Berkeley City Auditor’s Damning Report Confirms That Only Worker Solidarity Can Save the City

The Berkeley Auditor recently released a damning report highlighting City Management’s utter failure to respect, retain, protect, and pay you.

The data in the report is a welcome validation of workers’ lived experience, but stops short of stating plainly what we know to be true: City Management is complicit in undermining its workers, and in turn the City, and only workers standing in solidarity can fix it.

Management Incompetently Runs the City Like a Corporation

The report confirms what you have long known: Management operates the City like a big business not unlike Walmart, Starbucks and Amazon. They voraciously consume your labor without regard for your health or well-being and when they are done with you they throw you out like an old sock. Now the jig is up. All value in our society derives from labor, and now the City has run out of workers to abuse. Indeed, Berkeley has the second highest vacancy rate of Bay Area cities!

The report dismisses Management’s convenient and buzz word-laden excuses through confirming the obvious: “workforce retention in Berkeley was a problem before the pandemic and the Great Resignation, which are not solely responsible for citywide retention challenges.”

While in past years Management papered over the problem they caused, the pandemic merely accelerated it, and now through Management’s persistent incompetence, the cracks are starting to show such that the Auditor was compelled to write a report detailing that:

Only 55 percent of current city employees are satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their City job as compared to federal government workers 73% (p. 12);
46% of workers reported that “they did not believe city management cares about employees” (p. 22);
37% of workers cited bad pay compared to 56% of federal workers citing satisfaction with their pay (p. 18), many workers report that COLAs are unfair and too infrequent (p. 19), and paying workers adequately is less expensive than turnover (p. 20);
55 percent of City employees reported looking for another job, and 47% cited “culture problems among their primary reasons for leaving” (p. 12);
Only 44% of workers said they weren’t overworked (p. 12);
Management is incapable of communicating with employees (p. 20);
Management has no credible plan to retain its workers, nor measure the problem, and overall has no idea how much staff it needs to deliver services (p. 7 and 10);
the community lacks critical services due to vacancies and overwork (p. 8);
Management has overseen if not contributed to a complete breakdown in the Human Resources department ensuring that despite a bad overall culture and retention, the City couldn’t hire new employees (p. 10), and new hires take an average of 7.7 months (p. 24);
efforts to improve wellness and retention have been limited to preferred departments like the Police Department (p. 10);
internal systems are outdated and hard to use and training is severely lacking (p. 14 and 16);
Nearly 30% left the City due to lack of promotional opportunities, and 47% of current employees report dissatisfaction with the same (p. 15);
52 percent of surveyed teleworking employees said they would leave if the City continues to cut back on teleworking privileges (p. 31), and many cited lack of fair and equitable teleworking policy that leaves the option up to Managers and requires no justification for denial (p. 34);

City Manager Poised to Undermine Report with ‘Employer of Choice’ Charade and Boondoggle

The mere presence of this report is so offensive to those responsible for the dire situation that the City Manager (unelected), Dee Williams-Ridley, recently announced at a Council committee meeting that she intends to respond to and undermine the Auditor’s (independently elected) report by hijacking the July 11 Council meeting to promote her separate consultant-led “Employer of Choice Initiative.”

The City Manager created the Employer of Choice as a Public Relations initiative in 2022 to save face, and to get in front of union organizing and the Auditor’s report (started in 2019). The City Manager is calling for nearly a million dollars in new unaccountable spending for HR following last year’s allocation of $155,000 in consulting fees to design the “initiative,” as well as “branding and marketing agency fees” of $250,000, and $200,000 for “communications and social media content planning and strategy.” More recently at the ‘employee appreciation event,’ Management had employees wait in line for food for hours in the scorching sun so that senior management could cosplay as humble servants in orange Home Depot-style aprons. They also hired a ‘motivational speaker’ who typically charges $40,000 to speak to evil corporations (e.g., Chevron, Shell, BP, PG&E, DuPont, Northrop Grumman, Airbnb, Walmart, Cargill, Coca-Cola, Wells Fargo, Google, GSK, Roche, Comcast, Berkshire Hathaway, Disney, Dow Jones, Gap, eBay, Microsoft, and Charles Schwab) to lecture workers not to “complain” about management destroying the City’s labor relations and workforce retention.

Clearly the City Manager is throwing good money after bad through ‘The Initiative,’ having contracted out similar work to the very consulting firm in 2018 to address the HR Department’s prior failures, and through the ‘initiative’ is duplicating the work already being performed by the Auditor. Meanwhile Management gave themselves 5-38% raises, and promoted the head of HR during the disastrous bulk of the audit report period to the #2 position: Deputy City Manager.

The workers and the public they serve don’t need this $1.5 million boondoggle and charade; they simply need city management to demonstrate basic competency, retain HR staff, listen to their workers, and negotiate in good faith.

Report Stops Short of Calling for New Management or the True Accountability That Only Workers Can Provide

Overall, the Auditor’s report is welcomed, but the solutions offered by the Auditor, while well-intentioned, may result in ‘better management,’ but do not get to the heart of the matter: a lack of worker empowerment in the workplace and toxic anti-worker/union culture and supervisors.

In reading this report, there is little doubt reasonable readers will see that City Management should be let go for their incompetence and behavior. Average workers know that if they acted so incompetently, they’d be let go. But you won’t see the Auditor or Council calling for such accountability, but rather mere reforms.

Only workers can bring true accountability through organizing and collective action. Unfortunately, it appears that nothing short of workers in solidarity with the public they serve shutting down the City by withholding their labor will bring them to their senses, i.e., allowing workers to lead.