**FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE**

Contact: Jennie Smith-Camejo, jennie.smith-camejo@seiu1021.org, (510) 710-0201

(San Francisco) — Last October, San Francisco Superior Court’s clerks walked off the job in protest of management’s refusal to negotiate good-faith solutions to the staffing and training issues that plagued the court, causing unacceptable and unconstitutional delays and grievous mistakes. In what feels like déjà vu, yesterday they voted by a sweeping 98% to authorize their contract negotiations team to call for another strike—for the very same issues that forced last year’s strike.

“The situation is even worse than it was at this time last year,” said Rob Borders, a courtroom clerk for the Superior Court for 11 years who has been at the SF Hall of Justice for 2.5 years and who is on the union negotiations team. “We still have no meaningful training. They’re still assigning people to courtrooms they’re not adequately trained in. Last year, we tried to address the issue, and the court agreed to institute a system where they place reference binders in the courtroom. But that still hasn’t happened, and experienced clerks who know what would be most useful have not been involved in developing them, so what’s been produced so far is not even helpful.”

Chronic short staffing continues to wreak havoc at the criminal court. Courtrooms there are now doubling up—hearing one jury trial in the morning and another in the afternoon, rather than a single trial continuing throughout the day in a given courtroom—in an effort to meet constitutional timelines. Yet that system makes trials drag out twice as long as they ordinarily would, delaying justice. And because the same clerk is in the courtroom all day, it dramatically increases the daily workload—and the chances of errors.

“It’s an extra burden on the jurors, because if you’re doing half days, that means that trial is going to take twice as long,” said Borders. “I fear that it’s going to make people who want to do their civic duty reluctant to go through that experience, because there are a lot of delays. The same goes for the public defenders. They’re frustrated that these cases have to drag on.”

Courtroom clerks have been in contract negotiations since early September, but so far have not seen management make a serious, good-faith effort to meaningfully address these concerns—despite the fact that they are still causing inexcusable delays and errors that have led to defendants kept in jail too long and others released too soon. 

Ashley Hebert, who is also a courtroom clerk at the Hall of Justice, is a member of the union bargaining team and has been on negotiating teams before. “But this time at the table is like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. A lot of our proposals are not going to cost the court money. Management’s bargaining team, they don’t have experience in the courtroom. None of our frontline managers are there. The people who know there are too many cases, the people who know what it takes to process the case, none of those people are at the table. So they are just refusing common-sense proposals that would help the court run so much more efficiently.”

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SEIU Local 1021 represents nearly 60,000 employees in local governments, nonprofit agencies, health care programs, courts, and schools throughout Northern California, including seven private colleges and numerous community colleges. SEIU Local 1021 is a diverse, member-driven organization with members who work to make our cities, schools, colleges, counties, and special districts safe and healthy places to live and raise our families.