When leaders of the San Francisco teachers union this afternoon announced that 97 percent of the union’s voting members yesterday opted to authorize a strike, it was no surprise. Your humble narrator put the over-under at 95 percent, and one of you reading this owes me a dollar. You know who you are.
To the contrary, the only surprise was that teachers waited this long to threaten a walkout. San Francisco is an expensive place to live, in which those unable to benefit from a pile of cash or a time machine must live in a state of perpetual adolescent penury. San Francisco teachers are not particularly well-paid, even when compared to educators not dealing with the Bay Area’s parodic costs of living.
Raises vs. bonuses, prep time, student counts for special ed teachers: Both teachers and management alike can speak to the progress (or lack thereof) made on these important if arcane matters. But, looming like Banquo’s ghost over today’s press event — and the ongoing contract negotiations, and the lives of every SFUSD employee — is the district’s ongoing, years-long payroll debacle.
In January 2022, the district rolled out EMPowerSF, a boutique payroll system it paid $9.5 million for out of the box. Mission Local, in March of that year, broke the story of the expensive new system failing spectacularly upon launch, with teachers going unpaid, underpaid or mispaid.
It is hard to overstate how poorly EMPower has performed, and the district has spent dozens of millions of additional dollars propping up a system that never worked and may, in the end, be scrapped. Every teacher is now forced to examine their paycheck like a forensic accountant to ensure every last health care or retirement contribution is in its right place; teachers have told us that the normally pleasant experience of being paid has been transformed into an anxiety-inducing ordeal.
Many teachers (and their spouses) have found themselves unenrolled from retirement, health and dental plans as a result — and, in a scenario worse than any horror movie, 20-year SFUSD paraeducator Eddy Alarcon had to spend his last, dying days battling with insurance companies after his healthcare was dropped while he was on medical leave.
Teachers union president Cassondra Curiel told Mission Local yesterday that much, if not most, of the frustration driving her colleagues to authorize what would be the district’s first walkout since 1979 has been driven by EMPower. It is not too strong a word to say that the payroll situation has traumatized the city’s teachers — and traumatized people behave accordingly.
All of which adds up to a challenge for the contract negotiators on both sides. Yes, there are important (and arcane) proposals to hammer out. But, more generally, everyone is angry at everyone, and that alters the dynamic around the table.
The embittering experience of EMPower “has led to a willingness to be more disagreeable,” agrees Washington High School social studies teacher David Ko, who has taught at his alma mater for 19 years. But, Ko argues, the teachers aren’t just angry. He’s hosted paycheck-auditing tutorials at Washington; dealing with EMPower has forced him and his colleagues to become more vigilant — and cohesive. That goes a ways toward explaining yesterday’s 97 percent vote.
“EMPower,” explains former longtime Phillip and Sala Burton High School teacher David Knight, “is the steel girder that broke the camel’s back.”
He retired this year, after 25 years in the district and 40 as a teacher, rather than deal with what he described as increasingly palpable disrespect emanating from the district’s central office at 555 Franklin — and, starting in 2022, EMPower embodied that disrespect.
These are the things educators like Sarah Nelson, a middle school science teacher at San Francisco Community School in the Excelsior, think about when they enter their hours into the EMPower system. Adding insult to injury, teachers play along with the farce that they work only seven hours a day. “It’s demoralizing to realize I ‘worked’ seven hours today,” she told me on the day of the strike vote. “I got here at 8 yesterday. I didn’t leave until 7:30 at night.”
But EMPower is a system that has no shortage of range. It can demoralize the workforce in any number of ways. To wit, the manner in which EMPower broke down signaled to front-line teachers that their managers did not understand the basic framework of their jobs. That the system would conk out when presented with the task of tabulating pay for teachers who focus on several subjects and have more than one classification was perceived as a slap in the face. This is a rudimentary task, and handling it is the epitome of what the payroll system for a public school district ought to be able to do — let alone a costly, boutique system.
More to the point: Making payroll is the epitome of what any employer ought to be able to do.
EMPower is not failing on the grand scale it was in earlier months. But it is still striking here and there, inducing anxiety — and fiscal problems — among the workforce. Last month, teachers were informed that some of them were being dinged for double or triple the proper earmark for their union contributions — and the union was not getting that money.
Shellie Wiener, the school secretary for Alamo Elementary School, was recently approached by a teacher who’d noticed an oddity on their paystub. Rather than paying a quotidian $44 a month toward some manner of health or retirement fund, the form indicated the district had been socking away $44,000 a month — for months and months.
Among other problematic conditions, EMPower has made more work for school secretaries like Wiener, who now has to regularly deal with aggrieved and stressed teachers regarding payroll issues. Perhaps not coincidentally, secretaries, janitors and other district employees covered by the Service Employees union voted at a 99.5 percent clip earlier this month to authorize a strike.
Even if the district manages to fix EMPower (or cuts bait and drops it), the damage has been done — metaphysically, if no longer physically.
But is a strike inevitable? Not necessarily. Teachers feel the district has acquiesced somewhat after prior shows of force and, Curiel noted, the next scheduled bargaining session is Monday, Oct. 16. But, if things go poorly, the United Educators could call for a mandatory second strike vote within a week or two and, potentially, the teachers could hit the streets before Halloween.
No, a 97 percent authorization vote was not a surprise. But that’s still a gaudy number. If the strike is the nuclear option, it would seem the vast, vast majority of teachers are ready and willing to ride that bomb, Slim Pickens-style.
And that would lead to an explosive situation, transcending students unable to learn, parents unable to work and teachers unable to get paid. A teachers’ walkout would serve as a de-facto dress rehearsal for vast swaths of city workers going on strike next year, with nearly every union contract up for renewal and Mayor London Breed up for re-election while, already, calling for mid-year cuts and austerity.
A messy strike could also jeopardize the embattled school district’s proposed March 2024 $1 billion school bond. Even if the teachers don’t go out on strike right away, the rest of organized labor could threaten to sink this bond before it even gets on the ballot. It is nigh-inconceivable this bond would pass without union support. And, if labor plays hardball, it might not even be worth putting it in front of voters.
Labor’s message to the school district: The clock is ticking.
So, there are ever so many reasons why everyone in this city would want these problems to be solved, expediently, and for San Francisco’s teachers to stay within their classrooms.
But things break down when a governmental entity is unable to accomplish basic tasks, such as making payroll. They may not teach you that in school. But, here in San Francisco, school teaches you that.
Nothing will else will move the bureaucratic stagnation of SFUSD. Each assistant superintendent of blah-blah is working overtime to protect their butts/pet-programs/friends. The board, for the most part, is doing the same, as is the Sup. The central office needs to be cleared out completely. They are incompetent or corrupt. Time to clean house. If a strike gets what the teachers’ need, then great. If it puts the champions of the status quo on notice, even better. Solidarity.
I’d still like to know who’s footing the bill for all the costs related to the EmPower debacle. If it’s the District, why? Did they make substantive changes in the specs that resulted in EmPower having to drastically reprogram things? If there were no substantive changes in the specs and the District is still paying all the costs, that’s a huge issue.
The district is paying. From what I read elsewhere, the software vendor was poor (despite the cost) and the SFUSDs management of the project must have been poor. When you implement a new system, especially a financial one, there are a bunch of standards for testing that it sounds like were not followed. For example, you run a few real payrolls in the old system, and at the same time run them as a test in the new EMPower system (without the checks / direct deposits). Have accountants compare the real and test payrolls, not until they match do you go live with the new system.
I don’t work for or have shares of ADT or Paychex or any of the other payroll outfits but I note you never see small businesses having this problem. It’s always municipal governments and school districts who get lured by the promise of “boutique” payrolls.
I don’t know if it’s possible to overstate the negative impact of the EMPower debacle. It’s been a huge loss of money, time, and morale across the district.
The article touches on one of the most prevalent factors in this for all SFUSD employees. Before EMPower, each school, department and division had a specific staff member who was trained to navigate and enter time sheets for everyone else on the team. If you had questions they usually knew the answer or knew who to ask. Now that all SFUSD employees are required to enter and track their own payroll, sick days, substitutes and healthcare costs they get to see, day-to-day how much they aren’t getting paid to do. It’s easier to work 11 hours and accept getting paid for 8 when someone else handles the time keeping business process and you get a complete and correct check when you are supposed to.
This debacle was years in the making. The School Board members who
were ousted were more interested in virtue signaling than in the well being
of the teachers and the education of the students. They wanted to change
the name of 44 schools, but were negligent about, for instance, the rodent
infested Horace Mann school. They wanted to program rather than
monitor the well being and progress of the SFUSD.
In 1970, San Francisco had a population of around 720,000, the SFUSD
had 92,000 students. Now, in 2023, with a population of 815,000 ( down
from 875,000 in 2020 census), the SFUSD has less than 49,000 students.
A decrease of almost 47 %! The SFUSD became a tier for aspiring
politicians. The former Board wanted to dumb down students in the
name of “equity and equality”, not effort and merit, as evidenced by
the Lowell admissions controversy.
Well, San Francisco, you have reaped what you have sown.
And it will require a generation to undue the damage- to the
school system, and more importantly, the students.
Here you come throwing dirt on reader’s eyes to distract from who’s job it is to guarantee well-compensated educators who are paid correctly and timely, and get trained to deliver quality education to SF students. The current BOE and Supe have haughty plans for visions and guardrails—but they too are unable to run a functional payroll department. As for the demographics comparison, you can’t do that in all honesty if you do not consider the number of families versus single residents in the 1970s and now.
This dysfunctional payroll system is a demonstration of the incompetence of the School District Administration, bad software, bad contract which requires the School District, not the software vendor to fix the problems. It begs for a tax payer lawsuit. The no pay, late pay, wrong pay, no pension contribution, wrong pension contributions, aren’t just inconvenient, they violate the California Labor Codes and Regulations. More than a year in and horror story after horror story – where are the government oversight bodies? There are any number of California State bodies: the SF Healthcare System which fails it’s fiduciary obligation to the school employees to see if their benefits cut offs are appropriate; the teachers pension entity, CalSTRS, failing it’s fiduciary obligation to the teachers to see that the pension contributions are timely and correct. No investigations by any of these government entities when, assuming they care to do their jobs, they know it’s a mess. This is a foul mess where failure and indolence abound and yet it doesn’t have to be that way.
As a technical matter, the School District Administration should have created spreadsheets or database programs to catch the errors as the payroll and benefit runs are performed, comparing expected results to actual results and thus immediately catch the anamolies so they could be quickly rectified. Anybody with access to the payroll data and benefit contribution data, which is to say the School District, or their unions as these unions have the legal right to this data, and moderate Excel skills could do this in less than an hour per payroll or benefits cycle. Someone who had skill in database development could automate this process. In technical terms, it’s looking for non-matches. That something this simple and this important hasn’t been done, calls for heads to roll.
I’m still searching for the District’s justification of a boutique payroll system. There are scores of public and private entities with much larger numbers of employees, and several large companies that specialize in payroll services. Why build a custom system??
Here is an article regarding the Payroll System (SAP) and LA Unified Schools that happened in 2008. https://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-payroll11feb11-story.html
Software bugs, no test plans, and not training people that should manage
it. Plenty of blame to go around for this one SFUSD.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/sfusd-teacher-payroll-san-francisco-bureaucracy-18000777.php?utm_source=marketing&utm_medium=copy-url-link&utm_campaign=article-share&hash=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuc2ZjaHJvbmljbGUuY29tL29waW5pb24vb3BlbmZvcnVtL2FydGljbGUvc2Z1c2QtdGVhY2hlci1wYXlyb2xsLXNhbi1mcmFuY2lzY28tYnVyZWF1Y3JhY3ktMTgwMDA3NzcucGhw&time=MTY4MzM4NTk2MTcyNA==&rid=ZDY1NDZjMzMtOTdkNi00M2NmLWE5ZjEtZjYxZDA0NTdhNWFj&sharecount=MQ==