Playing out of position
3,000 city workers find new challenges in emergency roles
On the day furloughed San Francisco librarian Jen Woo was redeployed to the assembly line at the San FranciscoMarin Food Bank, she thought of Lucy and Ethel working a candy conveyor belt.
But when Woo arrived for duty, it was not like what she’d seen on “I Love Lucy.” She was handling frozen packages of meat and fruit and onions and potatoes to be bagged up toward a goal of 2,000 care packages during her shift, which ran from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., unless her team made its quota before quitting time.
“One day, I am an adult services librarian at the West
Portal branch,” said Woo, 44. “The next day, I am working in food prep, packing bags and boxes.”
The job switch was not quite that abrupt, but close enough for 3,000 city workers from nearly all 60 city departments who have had to learn new skills such as site managers for hotels housing the homeless or as greeters at COVID19 test sites. The Recreation and Park Department, for instance, has converted 163 staffers to running child care centers for essential workers at 25 park facilities citywide.
“When Daddy and Mommy have to play nurse or doctor or whatever they do, we take care of the kids,” said Don Franklin, 53, who is normally in charge of alternative recreation, everything from karate to cooking to fishing. At Glen Park Recreation Center, he supervises kids between ages 5 and 13 who are there from 6:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Franklin figured there would be games of basketball and baseball, and energy burned on the newly installed rockclimbing wall.
“Kids see that rock wall and they want to go climb it,” said Franklin, who has to be the one to tell them no. “The health orders don’t allow any sharing of equipment.”
The Department of Human Resources handles the majority of these assignments, with 600 activations a day, half of these assigned to the Emergency Operations Center at Moscone Center in support of field operations. Among them are 39 staffers representing the planning department, the Port of San Francisco, the Department of Elections and the mayor’s office, moving in a convoy of rental cars, two passengers each, to distribute health orders issued by county Health Officer Dr. Tomás Aragón.
Redeployment is the equivalent of being in the Army reserve for all 38,000 city employees. It is noted in their employment contract that regardless of job title, they are eligible to be deputized as disaster service workers to be called on by the mayor.
“All public employees are DSWs” said Mawuli Tugbenyoh, chief of policy for the Department of Human Resources. “We are all obligated to help with the city’s response to COVID19.”
This includes police, fire and health department personnel, along with most Muni drivers, though many are continuing to perform their regular jobs in essential services. But employees who cannot do their normal jobs from home can be drafted at any time.
“When I accepted my position, I was fully aware that in the event of a disaster or an emergency, I would be called upon to do this work,” said Vincent Page, 23, a city planner who had just put in a long day posting the latest city health notice on front doors and in apartment lobbies in the Excelsior neighborhood. “I’m very proud of the work I’ve done and proud to be part of the city’s response to this disaster.”
The activation of DSWs last happened when a small force was dispatched to Sonoma County during the Kincade Fire in 2019. Before that, it was the 2007 Cosco Busan oil spill in San Francisco Bay.
“Those were nowhere near the scale of what we are doing now,” said Francis Zamora, joint information section chief for the Emergency Operations Center. “This is the largest activation of disaster service workers that the city has ever done.”
Whether they are working or waiting on their couch for assignment, all city employees are receiving their regular pay, and will continue to do so through at least May 31. Some have been on DSW assignment since February and will be there for as long as it takes to complete the mission. This includes a cadre of 43 librarians trained as contact tracers under a program at UCSF. Less glamorous is the work on the custodial staffs at San Francisco General Hospital and the county jail. These jobs are filled by custodial staff from city museums.
One person has been assigned to work with the city coroner, but she had prior experience in the mortuary arts.
None of the city employees can turn down a DSW assignment without a good reason, like child care or an underlying health condition. When a need is determined by the Emergency Operations Center, the call for bodies goes out through department heads and their HR managers.
Most of the jobs are in rotations of between two and five weeks, depending on the operational need.
“There is no standard for how long a deployment lasts,” Tugbenyoh said. “This is a marathon that we are going through, and we don’t want to wear people out.”
There is no additional labor cost to the city, because all of these people would be working anyway, and state and federal disaster funds are expected to reimburse the city for costs associated with COVID19. In order to qualify for disaster funds, every activated worker must fill out a work log each day, specifying the service performed and the number of hours worked.
Translators have been turning out city orders and informational guides in six languages (Chinese, Spanish, Tagalog, Russian, Vietnamese, and Arabic) for publication at the cityowned print shop. These are the informational flyers distributed by the Emergency Operations Center.
“Since January, when we first started doing education and outreach for COVID19,” Zamora said, “we have disseminated more than 700,000 pieces of information, on fact sheets, flyers and postcards, distributed all across the city.”
That job starts at 8 a.m. and the teams are on the streets until 4 p.m. when they return to Moscone Center for a debriefing. Nzugu Kitenge, 30, an assistant librarian at the Western Addition branch library, starts even earlier than that, in her position as SF Greeter at a free COVID19 test center along the Embarcadero.
From 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., in all weather, Kitenge stands at the entrance to one of the piers, with a variety of handheld signs at the ready. These instruct motorists to keep their windows up while they are presented with a variety of questions to be answered with a thumbs up or down. She can communicate verbally with walkins, but only through her face mask at a distance of 6 feet.
Because Kitenge is still working part time with the library, she has managed to boost her pay because the hours are longer. The new assignment is harder on the feet, too.
“I can’t really say it is something I visualized, but it has been an interesting experience working during a pandemic,” said Kitenge, who commutes from San Leandro, wearing her Nike runners for the extra cushion. “Every day you can feel the thanks that people have, even with all of this going on.”
Jason Hill, 47, children’s services manager at the Sunset branch library, was assigned to the food bank, and on his way from his home in the Tenderloin, the thought crossed his mind that “my master’s degree in library studies did not train me for this.”
He is accustomed to lifting books and the random toddler but was unprepared for the lifting involved at the food bank. “I was doing a job where I was lifting 50pound bags of onions and potatoes,” he said. “The gyms are closed, so it felt like a workout.”
His crew of 40 or 50 was mostly library staffers. Day by day, they got better at it. “The most we bagged was 2,100 in a day,” he said proudly.
They probably would have bested that mark but Hill’s twoweek stint ended Friday as he was just perfecting the chore. “I miss being around so many great people,” he said from home as he waited to be called upon again.
“As librarians, we serve the community, and this is another way to serve,” he said. “It could be a different job, but I am hoping to return to the food bank.”
One of his mates on the line was Woo, who had been recruited off her couch in El Cerrito. “I was basically sitting at home worrying,” said Woo, who jumped at the chance to return to work, any work. Once she figured out to bring her own gloves to keep her hands warm while handling cold meat and produce, she didn’t want to leave the place.
Her fiveweek deployment ended Friday, but she couldn’t stand being away from the action. She is being paid by the city no matter what she does or does not do. But she’d rather be active, so she reupped as a food bank volunteer and is going in twice weekly until or unless she gets called to a different DSW position.
“I like the food bank because it feels like I am doing something meaningful,” she said, “and I get to spend time with my awesome coworkers.”