A Fair Contract

We are janitors, secretaries, clerk typists, accountants, payroll clerks, houseparents, nurses. We clean the schools. We answer the phones. We apply bandages to bloodied elbows. We make sure the district is reimbursed for serving the students.

Almost 50% of us work part time due, and another 12% work less than 4 hours a day in order to deny us full benefits and breaks. The district has been steadily serving lay off notices to full-time employees, offering them 3, 4, 5 hours or 6 hours with a split shift and two job assignment numbers (and no lunch break)--and workers are often forced to take them or are denied unemployment. And now, on the heels of the superintendent receiving a 20% raise and a monthly "living expense" higher than our monthly wages, we are about to receive paycuts, layoffs and mandatory unpaid furlough days. We are being used as the solution in the district's mismanagement of funds.

As the first day of school approaches, we have no contract.
There has never been a SEIU strike in the public schools in San Francisco but come the Tuesday after Labor Day, we will be voting to strike.

I feel like I am working for a huge corporation, not a public school district.