You might recall on Valentine's Day this year, protesters marched to Twitter's office in SOMA equipped with cupid costumes, chocolates, and paper hearts.
Although today's sentiment is more bitter than sweet, workers are over at City Hall as we type, protesting against city policies granting CEO's at Twitter, Google, and other tech companies tax breaks. While they're at it, workers are also protesting the policies that reward developers who privatize housing.
The whole rally today is to draw attention to a new campaign the union has dubbed "Worker Wednesdays," a play-on to "Tech Tuesdays" in which the mayor meets with tech companies every Tuesday to discuss how the city can help them progress. The union will be inviting the mayor to visit different employment sites every Wednesday to meet with workers and to figure out how to help keep them in the city instead.
Larry Bradshaw, vice president of SEIU Local 1021, says today's group will confront the Mayor and the Board of Supervisor's Finance Budget Committee as they meet to discuss city finances. "We want to hold the Board of Supervisors accountable," says Bradshaw.
For starters, the protesters want the city to take a hard look at the current $600 million that's going toward corporate tax breaks. "Think of all of the public goods that we could have bought with that money instead of it going into corporate pockets," says Bradshaw.
Other proposals that will be presented to Mayor Ed Lee today:
"Members who use Kaiser are healthier and younger" and should not have to pay as much as they do for their plans, Bradshaw says. The San Francisco Health Service System found that from 2010-2012, Kaiser charged the city $87 million more for services that members weren't even using.
The hope is, Bradshaw says, that all this protesting and prodding will encourage the mayor to focus more on the well-being of workers than on the financial health of tech companies.
"We're a little disconcerted that the mayor is aloof about this," says Bradshaw.
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