An attorney representing the Service Employees International Union No. 1021 today sent the city attorney a letter claiming Mayor London Breed violated the law in placing Proposition F on the ballot, and urged it be removed from the March 5 ballot.
In her three-page letter, attorney Kerianne Steele said that the mayor placed her pet measure on the ballot in violation of the Meyers-Milias-Brown Act, which mandates employers to “meet and confer” with their unionized workforce regarding matters such as “wages, hours and other terms and conditions of employment.”
The SEIU 1021 is San Francisco’s largest public-sector union, representing some 16,000 city workers.
Proposition F would require people who receive cash benefits from the County Adult Assistance Program (CAAP) to undergo drug screening. If they are determined to be using illegal drugs, they would be mandated to undergo drug treatment if they wish to keep their benefits and/or housing.
Steele argues that the city “had a duty to provide prior notice and opportunity to bargain over its decision to place Proposition F on the ballot,” as it will have a “foreseeable significant and adverse effect on SEIU Local 1021-represented employees’ working conditions … ”
The City Attorney’s Office confirmed it is in receipt of Steele’s letter, but it has not yet formulated a response to it.
In that letter, Steele notes that there are presently 46 openings in city-run drug treatment centers. Since the city estimates that perhaps a full one-third of the roughly 5,200 people receiving cash assistance have drug problems, the capacity to treat them is not presently there.
Unionized workers at the Human Services Agency are already overworked and understaffed, the attorney writes, and Proposition F would create a vast new workload and a number of new procedures.
Marquitta Collins, a 10-year employee at HSA and a union shop steward, says that she worries for her and her colleagues’ safety when they’re made to enforce the tenets of Proposition F.
“We are already faced with a staffing shortage, and are not able to process benefits as we are required. Workers are already faced with a hostile environment,” she says. “Anytime you come between someone and their money, you are dealing with a hostile situation — whether or not they are on drugs.”
“Anytime you come between someone and their money, you are dealing with a hostile situation — whether or not they are on drugs.”
HSA employee Marquitta Collins
Collins notes that there are, presently, no treatment programs available and not even enough workers to process the Medi-Cal benefits for aid recipients who want to be in treatment — let alone people who do not seek treatment and are compelled into it. There are no earmarks in Proposition F for additional dollars with which to fund an expansion.
The HSA worker says the security situation and protocol for screening aid recipients — and potentially cutting them off — has not been revealed to the workers. HSA employees, Collins notes, already fear being waylaid by disgruntled clientele: “We have workers who do not go out to lunch at 1235 Mission, because of security concerns.”
The SEIU’s call for Proposition F to be removed from the March ballot is a non-starter; the Department of Elections confirms that the deadline to remove a measure placed on the ballot by the mayor was in November 2023.
As of last week, nearly 21,000 ballots had already been returned to the elections department. This is on par with the number received at this point during the March 2020 election, and turnout in that contest eventually reached 61 percent.
With Proposition F unable to be severed from the March ballot — and widely expected to win — the union would be forced to demand, post-facto, that the city meet and confer to negotiate its enforceability. If stymied there, further legal action would be necessary.
This was what recently occurred in the North Bay, in a case that Steele cites in her letter. In 2020, nearly 65 percent of Sonoma voters approved Measure P, which altered the county’s Law Enforcement Review Board.
Law-enforcement unions objected, and took legal action regarding Measure P. And, last year, the Public Employees Relations Board sided with the unionized workforce, ruling that “the County failed to give the [unions] notice and an opportunity to meet and confer over certain Measure P amendments before placing the measure on the November 2020 ballot.”
The state body “ordered the County to cease and desist from such conduct in the future and to post a notice of its violations.” It declined to “order restoration for the status quo” only because the unions and county had subsequently met and conferred and resolved the issues that the state body affirmed “could not be adopted or implemented without bargaining.”
The union, in its letter to San Francisco’s city attorney, implies that the same would happen here.
“The City’s need for unencumbered decision making in managing its operations does not outweigh the benefit to employer-employee relations of bargaining over the terms of Proposition F,” Steele writes. “The City should have provided SEIU Local 1021 prior notice and opportunity to bargain before it placed this proposition on the ballot.”
In a statement to Mission Local, Steele added that SEIU workers “reserve their right to initiate legal proceedings and engage in collective worker actions to protest the City’s persistent unfair labor practices. Any legal or job actions would be undertaken on behalf of workers and the most vulnerable residents of our city.”
As an employee of a long-term housing facility that would likely house folks after treatment, I can tell you we don’t have the staff. We still have empty beds because the city can’t get its’ act together and hire staff in a timely manner. If the mayor really wants to fix this, a complete audit of the Byzantine HR dept. should be her top priority.
It’s time for another investigation on the inability of the Department of Human Resources to hire personnel.
Xina,
Forgiving as the screens at Human Resources may be they probably wouldn’t hire Police cadets who had already shot someone or been accused of brutality.
I had a friend turned down for smoking pot back in high school and he ended up a lawyer in Navy Jag advising base commander at Guantanamo.
For ‘Laterals’ the requirements are less stringent.
Two of the five officers who shot Mario Woods had shot people at previous gigs.
A cop who roughed up an ex-ladyfriend of Willie Brown in North Beach had thugged at another department and was wearing another cop’s coat and ID.
SFPD made him a training officer.
Willie hired dozens of ‘Special Assistants’ and HR never turned down a single one.
Breed could care less. Prop F, like Prop E, is pure theater. It appears to do something but does nothing. Or it makes things worse. Either way the purpose is to curry favor with billionaire coke heads, who she thinks key to her election, who cry loud about drug addicts taking over the streets. BTW, they receive City welfare in the form of tax breaks but will not get tested under this or any law.
Mark,
Prop E if I read it correctly would give the SFPOA same power SEIU is claiming here which is to peruse and influence legislation before it is even considered, let alone be put on the ballot.
Under Prop E cops don’t have to do written reports that could later hang them but can make a choice of which cop camera angles they want to provide the Public and the Public Defenders.
h.
“anytime you come between someone and their money…” This isn’t true. These people are not adding to GDP and producing something of value. The money to them is a gift given generously by taxpayers who work hard, study, save and invest and live an upright life to be able to help them. If you are relying on taxes for rent, food, medical care and cash, you are relying on the hard work of others. There is no free lunch. Someone else earned that money. If we are giving people money, I think we have a right to say it comes with conditions, you must be doing your honest moral best to improve and make sure to minimize cost to hardworking taxpayers, which means don’t do drugs, use the free time to teach your kids and pressure them to study 15-20 hours minimum, get them to library tutors or any program available, go to parent teacher conferences, go to rehab if you have a problem, and use your time to seek out education and job training and go to the library and read self-help books to minimize your time as a burden to others, to society at large. You’re morally obligated to be thankful towards taxpayers as they’re buying your meals and paying your rent and other expenses, and make a sincere effort to improve as a person and recognize the role your previous decisions and lack of effort played in your current need to live on the hard work of other people. So yes, we have a right to say, show us you’re seriously having bad luck but doing your best to control your actions and improve in the future and become a better person. Let it be an investment, not enablement. Require people work hard and be thankful for the hard work of others. If you’re doing fentanyl or heroin or meth or crack or other drugs and are living on the hard work of others, and are argumentative and unwilling to admit you have a problem and go to rehab, we must require you change your behavior and outlook and we must tutor your kids and make sure your kids don’t follow you into poverty by having the same bad habits and actions. I’m not saying you didn’t have challenges, but you owe it to people working hard, including children in whose name we are borrowing money to feed and house you, to do your best, and really do your best, not a lame version of it which doesn’t require actual behavioral change or effort. These are the facts, and they are undisputed.
Floyd —
You seem to be missing the point. The people tasked with cutting off that money fear for their safety.
JE
He doesn’t care, he just needs to get of his chest how angry he is his tax money might help someone else.
If you have to give people money because you fear for your safety, that is called extortion.
David —
That’s profound, but you, too, seem to be missing the point. The union is claiming that, with more duties and increased risk, they need to meet and confer with their employer, the city, before new conditions are imposed.
Best,
JE
If your scared call the police.
You are making a philosophical argument about whether or not we have an obligation to provide support to homeless people. That’s beyond the scope of this article – Joe’s reporting is focused on the union’s position on Prop F, which is that SEIU workers would have to shoulder additional work and risk in order to carry out this testing. The union’s objections are practical, not moral.
Say what you will about the odds of Prop F working well, but it seems like a huge overreach to claim that it’s a change in the “wages, hours and other terms and conditions of employment” of city employees.
This interpretation would basically give unions a veto over any and all city policy changes – if you have city workers enforcing or implementing a policy, any change to the policy will change the nature of their daily work at least a little bit. If that counts as changing the “terms of employment” and requires union negotiations, then virtually every law and proposition in the city would get bogged down in union talks. No thank you!
“Collins notes that there are, presently, no treatment programs available and not even enough workers to process the Medi-Cal benefits for aid recipients who want to be in treatment — let alone people who do not seek treatment and are compelled into it. There are no earmarks in Proposition F for additional dollars with which to fund an expansion.”
Argue all you want about Breed, the bottom line is this proposition is ALL FOR SHOW as there are simply not enough beds or clinicians to give the mandated care.
Too little too late.
London Bred and admistration need new careers