A whole lot of San Francisco SRO employees to strike in name for larger wages

Hundreds of workers at the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, the largest operator of single-room occupancy buildings in San Francisco, said they were planning a one-day strike expected to commence on Wednesday.

The employees overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike in May, with 99% in support. Since then, the union and THC have continued meeting for bargaining talks that have now been grinding on for nearly eight months.

While the two sides made progress addressing worker fatigue — agreeing to allot three mental health days for each employee — they remain at odds over wages, the key issue driving the strike.

“Wages pay rent, they pay rising gas bills, they pay for groceries,” said Evan Oravec, a THC community organizer and president of its union, which is affiliated with Service Employees International Union Local 1021.

So far, THC’s position on wages increases “is not satisfactory for workers,” Oravec said. “It doesn’t raise everyone enough,” he said, referring to the proposed scale of $19 to $21 an hour for desk clerks, $20 to $22 for janitors and $22 to $24 for maintenance workers.

That range is too low, Oravec said, and has triggered fears of pay compression, which occurs when employees with different levels of experience earn roughly the same amount. A desk clerk with one or two years of experience already makes $18.40 an hour, Oravec said, fearing the new rates would effectively lock these employees in at a salary barely better than their current earnings.

Tenderloin Housing Clinic’s executive director, Randy Shaw, said he shares the union’s concerns about setting the bottom of the pay scale too low. Though Shaw believes that Wednesday’s action will have little impact on SRO residents — given its short anticipated duration — he and other managers have pressed the city to raise the proposed bar as contract negotiations wear on.

“We know it’s disruptive to not go in for a day,” clinical case manager Marissa Roarty said, indicating that without janitors, toilets might get clogged and trash might not get taken out, and without desk clerks, guests might not be able to come and go.

She said the workers “feel like this is a last resort.”

Union organizers were threatening to strike for several days, even as they continued bargaining with management. Though the talks appear amicable, workers sent a strong message when they held a picket sign-making party last Wednesday.

Mayor London Breed and the Board of Supervisors boosted funding in San Francisco’s budget this year for city-contracted nonprofits — and specifically those that oversee permanent supportive housing — with an eye toward increasing wages. The budget includes a 5.25% pay increase for all employees of nonprofits funded by the city, plus a 2.5% increase for all nonprofit contracts, which could also go to worker earnings.

Additionally, the city is providing $3 million annually to nonprofits in the permanent supportive housing sector, to bring case manager salaries up to $28 an hour, according to the mayor’s office.

However, Shaw said he’s been assured only that case managers’ salaries would rise to $25 an hour.

Another item in the budget allocates $12 million annually to raise wages of other frontline workers in the permanently supportive housing sphere.

Shaw said he agrees with the union that the minimums established in the current proposed pay scales for desk clerks, janitors and maintenance workers are all too low. He said the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing set those ranges, and the Tenderloin Housing Clinic has emphatically pushed to increase them.

A representative of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing said officials have prioritized “wage equity” in this year’s budget.

“We’ve been pounding HSH as hard as we can,” Shaw said, adding that clinic management also tried lobbying members of the Board of Supervisors’ Budget and Appropriations Committee, but could not persuade the majority of its five members to mandate that the department set pay at the higher end of the scale.

Robert Crockett, a custodian at THC who currently makes $17.37 an hour, said he’s confident his union will negotiate a better wage.

“The cost of living in San Francisco is very high: telephone bills, washing clothes and then I have grandkids,” Crockett said during a phone interview Thursday afternoon from the Raman Hotel, one of the clinic’s buildings on Howard Street.

Crockett lives in the Galvin Apartments, a separate Tenderloin Housing Clinic property in SoMa.

Chronicle staff writer Sabrina Pascua contributed to this report.

Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan