An emphatic ruling from a state public employment board has eviscerated San Francisco’s half-century-old City Charter sections forbidding public employees from striking — and enabling the city to fire workers who do.
The California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) on July 24 returned a resounding decision against the city and in favor of the Service Employees International Union 1021 and International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers Local 21. This ruling affirms — and expands — a decision handed down last year by an administrative law judge, and appealed to the PERB panel.
That state panel on Monday found that the charter provisions enacted following chaotic 1970s-era public employee walkouts, and subsequently modified by voters over the course of the ensuing decades, to be wholly incompatible with California law. While the state panel does not have the power to rescind portions of the San Francisco City Charter, it can — and, now has — declared significant swaths to be “void and unenforceable.”
As such, the ramifications of this ruling could be extremely significant: Mission Local wrote this week of the looming political bloodbath coming in 2024, as the city faces vastly diminished revenues and Mayor London Breed ostensibly pushes an austerity budget. This will, notably, come during the closing stanza of her re-election campaign — while, simultaneously, most public-employee contracts will have expired and require re-negotiation.
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