Labor Pains

The NFL owners dropped their strongest hint yet yesterday that they may delay expansion plans if they don't solve their labor woes soon. The owners whittled their list of expansion candidates from 11 cities to seven yesterday, giving the heave-ho to San Antonio, Honolulu, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham. But in the same breath, they announced that if their legal battle with the players, which is scheduled to go to trial in Minneapolis on June 15, isn't favorably resolved, it could force the league to delay plans to name its two expansion cities in October.

Despite the rosy business news of the last several years, all is not well in employee-employer relations. Changes in culture and technology have forced labor to add a host of new issues to the traditional disputes over health care, wages and job security. Here are some of the most troubling: Amalgamated Coffee Workers Local 59: A group at a neighborhood coffeehouse in Poquessock, Maine, tried to organize over health issues when several employees began complaining of conditions diagnosed as "steamed-milk dermatitis" and "espresso wrist.

After months of warning that Philadelphia faces a painful march to fiscal solvency, Mayor Rendell is scheduled today to show how he'll allocate the hurt. Look for the loudest cries of pain from the city's 24,400 workers. Rendell says they must accept no raises for four years and must take not only sharp reductions in benefits but also work-rule changes, all aimed at cutting $508 million in labor costs by June 1996. Or, they can accept massive layoffs. Some pain from Rendell's five-year financial plan also will be inflicted on abused and neglected children, contractors and other business people who need city permits, cultural organizations and non-profit institutions.

You know their names, you know their faces, but you probably can't exactly remember when you last saw them listed in the credits. Once, they might have found work on "The Love Boat," but that ship has sailed. Now you can find some of Hollywood's better-known faces playing Mumsie and Dad to a new generation of actors: JAMES FARENTINO Paternity test: Tonight on "ER," Farentino is introduced as the long-lost father of Dr. Doug Ross (George Clooney). Best known for: A ton of movie and TV roles, marriages to Elizabeth Ashley, Michele Lee and Debrah Farentino, and a court order to stop stalking Tina Sinatra.

Tanesha Harrison, 19, gave birth Tuesday morning to a healthy six-pound girl. Happens every day. Right? Not in weather like last week's. The baby, named LaKrista Nyree Harrison, was delivered in the back seat of the family's station wagon, with Tanesha Harrison's mother leaning over the front seat, and a hospital doctor banging helplessly on a frozen car door. "I couldn't hold it any longer," Harrison said, recounting the details last week from her bed in the maternity ward at Lower Bucks Hospital.

You can overdo last-minute Christmas shopping. Case in point: Lisa L. Holguin, who was 8 1/2 months pregnant and getting out of her car at 12:30 a.m. yesterday - 30 minutes past midnight - to go shopping at the Jamesway store in Wrightstown. That's when her water broke. But Holguin, already a mother of four, didn't panic and head for the hospital. Instead, she sailed on into Jamesway. "With my previous pregnancies, I (thought I) wouldn't have the baby right away.

Joan DuPont-Baine and Steven Baine had expected to enjoy a traditional Labor Day weekend - relaxing around their Glendora home and maybe attending a picnic. But by early Friday morning, the couple knew that their long weekend would be anything but ordinary. From now on, Labor Day weekend will always hold a double meaning for the Baines. At 5 a.m. Friday, Joan went into labor a week ahead of schedule, and moments later Steven found himself delivering their first child on the living room floor.

Junior Fleming apparently panicked when his pregnant girlfriend went into labor last year. Fleming, an unlicensed driver, was is such a hurry to get Gail Patterson, 29, to a hospital, he lost control of his car in North Philadelphia. It crashed into a pole and caught fire, killing Patterson, said Assistant District Attorney Arlene Fisk. "This was an absolute tragedy," said Fisk yesterday, after Fleming, 34, a street vendor, pleaded guilty to homicide by vehicle and involuntary manslaughter in exchange for five years' probation.

CHARMAINE TAKES CHARGE ON A LABOR-INTENSIVE DAY Charmaine Parks is one industrious kid. Why, just the other day the 9-year- old Detroit girl took charge when her mother and a neighbor both went into labor on the same morning. When Shari Parks woke up with labor pains before dawn Monday, Charmaine ran across the street and asked Patricia Jackson to drive her mother to the hospital. Charmaine and her five siblings went with the women to the hospital. When the children went home a few hours later, Margo Jackson, Patricia Jackson's daughter, was in labor.

The Van, the third and final installment of Roddy Doyle's Barrytown trilogy, lacks the Dublin soul of The Commitments and the crackle of The Snapper. Yet this engaging film brings comic meaning to the term "labor pains. " Only a mind with the mischievous warp of Doyle's - or Stan Laurel's - would assume that the only thing worse than not having a job is getting one that puts you in constant contact with your best friend. In filming Doyle's novel, director Stephen Frears (who also made The Snapper)

The National Football League lockout is almost over and I've got a stale beer taste in my mouth and a really bad hangover. I never thought I'd say that when it came to the NFL. When Major League Baseball went on strike, it really ticked us off because we all would have killed to be big-league players, and how dare these pampered, spoiled babies, who have it probably easier than any other pro athlete, take the game away from us fans?...

At a time when unemployment among construction workers stands at close to 25 percent, a $400 million Pennsylvania prison project that would have employed 1,400 carpenters, electricians, and others in the trades remains mired in bureaucracy and litigation. Meanwhile, the state prison system is so crowded that it is shipping 2,000 inmates out of state at a daily cost of $62 per inmate. Construction on the project, a new 4,100-bed prison next to Graterford Prison in Skippack Township, Montgomery County, was supposed to have started in September.

In her hotel, with its glorious views of the Delaware River, Julie Coker, general manager of the Hyatt Regency, has a problem. Two unions each claim to represent her workers. When Coker deducts union dues from paychecks, where should she send them? When there are grievances, who should represent the workers? If there are layoffs, which union should she call? "Mostly [unions] are fighting with management," Coker said. "This time, they are fighting among themselves, so this is an unusual turn of events.

There's a characteristic that managers and coaches love to see in players. They call it "good face. " Back in spring training in 1994, manager Jim Fregosi saw it in a young reliever named Ricky Bottalico. Essentially, having good face means you are a competitor, that you have no fear. Kyle Kendrick, roughed up for six runs over four innings in the Phillies' 7-4 loss to Washington, did not have good face yesterday, and that could cost him the chance to pitch against the New York Mets on national television Sunday night.

Just five years ago, Holy Redeemer Hospital & Medical Center expanded its maternity unit so it would have room for 2,500 new mothers a year. Already it's on track to see up to 3,500. "We are bursting at the seams," Marian Thallner, vice president of women's and children's services at Holy Redeemer Health System, told members of the Pennsylvania House Health and Human Services Committee yesterday. Five hospitals near Holy Redeemer have stopped delivering babies, and the Meadowbrook facility is coping with the fallout.

Just five years ago, Holy Redeemer Hospital & Medical Center expanded its maternity unit so it would have room for 2,500 new mothers a year. Already it's on track to see up to 3,500. "We are bursting at the seams," Marian Thallner, vice president of women's and children's services at Holy Redeemer Health System, told members of the Pennsylvania House Health and Human Services Committee yesterday. Five hospitals near Holy Redeemer have stopped delivering babies, and the Meadowbrook facility is coping with the fallout.

Talk about embarrassing. Mothers Work Inc., the Philadelphia-based retailer of maternity clothing, agreed to pay $375,000 to settle a discrimination lawsuit. The federal complaint? A Mothers Work store in Florida, Motherhood Maternity, refused to hire qualified applicants because they were pregnant, and then fired an assistant manager who complained about it. "This is horrifying to me," said company president Rebecca Matthias, who founded Mothers Work in 1982 when she was pregnant.

T HIS CITY'S TRACK record on minority contracting is already shameful. Adding insult to injury is a construction labor shortage, both nationally and in this city. The labor dearth, particularly among the skilled trades like plumbers, electricians, bricklayers and carpenters, has been caused by workers who leave the industry for other careers, the fact that fewer trained and educated workers are entering the trades, and a boom in construction that's kept the pressure on the labor supply.

AT A SIDEWALK PRESS conference yesterday, Sam Staten Sr., business manager of the Laborers Union, provided a short lesson in Philadelphia labor history, as well as one in statesmanship. And that gave us an idea regarding the Convention Center mess. At the old Civic Center, where the city's conventions and shows used to be headquartered, only the Laborers set up booths. They were, in fact, the first "unified work force. " Almost everyone now agrees that the key to fixing the labor woes at the Pennsylvania Convention Center depends on creating a category of "exhibition workers" who do all parts of the setup of booths - work currently fought over by the Laborers, Carpenters and Teamsters.

These are tough times for the women who play team sports for money. In the WNBA and the WUSA, players are entering the new season with dreams of big paydays on hold. With both organizations losing money and neither attracting substantial television audiences, the long-term financial viability of the leagues is no sure thing. Not surprisingly, the players are feeling the pinch. "A part of me says that we've reached a crossroads in women's sports, but a part of me doesn't believe that," said Mary Jo Kane, who heads the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota.