Audit: White city workers paid more
Report finds significant pay inequity for S.F. staff
“We need allies to help build the work, but need a new system to advance the work and have longlasting impact, to move from transaction to transformation.” Sheryl Davis, executive director, San Francisco Human Rights Commission
An audit of San Francisco’s employment practices shows a city still grappling with workplace disparities amid a pandemic that saw more employees leave their jobs and fewer new hires to replace them.
The audit, which the Budget and Legislative Analyst’s Office released this month and which does not address gender inequities, shows that the real disparity shows up in pay, with white employees making an average of $62.66 an hour during the 2020-21 fiscal year that ended June 30, 2021, a rate 16% higher than the average hourly earning of $53.97.
The average hourly earnings for white employees were also 24.4% higher than the $44.78 an hour workers of color made on average last year, the audit reveals. This actually reflects a slight improvement from before the pandemic, when white city workers were outpacing their colleagues of color by more than 27% in hourly pay.
“The data shows kind of a mixed result,” said Dan Goncher, the principal analyst who conducted the audit for the Budget and Legislative Analyst’s Office.
When broken down by race or ethnicity, the average hourly wage was $54.21 for American Indian or Alaskan Native employees, $52.82 for Filipino employees, $51.99 for Asian employees, $50.50 for Hispanic employees, $46.66 for Black employees and $46 for multiracial employees in 2020-21 year.
While average wages for employees of color rose by 12.5% to $50.36 in 2020-21, each nonwhite employee category earned less than the average hourly wage.
Wage transparency is an important tool in creating an equitable workplace, said Supervisor Shamann Walton, who requested the report with Supervisor Hillary Ronen.
“If we are going to address institutional racism and change the practices that lead to gaps in who is employed and who is promoted, then we need to know the data and have a consistent mechanism in place to receive it,” Walton said.
The city’s workforce declined by 4% over two years, from 36,497 employees in 2018-19 to 35,046 last fiscal year. Goncher said the reason for the decline is twofold: More people left their jobs and the city slowed its hiring during the early part of the pandemic.
“We have to keep in mind that a lot of hiring was stopped during the first pandemic year in 2020,” he said. “The city was only hiring essential workers at the time.”
The approximately 10,000 city employees who identified as Asian last year represented 28.7% of the city’s workforce, overtaking white employees as the largest ethnic group two years earlier.
The 2,207 hirings last fiscal year represented a 44% decline from two years ago, while the percentage of managers dipped 3.6% over the two-year period.
The percentage of Asian, Black and multiracial employees in management slightly increased over the two-year period. Last fiscal year, 191 Asian employees held 18.7% of the city’s roughly 1,000 management roles, 124 Black employees made up 12.1% of the leadership positions, 90 Hispanic employees accounted for 8.8% of the jobs and nine multiracial employees 0.9%.
When compared with their makeup of the city’s population, Asian, Hispanic and multiracial employees were underrepresented in management roles, while Black workers were overrepresented. African American residents account for less than 6% of the city’s population.
More than 540 white employees held over half the management positions in a city that is about 42% white, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
The report noted that efforts to address inequities across departments were being hobbled by local government bureaucracy.
For instance, the fourperson Office of Racial Equity, formed in 2019, has two vacancies, including a director position that has been open since inaugural director Shakirah Simley left in July 2021.
Sheryl Davis, the executive director of the San Francisco Human Rights
Commission, which oversees ORE, said she’s been meeting with community members and having internal conversations about the hiring process, while building an infrastructure to pursue the office’s goals whether supporters of diversity initiatives remain in office or not.
“We need allies to help build the work, but need a new system to advance the work and have longlasting impact, to move from transaction to transformation,” Davis said.
Currently, neither the Department of Human Resources nor the Office of Racial Equity monitors department initiatives to increase diversity in hiring and promotions, the report found. However, monthly workshops are held with department recruiters and human resources representatives to discuss strategies around diversity recruitment.
But while departments may report their individual efforts, their Racial Equity Action Plans are not currently collected and reported by a centralized city agency, the report stated. This makes it hard to track diversity efforts, Goncher said.
Last July, an independent report by William Gould IV, a labor and discrimination law expert at Stanford Law School, revealed disproportionate discipline and opportunities for — and an ineffective system of resolving employee complaints by — Black city employees. City agencies such as the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency released data in December 2020 showing the transit service doled out harsher punishments to transit operators of color than to white employees.
According to the new city audit, people of color represented 72% of the city’s workforce and received 67% of the 409 corrective actions issued last year. But Black workers remained overrepresented when it came to formal discipline. They accounted for 15% of the city’s workforce and 23% of disciplinary actions, which can include performance improvement plans, write-ups and termination.
“The system is the challenge; bureaucracy is a challenge; upending the rules that have been in place that limit accountability on the government side” is a challenge, Davis said. “Building trust and partnership with people who have consistently been harmed and ignored is difficult.”