Breaking News: SF Homeless Outreach Workers Unionize (and Think You Should Too)

Workers at San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team (SFHOT) voted yesterday, 38-6, to form a union with the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW). Workers said that, in addition to improved benefits, they’re hoping for more power to shape decisions about the services they provide to San Francisco’s unhoused residents.

“There’s so many things that we all love about this work,” said Meg Johnson, a case manager at SFHOT, “but we don’t have a say in most of what goes down and how we provide care.”

SFHOT, a nonprofit partnership between Heluna Health and the City of San Francisco, provides outreach  services to unhoused city residents, as well as crisis response and medical care. Workers spend their days in the field, visiting their assigned unhoused clients on a regular basis, helping them get necessary documentation, facilitating their access to city services — and doing whatever else they can to help. It’s emotional as well as physical and administrative labor, and it can’t be easily reduced to a job description.

“Our work is really client-focused,” said Sean Jordan, a case manager at SFHOT. “It’s not just getting clients [necessary documentation], but it’s taking a holistic approach. It’s helping them have a better life, whatever that looks like for them.”

“There’s a wide range of different folks that we serve,” said Johnson, “and doing outreach, building relationships with them, and [trusting each other] is the foundation, but then we sometimes end up taking them to doctors appointments” and deescalating personal and psychological crises.

Johnson said that to do their work well, SFHOT workers need more effective training, better mental healthcare, more consistent support from supervisors, and increased clinician staffing — things she said can only be guaranteed by a union contract. In general, she said, workers want a voice in SFHOT’s decisions, which sometimes feel out of touch with the complex demands of outreach work, or are influenced by city government and “the political flavor of the month regarding San Francisco homelessness.” Johnson said that SFHOT workers do some of the best outreach work in the city, but she also cited a range of policies she felt could be improved, from an overemphasis on shelter referrals to a glut of red tape. “Suppose we want to buy clients lunch. The money is there, but there’s so much red tape. Having a say in how resources are allocated could make a big difference.”

“We need mental health days, we need more time off. We need more support, because we’re dealing with stuff at home, and we’re dealing with stuff [at work]."

For Robin Harmon, who works on a crisis outreach team in collaboration with the San Francisco Fire Department, access to mental healthcare and flexible time off were especially important. She said workers in the field seemed to understand this issue better than their supervisors. “We need mental health days, we need more time off,” Harmon said. “We need more support, because we’re dealing with stuff at home, and we’re dealing with stuff [at work].” She said that even though most of SFHOT’s funding comes from contracts with the San Francisco city government, SFHOT workers don’t receive the benefits that city workers — many of whom are unionized — typically receive. “The city gives great benefits. Why can’t [SFHOT]?”

“I know that it is possible to get our needs met if we all stand up and fight together,” Harmon said.

Heluna Health said in a statement that they respect the outcome of the vote and are committed to the collective bargaining process.

This wasn’t the first effort to form a union at SFHOT, Johnson said. Workers tried in 2023, but the campaign stalled out. They were able to jumpstart the process last year with help from the East Bay Workers Organizing Committee, a local chapter of the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), a national organization which supports workers in their organizing projects, including unionization campaigns. Johnson said she started meeting with local EBWOC’s volunteer organizers last November. “Before, my coworkers were trying to do it alone,” she said, “but having that support from EWOC was really helpful, to have an anchor to come back to.”

Workers formed an organizing committee, which met regularly to strategize and coordinate. After a series of in-person meetings and one-on-one conversations with coworkers, they circulated a petition, calling for workers to be given more of a say in management’s decisions, and gathered signatures from a supermajority of staff. With their campaign off the ground, they approached several unions, ultimately deciding to affiliate with NUHW, which has helped other workers win contracts at similar organizations, including San Francisco’s Richmond Area Multi-Services (RAMS).

In the spring, SFHOT workers circulated a new petition — this time an official petition for union representation — and gathered more signatures. They took their campaign public in early July, delivering the petition directly to HR, in person, as a group. “We did a march on the boss,” Johnson said. “We got a lot of our coworkers to come back to the office during lunchtime, and had one of our coworkers knock on an HR person’s door, and we just started reading it. He was shocked — they had absolutely no idea that we were doing this.”

Once management was aware of their intent to unionize, workers had to weather an anti-union campaign, which involved “informational meetings” apparently designed to discourage unionization. “You could really feel  solidarity in the ‘informational meetings’ that our boss held,” Johnson said. “A lot of our coworkers were asking great questions that showed that we know what’s best for us.”

Their next steps after the successful vote are to elect a bargaining committee and decide on their priorities in contract negotiations.

The workers had a message for others.“We really hope this brings awareness to other jobs,” Harmon said of their unionization campaign. “Don’t give up! Do it!”