The members of SEIU 1021’s City of Oakland Chapter have been hard at work building on the gains of our last contract and standing up for public services to make sure our communities thrive, with our members leading the way. Our democratically chosen priorities and successes we have had are below.

Internal Hiring and Promotion

1021 members negotiated and enforced a side letter agreement moving 27 TPT (temporary, part-time) workers with no benefits or guaranteed hours into fulltime positions as provisional street maintenance workers. These workers now have full return rights to their original positions and are on the list for permanent hiring.

We moved 49 TPT workers to PPT (permanent part-time), moved 45 from part-time to fulltime, and created 202 new fulltime positions. We also rewrote a number of job specifications to make it easier for our members to get promoted, and created feeder classes for some positions, including Head Start and Early Head Start instructors, to help our members fill those positions and serve the community.

For many years, our members have worked to make the libraries transition their staffing model away from relying on part-time workers, and these efforts are having an effect. We helped pass Measure D, a parcel tax to fund library services, and pressed the libraries until they committed to hiring internally for the first 97 positions created, which will graduate those TPT workers into PPT or fulltime positions that will work in the libraries’ extended hours.

Politics

In addition to helping pass Measure D and Measure AA, to fund Head Start and early education, our members stepped up to volunteer their time and knock on doors to get out the vote to build our support in City Council, helping elect Sheng Thao in District 4 and Nikki Fortunato Bas in District 2.

Improvements in Working Conditions

As part of our years-long campaign to stop the city from contracting out, so that the city’s residents don’t have to wait for their services to be delivered, we separated Department of Transporation positions from the Public Works department, to ensure that departments are working to full capacity before contracting out can begin.

Our members are continuing to get non-sworn personnel removed from the police’s Internal Affairs discipline processes, which makes more sense for our members and better serves the public by freeing up Internal Affairs resources for the important work of holding sworn officers accountable to the people they are sworn to protect and serve.

By standing together and never backing down, our members have made the City remove three highly placed managers who were mistreating our members. Our strength in numbers made it impossible for the City to allow these bad bosses to keep their positions.

Members who were eligible for medical accommodations have all been placed in positions.

Fair Compensation

Secured retroactive payments for 35 people who retired between the expiration of the last contract and the ratification of the current contract.