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I met with a couple of union officials the other day and heard the kind of sad song you hear from union officials in tough economic times.

The officials were trying to negotiate a new contract with a company and were having no luck. The company was showing no flexibility at all. The company was pleading poverty. The officials had a lot of questions about that. But the final straw, and the reason the union officials called me, was that the company had just laid off some of the union workers.

The interesting thing about this situation is that the company isn't really a company. It's another union.

It's the St. Louis Teachers Union, Local 420 of the American Federation of Teachers.

The people who work for 420 — clerical workers and field reps — are represented by the Office and Professional Employees International Union, Local 13.

Local 13 has contracts with about 40 local unions and a couple of credit unions. Most of these contracts involve just a few people. In fact, Local 13 has 44 contracts and its total membership is about 400.

That would seem to be a nice niche for a union — to represent people who work for other unions. In fact, you would probably think it would be easy to negotiate a union contract when the people on the other side of the table are union officials. Apparently, it is not.

"I could write a book," said Patricia Austin, the secretary-treasurer of Local 13. She has been an officer in Local 13 for 34 years. "It is definitely not easy."

Actually, that's good news. As a union member myself, I wouldn't want to see union officials just giving away our dues.

But according to Austin, Local 420 is more than just tough. It's darn near ruthless. Anti-union, you could almost say.

Katie Fenlon, the president of Local 13, told me that when she first tried to organize Local 420, Mary Armstrong, president of Local 420, fired the workers who wanted the union. Then Local 13 tried again, Fenlon said, and got an election in July 2007. All five employees — three field representatives and two clerical workers — voted in favor of representation.

But it took 15 months to get a contract, and now that contract has expired and Local 13 is having no luck getting a new one.

Prolonged negotiations are not unusual. What brought the matter to crisis was the decision Local 420 announced in December to lay off two of its three field representatives and one of its two clerical workers.

Local 13 responded with an offer that the field representatives switch to a 32-hour week to avoid layoffs, but agreed that one of the clerical staff be laid off. (She was pregnant and ready to stop working anyway.)

Late last month, the executive board of Local 420 voted to reject the proposal that the field reps switch to 32-hour weeks.

So Local 420 laid off two of its three field reps and a clerical worker — three of its five employees — at the end of January. Fenlon sent an angry letter to Armstrong. "Your decision to under-staff your office is a serious disservice to your membership. Also, your lack of cooperation and unwillingness to work to find an alternative to these layoffs is abysmal."

I visited Armstrong at the Local 420 office early one evening this past week. She waved off the notion that she had fired those first employees because they wanted to join Local 13. "They were not represented by anybody. They had contracts and when the contracts were up, we chose not to renew them," she said.

What about these most recent layoffs?

She said that Local 420 was having financial problems, some of which were related to legal fees in the state's fight to take over the district. Right now, we are running a deficit, she said. It was unfortunate we had to lay off people, but it was necessary, she said.

I mentioned that Fenlon and Austin told me that the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers) had been facing financial problems with so many of their members out of work. The leaders of that union went to Local 13 and asked to work something out to avoid layoffs. Its staff went to 32-hour weeks.

Don't compare us to the electricians, Armstrong said. We're a public employees union. We're not a closed shop, she said.

That means teachers in the district do not have to join the union in order to be represented. Or teachers can join and resign. Armstrong said about 1,600 teachers, or about 60 percent of the teachers in the district, are members. All of this uncertainty leads to financial problems, she said.

Well, who knows? These are tough times. Strange times, too, when a union is laying off its union workers.