The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted on Tuesday to ensure that street cleaners who work for city contractors will be paid a prevailing wage, similar to what the city pays its employees for the same work.
At present, a unionized street cleaner working for the Department of Public Works earns up to $46.14 an hour. The contractor Ahsing Solutions, which employs street ambassadors in the Mission District, for example, paid each employee $26,000 over six months, which would amount to roughly $25 an hour, assuming a 40-hour work week.
Private contractors can also be costly for the city. In a newsletter from this summer, District 7 Supervisor Myrna Melgar wrote that some of these contractors bill the city $200 an hour to “supervise” street cleaners.
Contracted street cleaners and ambassadors have become a core part of the city’s strategy for managing street conditions, and they work in the Tenderloin, Mission and SoMa. Recently, the group Urban Alchemy began working in the Outer Richmond, Castro and Hayes Valley.
To remedy the wage gap and ensure street workers’ protection, Melgar introduced the bill, called the the Clean Streets and Fair Pay Act, in January.
“I’ve spent the past 10 months addressing everybody’s concerns,” Melgar said. “The whole point of the legislation is to protect the jobs of the unionized workforce, and not allow anyone in our city to undercut the collective bargaining agreement by paying their workers less for the same job that union workers are doing.”
The bargaining agreement between the city and Laborers International Union Local 261, which represents employees of the Department of Public Works, outlines benefits, compensation and requirements for protective clothing. Melgar said this agreement is about “dignity” for the workers.
Community benefit districts, the private neighborhood groups that operate some of the city’s street ambassador programs, feared the act would threaten their programs.
However, Melgar and Theresa Foglio-Ramirez, public sector business agent for Local 261, said that was not the case: Ambassadors are exempt from the ordinance, Melgar said, as long as they are not mostly doing street-cleaning work.
“We don’t want to impact anything that gives the community the ability to beautify their neighborhoods,” Foglio-Ramirez said. “Ambassador programs, they’re ancillary to the work that we do. They’re needed, same with the community benefit districts.”
Instead, Foglio-Ramirez said, the act is about preventing the exploitation of street cleaners who use complex, often dangerous equipment, and giving them career mobility.
“Many times, the workers don’t understand some of the biohazards that they’re dealing with out in the field. Then they don’t have the healthcare, either, to support them,” she said. “We really saw this as an opportunity to lift up these workers and actually connect them to a career pathway.”
Foglio-Ramirez was confident ahead of Tuesday’s meeting. “We’re very hopeful,” she told Mission Local on Monday. “I think it will go into effect.”
Melgar echoed her optimism; she believed that there would be “unanimous” approval.
They were correct. The ordinance was passed with unanimous support.
From the audience, longtime union leader Rudy Gonzalez, wearing a blazer and orange T-shirt, gave Melgar two thumbs up.
The city assesses a payment from me (property tax) to pay a city worker to keep the street clean. The city worker doesn’t do it, so the city charges me again to pay a non-union, non-city employee to do the same thing. The unions agreed to this? Seems like we don’t need the union labor or their prevailing wage if a cheaper way has been clearly established. When do we talk about the part where I’m being charged twice for the same services other tax payers get without the extra assessment?
Sell your shit, no more property tax, no more moaning. Easy.
I’d love to – but the state of my street and my city do not allow me to actually sell my property unless I PAY some fool to take it off my hands!
Where will the money come from?
The city pays street cleaners $46 an hour?
THAT is a scandal.
I’ll clean the streets for half that! LOL. That’s actually how much I make at my Service Industry job. $23/hour.
The $200 an hour supervision figure Melgar mentions is the number I would want explained. We run a job board for traveling trades workers, and the spread between what a contract bills and what the person doing the work gets paid is the thing nobody outside the office ever sees. Some of that spread is real cost, payroll taxes, insurance, vehicles, overhead, and some of it is just margin, and the two get talked about as if they were the same thing. We put together a tool that shows how far apart a billed rate and a paid rate really sit once you itemize it. Raising the wage floor moves one line in that stack, which is worth knowing before anyone argues about what it costs the city.
I’d pay it…. I would pay x-tra taxes so urban alchemy and all these workers I see with pickers & yellow vests picking up litter all the time . Hey…… They work with Recology and the city and helping city truckers & they keep cleaning it up so SMALL BUSNISSES & our larger corporations don’t have to do it & keep their places looking “so fresh & so clean clean”
Disgraceful. Public service orgs step in to do an important job the City SHOULD already be doing but won’t. Instead of being red-faced and making an effort to improve, of *course* the City punishes the service orgs. How dare you! Melgar is corrupt.
I’m interested in going to Laney College for dance, cosmetology and journalism. I like reading the news paper and staying informed.