Tell the Board of Supervisors: Reject the Mayor's Police Officers Association Contract!
Call Script
I am a member of Indivisible San Francisco and I live in district <your district>.
I urge my Supervisor to vote NO on the Mayor’s POA contract. Giving SFPD even more raises during a budget crisis, while other City workers are under the threat of layoffs, is outrageous. This contract prevents SFPD from being held accountable and rewards racism. It also ties city workers’ raises to raises for the police, which is unfair and burdensome to essential workers who risk their lives during the pandemic.
Context
The San Francisco Police Officers Association (SFPOA) is a membership organization of SFPD officers, and since 1990 has been the “bargaining unit” with which the City negotiates over those officers’ wages and other terms of employment.
Over the summer, the Mayor and Department of Human Resources renegotiated the City’s current contract with the Police Officer’s Association, the police fraternity that represents cops in San Francisco and continually pushes racist and violent rhetoric while defending officers from the consequences of their actions. While presented as a cost-saving measure, the proposed contract amendment extends the contract for two years to 2023 (an election year when the POA will have more leverage) and guarantees officers a cumulative >9% in raises over their already exorbitantly high pay, all while obtaining exactly zero concessions in return.
The contract also harms City workers in two ways:
Locking the City into additional raises for the police further strains the budget at a time when revenue is so low that (according to the Supervisors at the Tue, Nov. 17 meeting) the Mayor’s office is threatening essential City workers, who risk their lives during the pandemic, with layoffs.
This deal also inserts a parity clause, which handcuffs essential city workers to police officers. If city worker unions get raises, then the police get gifted the exact same raises. This makes it much harder for labor unions representing City workers to negotiate for raises in the future, because the cost of those raises will have to include parity raises to the police.
The Board of Supervisors has the authority to reject this contract. However, it currently looks like they may just try to slide through under the door in order to evade the political repercussions of standing up to the racist POA. Cowardly as this might be, this means we need to mobilize in order to demand they remember they are at City Hall to represent the community, NOT a police fraternity’s interests.
We believe that this contract is unfair to City workers and residents, and fails to hold SFPD accountable. The Board of Supervisors must reject this contract.
The Supervisors must also hold a hearing to hold DHR accountable for their lack of transparency during this most recent contract renegotiation and gather community input on what the City needs to push for in future negotiations with the POA.
Supervisor Mar has called for such a hearing in the Government Audit and Oversight Committee, but no date has been set. The Board must not put this off—we need transparency and accountability in how the City negotiates its contracts.