A Big Win for Working Moms and Dads at the San Francisco General Hospital
Since the early 1980s the City and County of San Francisco and SEIU Local 1021 have recognized the importance of helping to facilitate affordable, accessible, and high quality child care for City workers, particularly at San Francisco General Hospital, to aid with recruitment and retention of registered nurses and other hospital employees who work long and often irregular shifts. As early as the 1993 City-Wide Agreement, there has been a requirement that a child care center be included in any significant construction at the Hospital, if a child care center was not already established by the time such construction was planned. Despite these clear contractual commitments spanning decades, which were reaffirmed again and again and as recently as 2016, the City arbitrarily decided not to open a child care facility at the Hospital. This was demonstrated not only by the City’s failure to include a child care facility in the new Hospital buildings which opened in May 2016, but its failure to repurpose any of the older building areas into a child care center.
After three days of arbitration, an arbitrator determined that the Agreement language was sufficient evidence to prove that the city made repeated commitments to provide space for a child care center. The arbitrator directed the City to establish and operate a child care center at the Hospital and set deadlines for when the City must issue requests for proposals for contractors and operators for the child care center.
Author: Katie McDonagh
