Hollow Threat from the Restaurant Association (edit this)
The Golden Gate Restaurant Association is threatening a day-long strike to protest the costs of providing a minimium wage and health benefits to their employees.
The Golden Gate Restaurant Association is the association of all of the upper end restaurants. In response to the minimium wage campaign, they did a survey of their members-and the distribution of their members and the food specialities was fascinating. Almost all of its members were in either the Financial District, North Beach and upper Fillmore. Their membership included only one or two restaurants in the Mission, it included only a handful in Chinatown and it didn’t included any restaurants in the Tenderloin.
Basically, the Golden Gate Restaurant Association is the association of higher-end restaurants.
There are plenty of restaurants in the Mission, Tenderloin and Chinatown-who since they arent’ members of the Golden Gate Association, will ge happy to be open when their higher-price competition is closed.
And there are grocery stores. These entities also sell food and usually for less cost than high end restaurants.
So I say to Golden Gate Restaurant Association-pay your employees a wage that they can actually afford to feed their families from food from grocery stores and provide them with health benefits to ensure that they are healthy when working around the food that you will be serving.
Respecting your employees is a good business practice. Threatening to a useless one day strike isn’t.
March 23rd, 2007 at 10:25 am e
Leftinsf readers need to sharply question why Mark Sanchez proposed a Board of Ed resolution that omitted the word “new” before “in-kind services,” and then called for providing $2.5 million in in-kind services. That would just plain mean $2.5 million less in services to SFUSD children. Jane Kim spoke in favor of that too. The school community is united in opposition to that resolution.
It’s obviously a given that the in-kind services should be NEW, or why would voters have to trouble to pass a measure calling for them as support for the schools? Clearly the intent was to provide additional resources.
But there are definitely in-kind services that the city could provide that would be productive, rather than cash. One proposed by parent volunteer/school food activist Dana Woldow would have the city pick up the tab for the health coverage for SFUSD’s Student Nutrition Services employees. That would be about $1 million. It would allow Student Nutrition to break even rather than running in the red, which then means our kids’ classroom funding has to cover the deficit — and would then allow Student Nutrition to improve the quality, choices (and quantity, where appropriate) of school meals dramatically.
I want to emphasize that many of the services on the list Kim posted are NOT “in-kind services to the schools.” They are the community providing services to the community’s children. Health care, mental health care, violence prevention/gang prevention/safety/policing, transportation and other areas are not education-related services to the schools. That thinking was not incorporated in the language of Prop. H, unfortunately, but I’m putting it on the table now.
Feeding children is also a community function, not an education function. It should be a given that San Francisco feeds its children as well as possible. Instead, it leaves a desperately underfunded SFUSD Student Nutrition department to struggle along, and any deficit must be covered from classroom needs. That’s wrong — it shouldn’t be decent food vs. education. The city should be picking up the difference so as to allow the best possible meals. The proposal that the city pick up the health coverage cost would achieve that.
Also, I think it’s time to start working on the Board of Supervisors and other city officials regarding their attitude toward SFUSD and our children. They need to stop treating the discussion of how to meet their Prop. H commitment as though it were labor or legal negotiations, in which screwing your opponent is a success, a “win”. In this case, the “opponent” is the schoolchildren of San Francisco. How is harming them by providing as little for them as possible a success?
The hostile attitude at City Hall toward our schools really needs to be examined. To put it positively, we all need to recognize that strong schools contribute to the strength of our community, and that doing the best for our city’s children is both the right and the productive thing to do.
Or to get down in the gutter with city officials, can the entity that runs Muni REALLY assail another agency’s competence? And if it’s all so simple-as-pie to overcome social ills, why aren’t city officials stopping the shootings in Bayview-Hunters Point?