directive on equal pay for comparable worth and established a task worse with the city attorney, the manager of personnel, controller, directer of human rights commission, and others. in connection with that the san francisco civil commission put together benchmarkos salaries and positions and san francisco comparable worth committee outlined -- released a report in 1984. next slide. between 1986 and 1989 as was referenced there was a vote of the people, a charter amendment on prevailing wages and pay equity. this amendment was provided for salary adjustments for classes that were historically occupied

by minorities and women judged to be of equal in value and higher pay classes occupied strongly by non minority males so that was proposition h. in the same year the mayor's task force issued their report and seiu and the city came to an agreement how to implement pay equity. in 1994 to 99 there was a move to collective bargaining where discussion about pay equity moved into a negotiation between the union and the department of human resources employee relations unit. meanwhile in 1998 san francisco became the first municipality in the world to adopt a local ordinance perfecting the principles of the un convention and end all discrimination

against women and in this ordinance there is a provision woman are able to get remiewnination and that in is the code. there was a review of the report on pay ecequity and said that 101 classes continued to receive pay equity leading to smaller gaps. the 12 year study said that study should be conducted since it was 12 years since the beginning of that project. and skipping ahead to today unfortunately continue to live with a pay gap according

to the u.s. census, the survey, womens' median salary in san francisco is just 84% of men's salaries. and then just a final slide in terms of what our commission and department has been focused on we're taking a broad view of gender equity in the work place and for the past three years we were focused on setting up a system of seven guiding principles including pay, but principle one is employment compensation. we go deep into measurables with employers who should have comparable worth and benefits and comparable work for all employees and we're working with some of the largest private

sector like google, scrub, deloitte to encourage large employers to adopt these principles. we will be launching a best practices launch that we will certainly invite you all too, and i failed to introduce my colleagues on the department. elizabeth who helped me with the slides today. i am happy to entertain your questions. >> thank you and thank you for your presentation. colleagues any comments or questions? supervisor mar. >> just real quick. doctor, from the study and 101 classifications were receiving pay inequities and i am wondering if the classifications in question. >> i haven't had a chance to study those closely really in terms of the negotiations. i would defer to my colleagues at

the department of human resources. >> just from what you know about custodians, nursing assistants or other positions like the ones in the categories that are in the proposal. what would be your guess on the impacts of the proposal? >> well, we have monitored every year department of human resources puts out an equal employment report that shows disaggregated data based on race and gender and there is high concentrations as was reviewed earlier in particular classifications and we're concerned about that. we've come up with recommendations how to better outreach to non traditional groups but i'm not in a position to comment in detail about the existing proposal. >> okay. thank you very much for your presentation. there is a member of the public who is part of our opening line up of

speakers i would like to call up, so maybe at this point we can open up public comment, but just the one speaker from the public and then we will go on to ms. callahan. >> sorry. i failed to acknowledge jane powers who did a lot of work and i want to thank mary howe and dennis mcglophlin who contributed to the report. >> thank you very much. so chair farrell we could open it up for comment. let's have the one speaker come up. i would like to call up mara keely who will give a presentation. >> thank you very much mr. chair and members of the committee. thank you for the opportunity to speak to you. hello old friends who i share a past with too on the other side of the table today. in 1980 and continuing to 1986 i was the point person

for seiu on pay equity and i started with local 400. local 400 became 790 and today now it's 1021 i didn't go anywhere and had a lot of change and it was on pay inequities and thanks for the fact base summary of it is issues and paying a lot to the attention to the period i was here doing the work so i can skip that and make a couple of quick key points. first of all the 1981 declaration of city policy by this board that no longer would the city tolerate race discrimination based on race and sex was a policy separate to any implementation approach so in my view that is a long standing one today and any

proposal to over turn it, roll it back by imposing discriminatory wages by classifications with people of color and women is in not with the policy and you have to protect your rights and i am surprised it's on the board today and the board after hearing evidence based on years of study, two major studies. one referenced and conducted by our own gail butler who was a professor of economics. the board held hearings and took testimony so the policy is well reasond and continues. dianne feinstein as mayor acknowledged it and i want to say probably in my experience as a representative for public workers there was nothing more satisfying that san francisco

and to my knowledge the only jurisdiction that made it both on race and sex. >> your time is up. i want to ask a question. >> is that what the buzzes was about? >> yes they were and i'm going to ask you a couple questions about your experience on there. could you tell me what your title and role was and the experience was in the implementation process. >> yes, sir, i was legislative coordinator for the union and the allies on the legal community and the women community and other departments we worked together collaboratively and our job was documenting the problem, framing the policy, and then moving to implementation. in those days as today we had what sometimes i think as charter hawks. we know the deficit hawks in dc? well the people that say you can't do it because it's not in the charter were there then and now and that was our job basically

to show that san francisco the policy would work here and that's what we did. >> thank you very much. >> i want the to ask what you were the findings of the study you referenced? i know he had a connection with seiu-790. >> at the time daily was not working for 790 but we were attracted to his skills as an economists and basically what we did he ran the classifications that were 75% or more women and minority dominated, and ran them against classifications that didn't meet that criteria and then we applied internal equity judgment based on other studies done on comparable worth to identify benchmarks and job classifications that were directly comparable in knowledge, skill, education, experience, the usual criteria and we came up with a measurement where they were and

how to correct them. >> thank you. >> and can i just have one question because i would like to comment on the two tee problem which never was in the problem -- >> that was my next question. go ahead. >> it was never in the ready in 1981 -- not because it wasn't floated. then as now there were people that thought that market forces or surveys should trump internal equity, trump a policy of eliminating discrimination and those people did float the idea and shot down quickly by their own side because everybody knows that a two tier means you're not paying equal pay for equal work. how can you have comparable worth and for work of comparable value if you're under cutting the basics? so we never put it in our record at that time. thank you. >> thank you very much. [applause] next up i would like to call up

nicky callahan, dr. callahan from the department of human resources. >> good afternoon supervisors. nicky callahan, human resources director. thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today and i am pleased to see some sold colleagues and it's nice to see you all. i want to start by introducing my team who is working with me on this project we're involved with seiu and i think has been mischaracterized on attack on comparable worth and i have the chief negotiator and martin grand and mary who is leading this process with seiu right now and steve who is our compensation manager and in charge of our data and collection of information that we use in all of our

negotiations. what i would like to do i think reframe the discussion a little bi. i have been asked to speak to comparable worth and how it applies now and what is the status in san francisco? and i think one of the challenges that we have comparable worth is has been replaced in san francisco. it doesn't mean it's open season on -- i think mara described and reimposing discriminatory wages and not target a group of employees which is improper and inappropriate and doesn't mean we're violating a check calculation by the board of supervisors in 1981 that there is no toleration of this. we take this very seriously. i'm going to talk about some of the initiatives we are engaged in to improve economic opportunity and the status of women and people of color in city employment. to the extent that we continue to

have wage gaps it is our strongly held view these are the results what i refer to occupational segregation, that we are forced, we cannot operate in a vac scpum to look at the market with wage setting and it's driven by the need to hire people, so what we need to do is make sure people have the opportunity to get jobs, to get into those classifications where the pay is better and be fair about that, so i'm going to touch on that. let me talk a little bit first about why we think we're here. in 2012 as i think you all know -- many of you voted on them. we negotiated new labor agreements with all of our miscellaneous unions so it was a huge labor project and san francisco was impressive and we were were able to over a 3% cola phase in which is unusual right now and that

is a reflection of our commitment to recognize the fact that our employees need cost of living adjustments as prices go up, and also the city's improved economic situation, so we're please body that. we offered all miscellaneous unions the same package. however some of them took it in different places. for example seiu members are earning slightly less in the year because they chose to put out a concession on helt r health premiums and we offer the same and balance that with what their internal needs are and unions make different decisions. some take the money and apply it for different purposes and that is the reason that some of the historical relationship between classifications no longer are maintained. our two largest

seiu union and local 21 and small everybody unions came forward with requests to provide in addition cost of living market wage adjustments for certain classifications. they were significant in many cases and because of the short time line we have under the charter and our need to present completed agreements to the board by -- within the mayor's budget and our obligation to file by may 15 we deferred those conversations to what i would call mid-contract processes so we're engaged with local 21. we're looking at wages above and below the market. yesterday we had a arbitration process with a teamster unit on the subject and we have another one that has a process and talk about cost neutral wage adjustment and how

do we fund that within the contract? and within seiu the decision was made to have a process which ends in binding arbitration with the exception of two classifications. to the extent that this process results in any wage increase for sheriff cadets or food service workers they will go into effect then and the rest july 1, 2014 and after frankly a another round of contract negotiations so we agreed. we used language in the contract with the assistance of the mediator and executed an contract agreement which provides that we will look at both whether classes are above the market or below the market. i would note that i don't think it would be responsible of us to say that we will only look at the market when it produces

wage increases which seems to be the outcome if not the expressed intent of the union's position in this case. >> i will let you continue in a second but what ms. keely talked about the market wasn't necessarily going to driver the considerations that could trump comparable worth. she mentioned the two tier system was also discussed during the process by looking at pay equity and she did not consider that worthy of comparable worth as well, so i want to be sure that this is a framework i am looking at it knowing you're in negotiations with seiu but the framework i want to look at is ensure we're not making decisions that disproportionately fall on women and people of color and reversal of gains from previous moving forward and i am concerned about that and that's what i am paying attention to in this hearing. >> okay. let me go forward and

i am hoping to address your point. >> ms. callahan quickly and maybe you're going to address this later and you said in the wages there were some below and some above. do you have a sense of the numerical values or the classifications and below and how many above? are we going to get into it. >> we only looked at classifications 15% over the market and the market is not the private sector market or even combined public private market that the department of statistics would use. i am looking at the nine bay area counties and the cities of 100,000 or more within those. in some classifications you look at counties and it's a county function such as eligibility borkers. maybe are street functions such as a street

worker and sometimes there are not matches but those are the standard universal classifications that we use. >> again when you look at them. x number were at market. x were above. x were below. >> right. our cut of classifications -- and we did not because we think it would be improper to base any decision on wage setting on the demographics and the classification. we did a straight -- we looked at large -- mostly larger classifications because we were looking to find savings to fund the wage increase seiu was proposed and produce more savings for it and there were 12 job families and not all of which i will note -- in fact i think about -- most -- we looked at those above market; right. and not all of the classifications were the

classifications that received pay equity adjustments so it's not correct to say that pay equity is under attack. specifically we're using the criteria in the market that we're obligated to do under the charter and the union agreed to in negotiations, so that's a challenge that we have. seiu has raised as you know, i have a copy of the contract language. can you put that up? >> sorry just before to finish up. i just want to say that the topic of the hearing i completely agree and want to thank supervisor avalos for calling it and i fully support obviously pay equity and comparable worth. the line of question there is if we're making sure we're at market we want to understand the implications of how that affects our gender or ethic classes of

our employees but i want to get a sense of where we are generically as a market and budget committee going forward and if at market or below and above and i am all for evening it out and bringing people to what they should be paid and if we're over paying people i want to understand that as well. >> i would say that -- steve will correct me if i misstate this. every time we go into negotiations we do surveys. for example the building trades -- not represented by seiu are five to 10% above market and driven by the construction industry. our police are approximately i think they're about 8% over market. the largestir areas in we are over market is seiu. some of that is attributable to comparable worth. absolutely. but it's not our view we are required to exclude all market

classification that receive comparable worth. however in the negotiations the union hasn't responded to our proposals -- never counted on the proposals but if comparable worth were the issue we would look at the classifications that are not subject to comparable worth and we haven't received a response on that either. >> i think comparable worth is the issue and what we want to focus on here. the negotiations are on going, the discussions you're having, but the numbers that -- what 10 to one and that we're moving back on the work that we have done for women and people of color and in the classifications are coming forward and based on market surveys they're lowering the pay according to the classifications that are comparable and i see we're moving away from the standard that we have in place. that's what the numbers suggest and i would like you to focus on in your presentation.

>> well, let me speak to two things. first that we just received some information i think last night from seiu. ion of the documents presented to us in negotiations. we had negotiations yesterday and didn't see these documents so we haven't had the opportunity to analyze them. we looked at one of the charges that purported to show historically relationships of classifications and matched up with comparable worth and we found the target got moved in the course of a 10 year period. we don't know why that is, but for example laundry worker was linked to data entry operator in the 80's but in 95-97 it's linked to operating engineer which is a building trade which is significant apprenticeship period. we don't know why that

happen but this tells us this is not necessarily a science. we think if we are -- i would say further with respect that we -- the voters with the union's support replaced salary setting by formula with collective bargaining. >> that was in the 1996 -- >> 1994. >> and omnibus and one change or charter amendment that changed the charter completely? >> i'm going to ask martin to respond to that. >> sometimes people don't see what was there before. >> supervisors, good afternoon martin grand, employee relations and respectfully throughout chair. the charter provision prior to collective bargaining was a salary standardize ordinance and that was repealed in 1991 and first by police and fire and then by miscellaneous

unions. seiu and local 21 were the first to opt into it and then it repealed the former salary provisions including prop h, so with collective bargaining came a complete aggregation of the prior salaries standardization ordinances with the exception of the rn's and the transit operators. in other words, not part of the 1996 charter. >> okay. thank you. >> so to the extent -- i'm sorry. >> we spoke on monday and on monday you said that the proposals that you have preserve comparable worth and that was one thing that we asked you to come back and tell us exactly how that has happened but knowing there are different standards presented from the standard discussed by ms. keely looking at market surveys and

two tiered system does not necessarily address comparable worth issues and we are seeing a reduction in proposed classifications and that widens what we set in terms of a comparable worth in the past so i would like to hear from you how you say -- how you know materially that we are preserving comparable worth? considered from your lens or the lens that we're looking at. >>i would say first although it's my belief that comparable worth, that the raises provided in comparable worth, to the extent they can be tracked are preserved in our proposal by the exclusion of -- two factors. one is the exclusion of these factors and as public agencies mostly represented by seiu which did had themselves implemented comparable worth and it's my

recollection alameda county used this as a basis also for comparable worth so following up on the point that was made earlier, and while we believe that is true, we are obligated to follow the standard in the charter and also in the labor contract which does not speak to comparable worth t speaks to cost of living, recruitment and retention, difficult of filling positions and the market, and in fact the union has itself based its requests of raises on the market so what the union is effectively saying you can look at the market if it produces a wage increase, but if it doesn't then we don't look at the market. that runs counter to what they agreed to in negotiations. it's certainly not consistent and not with our obligations under the charter. with your permission i would

like to touch on a couple other points. >> please continue. >> if i drink water is that like the republican -- okay. sorry. i wanted to in view of time i know there is plenty of people that would like to peek and doubtedly chastise me but i would like to touch on the key element salary setting by any formula, standardization or comparable worth was changed in the charter. the unions proposed it. they agreed to it. they wanted the right to bargain about health premiums and about all of these things, and that is why we have the formula, the charter factors that we have and the labor language that we have, so i think that we can do our be