The City of Berkeley is the “Employer of Choice” for your boss. After a big unveiling this week, it turns out that the Employer of Choice strategy is to give City Managers more raises.
This week was doozy. City Management did what they do best:
- team up with fancy consultants to devise fake solutions to the problems they created;
- remove basic safety requirements that protect workers and our community;
- deny material worker needs; and
- set in motion processes that give themselves lavish raises while workers are further impoverished by inflation.
Whatever impact COVID is having on the job market, management deliberately poured gasoline on the fire. They systematically destroyed HR, ensuring that new job candidates who could relieve our exhausted frontline coworkers could not be hired. Naturally, the people who oversaw that destruction failed upwards to the highest positions in the City Management.
The Deputy City Manager is now giving herself a 5% raise while you are set to receive a mere 1%!
In 2021 you raised the alarm about spiraling vacancies across the City. They saw workers rising up, and the City Auditor beginning to investigate their total incompetence in terms of retaining workers.
Yet as we can see, when City Management sees workers agitating, their reflex is to hire consultant buddies to cover their behinds.
They got Council to bail them out with a whopping $155,350 consultant contract. For the price of joke COLAs for 155 workers, they produced a presentation that was entirely inaudible.
They lied about conferring with our union’s leadership, and in the ultimate sleight of hand, their plan to fix the problem is to hire two “new” HR staffers to replace the people they already drove out with “salary savings!”
Their other big idea is to spend $750,000 on advertising, marketing and branding–money that was stolen from workers.
The truth is that you can’t put “Employer of Choice” lipstick on a pig. Applicants see what the City is offering and how they treat their workers and look elsewhere. Until workers rise up and force management’s hand, nothing will fundamentally change.
In solidarity