected 3% wage offer that union leaders say falls far short of the cost of living in Orange County.
Striking workers officially ceased operations at 4 a.m. Tuesday, established picket lines by 6 a.m., and planned an 11 a.m. news conference outside the County Administration Building in Santa Ana timed to a Board of Supervisors meeting, according to Hey SoCal. The union, which represents workers across OC Public Works, OC Waste and Recycling, OC Community Resources, and other county departments, says the news conference was deliberately scheduled to coincide with closed-session deliberations happening inside, as first reported by CBS LA.
Local 952 union representative Sam Carlin told CBS LA that bargaining with the county has dragged on for months without good faith from management. “The County of Orange has not bargained in good faith,” Carlin said, adding that the union would have to file unfair labor practice charges after the county went months without putting forward a proposal. Carlin said Teamsters first called on the county to open bargaining back in December 2025, and that workers believed real progress had been made as recently as August 2026 — only for talks to stall again.
A Contract Expired in June, a Vote Rejected in August
The union's prior labor agreement, covering more than 465 public sector employees, expired on June 25, 2026, leaving workers without a contract for nearly four months heading into the walkout, according to Waste Dive. On August 20, Local 952 members voted to reject the county's proposed 3% wage increase, objecting to the absence of retroactive pay for work performed after the contract lapsed and saying the offer fell short of recognizing workers' value, per OCINT's reporting on the dispute.
Carlin said the county never put forward a new offer before workers walked out. “Our workers make Orange County work,” Carlin said, according to CBS LA, adding that the decision to strike was not one workers wanted to make and that they regretted it reached this point. Workers are seeking wages that keep pace with rising living costs in the county, and the union maintains the county's single-year 3% proposal has remained unchanged into the fall.
Supervisors' Own Raise Still Fuels Anger
The backdrop to the standoff is a 25% pay raise the Orange County Board of Supervisors voted to give themselves last year, lifting their annual pay by roughly $49,000 to at least $244,000. The increase was folded into the county's overall $10.8 billion budget rather than brought forward as its own agenda item, according to the Fullerton Observer's account of an Orange County Grand Jury investigation. That same Grand Jury report, published in February, concluded the stealth pay increase damaged public trust, pointing out that supervisors raised their own compensation while the county enforced hiring freezes and headed into contract talks with nine public employee unions.
The county's 2025–2026 annual budget totaled $10.8 billion. Under California's Meyers-Milias-Brown Act and rulings from the Public Employment Relations Board, local public employees retain a statutorily protected right to strike unless an employer can show the action poses a substantial and imminent threat to public health and safety.
Landfill and Road Work Grinds to a Halt
The union warned the strike could cause delays to road and flood channel maintenance, landfill operations, parks and beach maintenance, and repairs to county and first-responder vehicles, impacts that ripple across the three million residents those departments serve, per CBS LA's reporting. The disruption was already visible Tuesday in Irvine, where the City of Irvine issued a public advisory after operations at the Frank R. Bowerman Landfill forced the suspension of public compost pickup, asphalt delivery, and soil delivery, along with the cancellation of an October 17 compost event. Delays were likely on Bee Canyon Access Road.
Orange County Public Information Manager Molly Nichelson said in an email Tuesday that the county respects its workers' statutory right to strike under California law and has activated departmental contingency plans intended to keep essential services running, Waste Dive reported. County leadership has emphasized minimizing service interruptions while negotiations continue. Teamsters Local 952 represents Orange County public employees, according to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
It remains unclear whether the Board of Supervisors will authorize retroactive pay as part of closed-session deliberations, or how PERB will ultimately evaluate the union's claims of bad-faith bargaining. For now, the picket lines outside the Santa Ana County Administration Building stand as the most visible sign of a standoff that has been building since bargaining first opened months ago.
