San Francisco public school secretaries, custodians, health care and food service workers have gone three years without an active contract and four years without a raise.
Now, they are demanding pay parity with their peers, who make up to 20% more.
Like their San Francisco Unified School District counterparts who head classrooms and teach students, school support staff expressed feelings of burnout, low pay and frustration over a faulty payroll system.
Many public-school service employees worked inside and outside school facilities throughout the pandemic but haven’t seen a raise since 2019.
Custodians kept facilities clean to meet elevated safety standards due to the rise of infectious diseases. Kitchen staff provided grab-and-go lunches to children at the height of the pandemic, a critical lifeline at a time when many families suffered wage loss. School health-care workers pivoted to meet the new demands of on-site COVID testing.
Being the lowest-paid workers in the district with a three-year expired contract has motivated these workers to demand higher pay, said Rafael Picazo, president of the chapter for school district workers at the Service Employees International Union Local 1021.
”It was our members that worked every day during the pandemic,” he told The Examiner. “It was our members that got in there and opened up the schools safely and made sure things fell into place. Management wasn’t there.”
Antonaé Robertson, a secretary at Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy, said many clerks within the district are taking on more roles and responsibilities above their pay grade, leading to a sense of burnout.
”Pretty much any and everything that’s overflowed from the administrators kind of gets dumped on the secretary,” she told The Examiner. “We’re hourly employees, and there’s this untold culture of taking your work home as if we are salaried employees. That’s a culture that I am working diligently to change.”
She added that unlike SEIU members who have a 16% to 20% higher salary, clerks and other service workers interface with the school community on a near-daily basis.
”The secretary is literally the face of your school, and right now, (management) is so far removed from what actually happens at a school site,” she said.
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Picazo and Robertson said that low pay has driven their colleagues to seek work elsewhere, either for The City or with another school district.
At an Oct. 4 bargaining session, the district offered a salary increase of 6%, effective July 1, for all members, and a one-time additional 4% increase for all members next July 1.
Frustration over stalled negotiations boiled over at a Board of Education meeting Tuesday, where SEIU members rallied in support of higher raises and wage increases than the district proposed. The rally halted the meeting, with Board of Education President Kevine Boggess calling for a brief recess.
SEIU 1021 went again to the bargaining table Thursday in what is now a yearlong negotiation, asking for retroactive pay raises of 4% for 2021-22, in addition to the 6% raises SFUSD proposed in 2022 and this year, and a 6% increase for the 2023-24 fiscal year. As of press time, the union and district are in active bargaining.
At the board meeting, Wayne said the payroll operating system — which for more than a year has docked pay for clerks, custodians, health-care workers and teachers — would not be fixed and working correctly by the end of 2023 as hoped.
”I felt disgusted because (the district has) spent $46 million (on the system),” said Picazo, who was present at the meeting. “And they let the company that put it together just walk away. Why wasn’t that company held accountable to make sure this system is working properly?”
Union members overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike last week, with 99.5% voting yes.
Despite the overwhelming majority of both unions’ members voting to authorize a strike, many don’t want it to come to that point, Picazo said.
In response to the recent strike authorizations, Wayne said, “We want to reach an agreement that honors our employees’ contribution and ensures we are responsibly stewarding public funds. SFUSD is committed to a budget process that prioritizes financial decisions that most directly benefit student experiences.”
Negotiations between SFUSD and the service workers’ union were ongoing as of Thursday.
