Indeed.
In cities such as Sunnyvale or Fairfield, officials don't have to consider the fact that all city council seats are beholden to municipal workers' unions before deciding to, say, cut back fire department overtime.
Aaron Farmer
Aaron Farmer
Related Content
More About
San Francisco is different.
During a typical campaign season here, many hundreds of labor volunteers from as many as 30 unions make tens of thousands of phone calls and knock on tens of thousands of doors. These troops from the Labor Neighbor program, made up mostly of government workers represented by one of a number of public-employee unions, routinely tip key races in San Francisco elections, according to pollsters. In San Francisco, the Labor Neighbor election slate card is viewed as a political-correctness litmus test for public officials, leftist and otherwise.
Last week mayoral candidate/Supervisor Tom Ammiano spoke for many prominent elected officials here when he said the following before a crowd of municipal workers' union members: "Brothers and sisters, you have always been with me. You elected me. I serve you. There's not a moment I don't think of you."
And so, during a year when clear choices must be made between reducing care for San Franciscans with dangerous mental disabilities or preserving perks for firefighters (more than 300 of whom typically earn in excess of $100,000 per year), don't look for the firefighters to lose their group therapy counselors (who, because they retain the rank of lieutenant, make at least $80,000 a year).
Mario Treviño strikes me as the sort of man who'd just as soon this wasn't so. Treviño came here from Las Vegas, a city with its share of reputed political distortions; I get the impression he would feel more contented if he could run the Fire Department based on management practices that value efficiency, effectiveness, and scrupulous finances, rather than labor politics.
But Treviño's in a city where unions representing bus drivers, police officers, firefighters, laundry workers, and the vast majority of other city employees routinely cajole, threaten, co-opt, and manipulate political players and voters in ways that preclude significant political reform.
Treviño works for a boss, Willie Brown, who has a reputation for occasionally hiring competent managers, but then more than occasionally letting it be known that he won't help them in their most important task: confronting municipal workers' unions.
Treviño lives in a city that prides itself on its devotion to social justice, but doesn't demand reforms that would provide the best public services for the available public money. He works for a city bureaucracy that talks a blue streak about caring for the unfortunate, but first takes care of its own.
