San Francisco is going to have a union crisis in July.
The hotel workers have been without a union contract and will probably go out on strike when the tourist season picks up. The hotels still have no interest in being unionized and having a contract that expires at the same time in hotels across the country. The same is true for Sutter Health, which owns a large hospital, St. Luke’s. The St. Luke’s union plans to go on strike in July. St. Luke’s is running at a $1.5 million per month loss; partly because it is in the Mission district with mostly Medicare patients and partly because of union work rules. Both of these groups of union workers are part of the SEIU, a service workers union, whose leader is a boob.
The Chronicle is also going to have a strike at the same
time. The Chronicle is owned by the
Hearst Corp. and losses $1 million per month. The Chronicle circulation is now below the 160,000 level of the
competing free Examiner tabloid, which is non-union and operates on a skeleton
staff.
The mayor of San Francisco blew his chance to be a reliable
mediator in any strike when he joined the hotel union picket line last year.
More to report on this when it happens in July. I expect the radical left Board of Supervisors to muck everything up and I expect the Chronicle to come out with its new tabloid format and call it a “strike edition.”