BACKGROUND ON CCSF BARGAINING

OUR MEMBERSHIP.

We are over 25,000 dedicated public workers that serve San Francisco around the clock every day of the year. We are nurses, MUNI bus operators, plumbers, librarians, SFO custodians, gardeners, 911 dispatchers, engineers, planners, social workers and many others. We are 10 different unions united in coalition through the Public Employee Committee of the San Francisco Labor Council. Our contracts all expire on June 30, 2024. See the full list of unions here.

OUR ISSUES.

In our negotiations with the City, we’re fighting to protect the public services we provide and fix the biggest issues facing San Francisco. We are focused on addressing the understaffing crisis which is debilitating our public services, and reigning in wasteful spending on private contractors.

Understaffing is a crisis for our public services, and city workers are stretched extremely thin. There are currently over 3,700 vacant permanent positions in the City and County, hurting our ability to deliver timely, quality services that address San Francisco’s biggest problems such as mental health disorders, street and sidewalk cleaning, and homelessness.1

  • There are over 600 vacancies in the Department of Public Health, the highest number of any department.

  • There are over 400 vacancies—a vacancy rate of 22%—in the Department of Public Works, which is responsible for street and sidewalk cleaning.

  • An 18% vacancy rate in the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.

We believe the City needs to follow all recommendations made by the 2023 SF Civil Grand Jury report (“Time to Get to Work: San Francisco’s Hiring Crisis”) to speed up the hiring process and invest in more full-time staff to deliver for our residents. We are also fighting for stronger investments in attracting and retaining experienced full-time staff.

THE CITY BUDGET SHOULD PRIORITIZE PUBLIC SERVICES, NOT PRIVATE CONTRACTORS.

The City has thousands of vacant positions they can fill, but instead are prioritizing funding for private contractors. Only a small fraction of the mayor’s budget cuts so far—less than 6%—have been from reductions to outside contractors, while over $21 million was from cuts to vacant city jobs.2 We believe that the City needs to transition away from wasteful private contractors and spend that money instead on hiring full-time staff.

The City spends on average $5.2 billion each year on contracts—the vast majority of these awarded contract dollars (94%) is for contractors with no roots in San Francisco.3

Some private contractors cost the city anywhere from 2-3 times as much as it would to hire a city worker to do the job:

  • A $4 million IT contract was awarded to Auriga Corporation, which is based outside of SF. Their hourly billing rates are as high as $346 per hour for work that could be performed through filling staffing vacancies.4

  • In a contract awarded to Cross Country Staffing for $85 million, it cost taxpayers 14% more for contracted nursing services than had the city filled in current nursing vacancies. Providing in-house nursing services would have translated to around $1.8 million in cost-savings for a single year.5

CITY WORKERS HAVE THE RIGHT TO STRIKE.

San Francisco city workers have not gone on strike in over 40 years. For the first time in decades, city workers are entering contract negotiations with the legally recognized right to strike as a result of a California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) decision filed on July 24, 2023. PERB determined that the City Charter provision banning strikes is incompatible with California law.

The right to strike and fight for public services is one of the most basic rights our members have. Whether or not we exercise that right is a democratic decision for the members of our union. We hope that the Mayor and her Administration will be willing to work with us to fix our city. If not, we are united and willing to do what it takes to protect public services.

CITATIONS:

  1. Vacancy report received from the City Administration on October 24, 2023. (available upon request)

  2. Joint Report FY 2024-25 through FY 2027-28 (page 39) https://www.sf.gov/sites/default/files/2023-12/Joint%20Report%20FY%202024-25%20through%20FY%202027-28.pdf. Of the $75 million in cuts made so far, only $4.2 million was from capital projects and contract savings.

  3. San Francisco Chronicle https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/san-francisco-contracts/; Supplier Contracts dataset, available on Data SF. This dataset is maintained by the Controller’s Office, which keeps track of all current and previously awarded contracts. https://data.sfgov.org/City-Management-and-Ethics/Supplier-Contracts/cqi5-hm2d/data

  4. Auriga contract (page 127 of the pdf has a list of all hourly rates) https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-documents/2020/11/11-17-20_item_10.4_contract_-_as_needed_it_services_-_federal.docx_.pdf.

  5. Report from Budget And Finance Committee Meeting, Feb 16, 2022 (page 11) https://ifpte21.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Cross-Country-Staffing-DPH.pdf