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The funkmaestro of Vulfpeck on gaming Spotify, German pronunciation mishaps, and Google search optimization

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By Jonathan Kirchner

Members of the band Vulfpeck describe themselves as a “half-Jewish German-American rhythm section.” Creators of severely catchy, mostly-instrumental grooves, the four-piece — who first met in a German literature class at the University of Michigan — have built a following with their quirky YouTube videos: Each album track is accompanied by a cleverly shot and edited video of its recording. The videos not only capture the band’s camaraderie, loose attitude, and sense of humor, but also their musical cohesion as a group. Each song is endlessly and effortlessly funky.

As we listened to their fourth EP, Fugue State, released last week, a passerby commented on how their music has a distinctly familiar quality. This makes sense, for a group modeled after the great rhythm sections of the ’60s and ’70s: tight-knit groups of studio players like those in Detroit (Motown), Memphis (Stax) and Muscle Shoals (Atlantic, Chess) that played on not only countless soul and R&B hits, but on classic pop and rock records as well.

The LA-based band created a bit of a stir earlier this year with their Sleepify album — a collection of 31-second-long silent tracks that they told their fans to stream on Spotify, on repeat, as they slept. (That’s the minimum song length after which the music streaming service pays bands a small fee.) The group promised to use the Spotify proceeds to fund a tour of free shows, booked around the cities where the album was streamed the most — and that’s just what they did, after raising about $20,000. (Spotify has since removed the album.)

We spoke over the phone with Jack Stratton, multi-instrumentalist, audio/video engineer, and mastermind for the band, ahead of their upcoming performance at Brick & Mortar Music Hall on Mon/15. It’s a free show, of course. Frequent Vulfpeck collaborator Joey Dosik opens.

San Francisco Bay Guardian Do you want to talk a little about Sleepify and how it came about?

Jack Stratton The first time we had talked about touring, we were trying to play live, because there’s somewhat of a demand from our fans of the YouTube videos. So we were just talking about ways to do that, and get information from other groups about what it costs, and it seemed like a losing-money venture.

So we were trying to think up ways for it to make sense, because really we enjoy playing live, and simultaneously we were talking about this demand-funded tour, where you say: If 100 people in any given place say they’ll go, we’ll show up. And we talk about Spotify all the time when we release stuff — whether it hurts sales or has no effect. It’s hard to judge. So all of those conversations kind of collided into this demand-funded Spotify tour.

SFBG Would you consider it a success so far?

JS Oh, absolutely, yeah. Especially since our last release, it’s hard to say how many fans came in from Sleepify. Probably the majority of people were just interested in the Sleepify part of it, but people did end up checking out the band and enjoying it. I think it almost doubled our fanbase since then, so there’s no way to spin it negative, really.

SFBG I know you’re based in LA. Are all the members there these days?

JS No, not right now; we’re all scattered.

SFBG How do you find time to get together and make music?

JS Vulfpeck is a strict Monday-through-Friday workweek, once a year. Our last album we did in a week in Ann Arbor, and definitely the eventual goal is to be doing that way more often, with other artists, like a classic rhythm section. That’s the vision.

SFBG Do you seek out freelance work backing up other singers? It seems like your records could serve as a great demo tape.

JS Yeah, we’ve done a little bit of that. That’s definitely the vision for it, because you can put out a lot more material. Like, you watch any documentary about [classic soul/R&B rhythm sections], and they played on so many hits. Because with any single artist, there’s just a limit to how much new material you want to hear in a year, [but a rhythm section] can just crank it out — and we’re very fast.

The larger concept to start a rhythm section was that — name a band. If you name any band, I could name their dramatic falling out, but all the rhythm sections, they just kinda do their thing. And then there’s a documentary 50 years later and they’re all still hanging out.

SFBG Fugue State is your fourth EP; how would you say the band’s sound has evolved?

JS Well, I’ve gotten better at mixing, we’ve all gotten better at playing, we’ve gotten better as an ensemble…so those are hard to quantify. The team is improving. We’ve had a mastering engineer since the second album, Devin Kerr, and that’s really helped the overall sound.

SFBG I saw that you and Devin released a Vulf compressor plugin for other musicians to use. Not a lot of bands can say that. How did that come about?

JS Yeah, I’m very excited about that. That was, man, a long time in the works. Not heavy duty work, but I was really into, at one point, this sound of Madlib and Flying Lotus and J Dilla. Whatever that sound was, that pumping, where the whole track pumps — I was like “What the hell is that?”

And I did some research, and the Internet is a magical thing, and I was directed to these late 90s/early 2000s digital samplers. And the compressors on those, certainly Madlib was using them, so I went to Devin and was like, “Check out these sounds I’m getting with these digital compressors.” And he was trying to replicate it with his plugins and he couldn’t do it at all, so he just did a ton of listening to these characteristics, that were not, I think, programmed.

SFBG Right, they might have been bugs or imperfections…

JS Yeah, and actually they were, because [the manufacturers] started phasing out certain effects that were classics. They just didn’t know. [Devin’s] a dangerous dude because he’s very good at DSP [Digital Single Processing] and he’s a mastering engineer, so he’s very musical and has this very technical side. So he did his thing and we would test it out and it was really thrilling. And then our friend Rob Stenson did the interface with Devin and now its in beta and eventually it’ll be out. 

SFBG Do you have a take on analog vs. digital recording?

JS We’re fans of both. We’ll do stuff to tape; we’ll use a nice mixing board and go into the computer or some funky cassette preamp. We’ll do it all — no hangups.

SFBG A lot of your videos are shot in living rooms and bedrooms and they look pretty impromptu. 

JS Yeah, I was kind of all about building a nice tricked-out studio for us. But Theo [Katzman, drummer-guitarist] mentioned part of the charm is all of these different locations and how rugged the setups are.

SFBG The last couple records have each featured a song with Antwaun Stanley [on vocals]. Do you envision more collaboration with him in the future?

JS Oh yeah, I mean, he rules. It’s really fun to work with him. Honestly, not many people could [with us]. It’s not just picking a good voice with us; the person has to be a really good improvisor, like Antwaun, because they have to make it happen on the spot, and there’s no overdubs or background vocals. It’s not just a nice timbre; you have to be a really talented singer and improvisor — a performer.

SFBG Did you write the lyrics or did he?

JS I wrote those. That is one of the greatest joys I wish everyone could experience is having Antwaun Stanley sing your lyrics. Because they go from, like, ridiculousness, to sounding like they were meant to be.

SFBG In general, do you write all of the parts for the band or is it more of a collaborative process as far as the arrangements go?

JS Depends on the tune. I like how versatile everyone is: We’ve done tunes where it’s completely arranged, we’ve done tunes where it’s like: “Do your thing.” Generally, one person comes in with the nugget and they’ll kind of be producer on that track and get to call the shots, but it’s collaborative within that.

SFBG You’ve got some multi-instrumentalists in the band. [Theo Katzman doubles on drums and guitar and Jack plays drums, various keyboards and guitar.] How do you choose who’s going to be on drums, and who’s on keys, etc., for each song?

JS It’s mostly a decision of who will be able to pick up the parts fastest, because it’s all on-the-spot — there’s no rehearsal. Theo’s got a really good ear harmonically. I don’t really, I can’t pick up tunes that quick. If I’ve written the tune on keyboards, I’ll play keyboards, but if it’s someone else’s tune and it’s difficult, he’ll play guitar [and I’ll play drums].

SFBG What does Vulfpeck mean?

JS That was kind of the earliest part of it: It’s “wolfpack,” pronounced by a German, but phonetically spelled out in English. So, if a German saw the word wolfpack, it would probably come out “vulf-pock,” which I screwed up at the time. I thought it would be “peck,” but apparently it’s “pock.”

But that’s the whole idea, and it’s endless joy, because I love the name and it’s great for the Internet, you know? Getting all the [web] addresses. I think there was one military dating profile — that was it — when I first Googled it. I was like “Alright, I think this is open.”

SFBG Search engine optimized…

JS Our Google splash page is — I mean you can’t control these things — but nice, man, it’s all us.

VULFPECK
With Joey Dosik
9pm, free
Brick & Mortar Music Hall
1710 Mission, SF
www.brickandmortarmusic.com

 

SOS: A bill to protect oil refineries also threatens public access rights

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Gov. Brown. Veto SB 1300

This bill would establish a stealth template for how to gut the California Public Records Act one economic and political sector at a time. 

By Bruce B. Brugmann (with a First Amendment Coalition emergency message and a button for readers to request a Gov. Brown veto) 

Possibly the bill most damaging to the public interest in years is sitting on Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk for signature. It is SB 1300, which amounts to an oil refinery protection bill proposed by Sen. Loni Hancock (D-Berkeley) and Assemblyperson Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), two legislators living in the shadow of the East Bay oil refineries who ought to know better. It was supported by oil companies, organized labor, and the California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH)  and was passed by the Assembly on a 68-5 vote and by the Senate on a 34-0 vote. No debate, no discussion, no questions asked. 

The gist of the damage is that SB 1300 was amended at the last minute to force a CPRA requester to pay fees if a court rules against disclosure. As the California Newspaper Publishers Association explained in its current legislative bulletin, SB 1300 “would expand the definition of what constitutes a trade secret and erect an insurmountable barrier to any effort by a member of the public to obtain information about DOSH’s performance in its role as a consumer watchdog over a refiner’s conduct.”

Peter Scheer, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition (FAC), warned in a special message that “it’s safe to say that no one will ever file a CPRA request for refinery information once it becomes known that a mere request may thrust the requester involuntarily into a costly battle against oil companies.” But just to be sure no one even contemplates filing a CPRA request, Scheer noted that the last minute amendments to the legislation also provide that the requester will have to pay his/her own fees as well as the fees of the oil company’s lawyers if he/she loses the suit. 

CNPA General Counsel Jim Ewert and Staff Attorney Scott Merrill worked furiously to try to  negotiate with Hancock’s staff and DOSH representatives to eliminate the toxic effect on CPRA requesters. But all CNPA amendments were rejected before the bill was taken up by both houses. Hancock told the CNPA advocates repeatedly that she would rather have the information in DOSH’s hands even if that meant that the public wouldn’t have access to it. 

Scheer wrote that “some may say that these changes to existing law, while terrible, are not such a big deal since they only curtail access to information about refineries. (This is presumably the view of organized labor, which cynically backs SB 1300 after getting a special carveout for refineries’ employment and financial data that unions want.)

“Try telling that to the families who live downwind of refineries.  But more than that, SB 1300 establishes a template for how to gut the CPRA one economic and political sector at a time. First, it’s information about oil companies; next it will be information about schools or about law enforcement or about water supplies. SB 1300 creates a dangerous precedent for other industries and special interets to follow.

“Don’t let that happen. Tell Governor Brown to veto SB 1300.”  

Below is the full text of Scheer’s message on the FAC website with a response button to email, fax, or phone requesting Gov. Brown to veto SB 1300.  CNPA is emailing Scheer’s message to its member papers in its Sept.12 Legislative Bulletin, several are preparing stories and editorials, and public access activists are mobilizing opposition across the state. Brown was expected to sign the bill, until CNPA and FAC blew the bugles and started blasting away.

 Meanwhile, ask Hancock and Skinner and DOSH how they came up with this abomination and ask your local senators and assemblypersons why they voted for it without gulping. You can start with the San Francisco delegation, all of whom voted for the bill (Assemblymen Ammiano and Ting and Sen. Leno). On guard, b3

Gov Brown, Veto SB 1300. Ostensibly about oil refineries, SB 1300 threatens public access rights.

P.S. CNPA laid out this Kafkaesque scenario for people who have the gall to request information on emissions from a nearby oil refinery fire: 

 “ A mother and her family driven from her home by the emissions from a fire at a nearby refinery submits a CPRA request to DOSH for information that she believes is disclosable about the next turnaround at the refinery to determine how safe the refinery is. Because her request could include trade secret information as now defined, DOSH notifies the refinery that a request for the refiner’s information has been received.

“The refinery files an action against DOSH for injunctive relief to prevent the disclosure of the information and, since the bill requires the refiner to name the requester as a real party in interest, the requester is named as a party in the lawsuit filed by the refinery.The requester, who may or may not have been willing to go to court to enforce her rights under the CPRA, now finds that she is an unwilling party in a lawsuit.

” If she decides to participate in the action to pursue the information she believes she has a right to obtain she will have to pay her own expenses for a lawyer and the costs associated with the action. If she decides not to pursue her rights she risks that a default judgment could nonetheless be entered against her.

 “If the court denies her request, or a default judgment is entered against her, the court would be required to order her to pay the refinery’s attorney’s fees and costs.

 “SB 1300 was also amended to provide ‘the public agency shall not bear the court costs for any party named in litigation filed pursuant to this section.'”  Incredible. Simply incredible.  b3

For the  CNPA letter asking Gov.Brown to veto the bill, click the link below

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8sxRIlFa7G4Ql8xRExkT095cU1tbzdOeHRNLTZaRDIwUkMw/edit

(The Bruce blog is written and edited by Bruce B. Brugmann, editor at large of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. He was the editor and he and his wife Jean Dibble co-founded and co-published the Guardian, 1966-2012.) 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

Racing for solutions

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rebecca@sfbg.com

Although there are five seats on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors up for reelection this fall, incumbents face few contenders with the requisite cash and political juice needed to mount a serious challenge. The one race that has stirred interest among local politicos is the bid to represent District 10, the rapidly changing southeastern corner of San Francisco that spans the Bayview, Hunters Point, Visitacion Valley, Dogpatch, and Potrero Hill neighborhoods.

Sup. Malia Cohen, who narrowly beat an array of more than a dozen candidates in 2010, has raised way more money than her best-funded opponent, progressive neighborhood activist Tony Kelly, who garnered 2,095 first-place votes in the last D10 race, slightly more than Cohen’s, before the final outcome was determined by ranked-choice voting tallies.

For the upcoming Nov. 4 election, Cohen has received $242,225 in contributions, compared with Kelly’s $42,135, campaign finance records show. But Kelly, who collected the 1,000 signatures needed to qualify for the November ballot and qualified for public financing, has secured key progressive endorsements, including former Mayor Art Agnos, Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, Sups. David Campos and John Avalos, and the Potrero Hill Democratic Club.

Others who’ve filed to run for this office include Marlene Tran, a retired educator who has strong ties to families in the district, especially in Visitacion Valley, through her teaching and language-access programs (she’s known by kids as “Teacher Tran”); Shawn Richard, the founder of a nonprofit organization that offers workshops for youth to prevent gun violence; and Ed Donaldson, who was born and raised in Bayview Hunters Point and works on economic development issues. DeBray Carptenter, an activist who has weighed in on police violence, is running as a write-in candidate.

But the outcome in this dynamic district could be determined by more than campaign cash or political endorsements. That’s because the D10 supervisor faces the unique, unenviable challenge of taking on some of the city’s most intractable problems, which have disproportionately plagued this rapidly changing district.

Longstanding challenges, such as a high unemployment and crime rates, public health concerns, social displacement, and poor air quality, have plagued D10 for years. But now, fast-growing D10 is becoming a microcosm for how San Francisco resolves its growing pains and balances the interests of capital and community.

 

MIX OF CHALLENGES

While candidate forums and questionnaires tend to gauge political hopefuls on where they draw the line on citywide policy debates, such as Google bus stops or fees for Sunday parking meters, neighborhood issues facing D10 have particularly high stakes for area residents.

While other supervisors represent neighborhoods where multiple transit lines crisscross through in a rainbow of route markers on Muni maps, D10 is notoriously underserved by public transit. The high concentration of industrial land uses created major public health concerns. A Department of Public Health study from 2006 determined that Bayview Hunters Point residents were making more hospital visits on average than people residing in other San Francisco neighborhoods, especially for asthma and congestive heart failure.

Unemployment in D-10 hovers near 12 percent, triple the citywide average of 4 percent. Cohen told us efforts are being made on this front, noting that $3 million had been invested in the Third Street corridor to assist merchants with loans and façade improvements, and that programs were underway to connect residents with health care and hospitality jobs, as well as service industry jobs.

“The mantra is that the needle hasn’t moved at all,” Cohen noted, but she said things are getting better. “We are moving in the same downward trend with regard to unemployment.”

Nevertheless, the high unemployment is also linked with health problems, food insecurity — and violence. In recent months, D10 has come into the spotlight due to tragic incidents of gun violence. From the start of this year to Sept. 8, there were 13 homicides in D10.

Fourth of July weekend was particularly deadly in the Bayview and D10 public housing complexes, with four fatal shootings. Cohen responded with a press conference to announce her plan to convene a task force addressing the problem, telling us it will be “focused on preventing gun violence rather than reacting to it.”

The idea, she said, is to bring in expert stakeholders who hadn’t met about this topic before, including mental-health experts and those working with at-risk youth.

“I think we need to go deeper” than in previous efforts, Cohen said, dismissing past attempts as superficial fixes.

But Cohen’s task force plan quickly drew criticism from political opponents and other critics, including Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, who dismissed it as empty rhetoric.

“How many people are cool with yet another task force?” Kelly said in a press statement challenging the move. “We can’t wait any longer to stem the deadly tide of violence in District 10. Supervisor Cohen’s task force won’t even propose solutions till 2017. We can’t wait that long.”

Kelly told us he’s formulated a five-point plan to tackle gun violence, explaining that it involved calling for a $10 million budget supplemental to bolster family services, reentry programs, job placement, and summer activities aimed at addressing poverty and service gaps. Kelly also said he’d push for a greater emphasis on community policing, with officers walking a beat instead of remaining inside a vehicle.

“How do you know $10 million is enough?” Cohen responded. “When you hear critics say $10 million, there is no way to indicate whether we’d need more or less.” She also took issue with the contention that her task force wouldn’t reach a solution soon enough, saying, “I never put a timeline on the task force.”

Cohen also said she wanted to get a better sense of where all of the past funding had gone that was supposed to have alleviated gun violence. “We’ve spent a lot of money — millions — and one of the things I am interested in doing is to do an audit about the finances,” she said.

She also wants to explore a partnership with the Guardian Angels, community volunteers who conduct safety patrols, to supplement policing. Cohen was dismissive of her critics. “Tony was not talking about black issues before this,” she said. “He hasn’t done one [gun] buyback. There’s no depth to what any of these critics are saying.”

Tran, who spoke with the Guardian at length, said she’d started trying to address rampant crime in Visitacion Valley 25 years ago and said more needs to be done to respond to recent shootings.

“There was no real method for the sizable non-English speaking victims to make reports then,” Tran wrote in a blog post, going on to say that she’d ensured materials were translated to Chinese languages to facilitate communication with the Police Department. “When more and more residents became ‘eyes and ears’ of law enforcement, community safety improved,” she said.

Richard, whose Brothers Against Guns has been working with youth for 20 years and organizing events such as midnight basketball games, said he opposed Cohen’s task force because it won’t arrive at a solution quickly enough. He said he thought a plan should be crafted along with youth advocates, law enforcement, juvenile and adult probation officers, and clergy members to come up with a solution that would bolster youth employment opportunities.

“I’ve talked with all 13 families” that lost young people to shootings this year, Richard said, and that he attended each of the funerals.

 

CHANGING NEIGHBORHOOD

Standing outside the Potrero Terrace public housing complex at 25th and Connecticut streets on a recent sunny afternoon, Kelly was flanked by affordable housing advocates clutching red-and-yellow “Tony Kelly for District Supervisor” campaign signs. The press conference had been called to unveil his campaign plan to bolster affordable housing in D10.

Pointing out that Cohen had voted “no endorsement” at the Democratic County Central Committee on Proposition G — the measure that would tax property-flipping to discourage real estate speculation and evictions — Kelly said, “This is not a time to be silent.”

While Cohen had accepted checks from landlords who appeared on the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s list of worst offenders for carrying out Ellis Act evictions, Kelly said he’s pledged not to accept any funding from developers or Ellis Act evictors. Asked if any had offered, Kelly responded, “Some. They’re not knocking down my door.”

Cohen told us that she hadn’t supported Prop. G, a top priority for affordable housing advocates, because she objected to certain technical provisions that could harm small property owners in her district. As for the contributions from Ellis Act evictors, she said the checks had been returned once the error was discovered. Her formal policy, she said, is not to intentionally take money from anyone involved in an Ellis Act eviction.

Speaking outside Potrero Terrace, Kelly said he thought all housing projects built on public land should make at least one-third of their units affordable to most San Franciscans. He also said renovation of public housing projects could be accelerated if the city loaned out money from its $19 billion employee retirement fund. Under the current system, funding for those improvements is leveraged by private capital.

Mold, pests, and even leaking sewage are well-documented problems in public housing. Dorothy Minkins, a public housing resident who joined Kelly and the others, told us that she’s been waiting for years for rotting sheetrock to be replaced by the Housing Authority, adding that water damage from her second-floor bathroom has left a hole in the ceiling of her living room. She related a joke she’d heard from a neighbor awaiting similar repairs: “He said, Christ will come before they come to fix my place.”

Lack of affordable housing is a sweeping trend throughout San Francisco, but it presents a unique challenge in D10, where incomes are lower on average (the notable exceptions are in Potrero Hill, dotted with fine residential properties overlooking the city that would easily fetch millions, and Dogpatch, where sleek new condominium dwellings often house commuters working at tech and biotech firms in the South Bay).

Home sale prices in the Bayview shot up 59 percent in two years, prompting the San Francisco Business Times to deem it “a hot real estate market adorned with bidding wars and offers way above asking prices.”

One single-family home even sold for $1.3 million. Historically, the Bayview has been an economically depressed, working-class area with a high rate of home ownership due to the affordability of housing — but that’s been impacted by foreclosures in recent years, fueling displacement.

Although statistics from the Eviction Defense Collaborative show that evictions did occur in the Bayview in 2013, particularly impacting African Americans and single-parent households, Cohen noted that evictions aren’t happening in D10 with the same frequency as in the Tenderloin or the Mission.

“When it comes to communities of color in the southeast, it’s about foreclosure or mismanagement of funds,” explained Cohen.

She said that a financial counseling services center had opened on Evans Street to assist people who are facing foreclosure, and added that she thought more should be done to market newly constructed affordable units to communities in need.

“There’s an error in how they’re marketing,” she said, because the opportunities are too often missed.

But critics say more is needed to prevent the neighborhood from undergoing a major transformation without input from residents.

“This district is being transformed,” Richard said. “A lot of folks are moving out — they’re moving to Vallejo, Antioch, Pittsburg. They don’t want to deal with the issues, and the violence, and the cost.”

At the same time, he noted, developers are flocking to the area, which has a great deal more undeveloped land than in other parts of the city.

“The community has no one they can turn to who will hold these developers accountable,” he said. “If the community doesn’t have a stake in it, then who’s winning?”

 

Everyone’s hospital

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rebecca@sfbg.com

“I am a survivor of the AIDS epidemic,” Daniel volunteered, beginning to tell us his very San Francisco story.

He was diagnosed with HIV in the 1980s. Working in fine dining rooms of San Francisco hotels at the time, he had health insurance, and had gone to Kaiser for an unrelated procedure. That led to a blood test — and then wham.

“They just bluntly, without any compassion, just told me: You have it,” Daniel said. “Like telling you that you have a pimple on your nose or something.”

All around him, friends were dying from the disease. “I didn’t freak out, because that’s just my personality,” he recalled. “I know a lot of people who have been diagnosed, and they want to take their lives or whatever.”

Today, he’s unemployed and living on a fixed income. He lost his left eye years ago to an infection linked to HIV; he now has a prosthetic eye.

“I’m single, disabled, and low-income,” reflected Daniel, who didn’t want his last name printed due to privacy concerns. Originally from El Salvador, his family came to the U.S. when he was 10 and Daniel has permanent resident status. But despite the disadvantages he faces, Daniel still isn’t freaking out. His medical needs are met.

He got on MediCal after having to drop Kaiser. “And then I ended up at SF General,” he said, “with some of the most professional staff, doctors rated worldwide. It has some of the most professional health care providers for HIV, all in one place.”

Daniel is one satisfied San Francisco General Hospital patient, and he might as well be a poster child for how public health is supposed to work in big cities. Rather than being deprived of primary care and then showing up at the emergency room with preventable complications stemming from his disease, he’s keeping everything in check with regular doctor’s visits — and he can access this high level of care even though he’s on a very tight budget.

There’s a concerted effort underway in the San Francisco Department of Public Health to give more patients precisely the kind of experience Daniel has had, while also expanding its role as the region’s go-to trauma center.

But a difficult and uncertain road lies ahead of that destination, shaped in part by federal health care reform. The new course is being charted amid looming financial uncertainty and with more patients expected to enter the system and the doors of SF General.

Not every General Hospital patient is as lucky as Daniel. For scores of others, SF General is the last stop after a long, rough ride.

 

EMERGENCY CARE

Craig Gordon and Dan Goepel drive an ambulance for the San Francisco Fire Department, regularly charging through congested city streets with sirens blaring as they rush patients to SF General and other care facilities. They see it all: Patients who are violent and psychotic and need to be restrained in the back of the ambulance, folks who’ve just suffered burns or gunshot wounds.

Sometimes, in the thick of all of this, SF General’s Emergency Department is closed to ambulances — in public safety lingo, it’s called being “on diversion” — so the medics will have to reroute to different hospitals.

SF General might go on diversion because the Emergency Department is too slammed to take on anyone new, or because it’s too short-staffed to take on new patients without pushing nurse-to-patient ratios to unsafe levels.

For serious trauma cases, strokes, heart attacks, or traumatic brain injuries, however, the doors are always open. Patients with less-serious cases are the ones to be turned away when the hospital is on diversion.

Patients who wind up en route to SF General in Gordon and Goepel’s ambulance might be living on the margins. “If you’re kind of living on the cusp … you’re not likely going to pursue getting a primary care physician,” Goepel pointed out. “When something comes up, then you find yourself in the emergency room.”

Or their patients might be getting rescued from a spectacularly awful situation, like a plane crash. In this densely populated, earthquake-prone region, there is only one top-level trauma center between Highway 92 and the Golden Gate Bridge: SF General. Anyone in the city or northern San Mateo County unfortunate enough to experience a life-threatening incident — a car wreck, shooting, nasty fall, boating accident — winds up there, regardless of whether they’re rich or poor, indigent or insured. Ranked as a Level 1 trauma center, SF General is equipped to provide the highest level of care.

“In the summer, when school is out, we have a high season of gunshot wounds and stab wounds,” explained Chief Nursing Officer Terri Dentoni, who recently led the Guardian on a tour of the Emergency Department. “When it’s really nice outside, you have a lot of people who get into bike accidents, car accidents. … Last week, we were just inundated with critical care patients.”

Around 100,000 patients flow through SF General’s doors each year, and more than 3,900 need trauma care. On July 6, 2013, when Asiana Airlines’ Flight 214 crash-landed at San Francisco International Airport, more than 60 crash victims were rushed to SF General with critical issues ranging from organ damage to spinal injuries.

“It was a very big tragedy,” Dentoni said. “But it was amazing how many people we took care of, and how well we took care of them.”

Aside from being the sole trauma center, SF General is also designated as the county’s safety-net hospital, making it the only healthcare option for thousands who are uninsured, poor, undocumented, homeless, or some combination thereof. This makes for complex cases. Patients might require translators, be locked in psychiatric episodes, or need a social worker to help them get to a medical respite facility after being discharged if they’re too weak to fend for themselves and don’t have anyplace to go. There isn’t always a place to send them off to.

“We’re seeing people who are dealing with poverty, and often homelessness, in addition to mental health issues,” explained Jason Negron, a registered nurse in the Emergency Department. “You’re seeing patients who often have a number of things going on. Someone who has multiple illnesses — HIV, heart failure, Hepatitis C — even under the best of circumstances, they would be juggling medications. So what happens when they’re out on the streets?”

San Francisco ranks high on the list of health-conscious cities, a haven for organic food aficionados, yoga addicts, and marathon runners. It’s also a world of high stakes struggles and mounting economic pressures. With the city’s skyrocketing cost of living, sudden job loss can spell disaster for someone without a financial cushion. SF General is the catchall medical care facility for anyone who’s slipped through the cracks.

But while rank-and-file hospital staff must tackle grueling day-to-day problems, like how to juggle multiple patients with complex health issues when all the beds are full and the hospital is understaffed, hospital administrators face an altogether different challenge.

For the past several years, the city’s Department of Public Health has been preparing for the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, the federal policy that is reshaping the health care landscape. Since public hospitals are mandated to provide safety-net care, they are uniquely impacted by the ACA.

Even with a sweeping new rule mandating health insurance for all, some segment of the population will nevertheless remain uninsured. But they’ll still need medical care — and when health crises come up, they’ll turn to SF General. Trouble is, no one knows exactly how much funding will be available to meet that need as the financial picture shifts.

 

FUNDING CUTS LOOM

Even as ACA aims to increase access to medical care, it’s also going to trigger major funding cuts at the local level. With both state and federal funding being slashed, San Francisco’s county health system stands to lose $131 million in financial support over the next five years, a budgetary hit totaling around 16 percent.

That’s a significant shortfall that will directly impact SF General — but the cuts are being made with the expectation that these gaps will be filled by reimbursements riding in on the waves of newly insured patients enrolled in ACA. Before federal health care reform took effect, around 84,000 San Franciscans lacked health insurance. At the start of this year, 56,000 became eligible to enroll in a health insurance plan.

SF General serves most of the area’s MediCal patients, the subsidized plan for people living on less than $16,000 a year. And since the county gets reimbursed a flat rate for each patient, the expansion of MediCal under federal health care reform will presumably help San Francisco absorb the state and federal funding losses.

“There’s a certain set of patients who previously were not paid for, who now will have MediCal,” explained Ken Jacobs, an expert in health care policy and professor at the UC Berkeley Labor Center.

But there’s a catch. Since MediCal and insured patients will be able to choose between San Francisco’s public system (called the San Francisco Health Plan) and a private medical provider, SF General also runs the risk of losing patients. If too many decide to go with Anthem Blue Cross instead, the system could veer into the red.

“There’s some question of what share of those we’ll keep,” Jacobs noted.

Asked about this, hospital CEO Sue Currin sounded a note of confidence. “Because our outcomes and our quality of care has been so high…75 percent of everyone who’s enrolled in MediCal managed care default to the Department of Public Health,” she told us.

But the journey toward ACA has only just begun, and things are still falling into place. Costs are projected to rise if nothing is done to improve efficiency, while at the same time, the pending state and federal funding shortfalls could take a toll.

Retaining and attracting insured patients is the only way to avoid a resource crunch — but patients could always walk away if they’re dissatisfied. This uncertainty “makes financial planning and management of risk even more challenging,” according to a report issued by the City Controller.

“We don’t know yet today how the Affordable Care Act will impact the safety net,” acknowledged Erica Murray, CEO of the California Association of Public Hospitals, which represents 21 public safety-net institutions throughout the state. “How are these health care systems evolving to be competitive? How do we continue to fulfill our core mission of being the safety net? That is the fundamental challenge. And we don’t know today, and we can’t be certain, that these public health systems will have sufficient funding.”

It’s all “very dynamic,” Murray said. “We don’t have sufficient data to be able to draw any definitive conclusions. It’s just too short of a time to be able to make any predictions. It will take several years.”

For all the newly insured patients under ACA, a certain segment will continue to rely on the safety net. Undocumented immigrants who don’t qualify will be left outside the system. Some individuals can be expected to outright refuse ACA enrollment, or be too incapacitated to do so. Others will opt out of Covered California, the ACA plan for people who make more than about $29,000 a year, because their budgets won’t stretch far enough to afford monthly payments even though they technically qualify. They’ll need safety-net care, too.

Yet under the new regime, “We can’t, as a safety net, go forward only with uninsured patients — because there won’t be funding to sustain the whole organization,” explained hospital spokesperson Rachael Kagan. “We will still have uninsured patients, always. But it won’t be sufficient to serve only them.”

Mike Wylie, a project manager in the Controller’s Office, worked on the city’s Health Reform Readiness project, an in-depth assessment performed in tandem with DPH and consultants. “The million dollar question is: Are we going to be on target with the projections?” Wylie asked.

Instead of standing still, San Francisco’s health system must transform itself, the Health Reform Readiness study determined. Ask anyone who works in health care management in the city, and they’ll tell you that DPH has been working on just that. The idea is to focus on network-wide, integrated care that runs more efficiently.

“We need to switch from being the provider of last resort, to the provider of choice,” Wylie noted, voicing an oft-repeated mantra.

This could mean fielding more patient calls with nursing hotlines, or using integrated databases to improve communication. There’s also emphasis on increasing the number of patients seen by a care provider in a given day. The report urged the department to ramp up its productivity level from 1.5 patient visits per hour, where it currently stands, to 2.25 patient visits per hour. Currin noted that the hospital has also been looking into group patient visits.

“Part of getting ready for health care reform was creating more medical home capacity,” Currin said, referring to a system where multiple forms of care are integrated into a single visit, “so we knew we needed to have better access to primary care.”

If no changes are made, the Health Reform Readiness study found, the city’s General Fund contribution to DPH is projected to rise substantially — to $831 million by 2019, up from $554 million in 2014-15.

“We’re a little concerned about this rising General Fund support,” Wylie noted. And even though staffing represents a major expenditure, “They didn’t assume cuts in staff,” while performing the assessment, he said. “What they’re trying to get is more outputs, more efficiency. The managers went over this and said: in order for us to survive, we’ve got to get more out of our system. We may have to cut money — we may have to cut later, if city leaders don’t commit to this rising General Fund. We’ve got to do all these best practices.”

Throughout crafting this road map, he added, “There were some uncomfortable meetings and uncomfortable moments. But I think [DPH Director] Barbara Garcia got everyone to agree to these strategies.”

Talk to rank-and-file hospital staff, however, and some will tell you that getting more out of the system is a tall order — especially when the system already feels like it’s busting at the seams.

 

SPACE CRUNCH, STRESSED STAFF

“We hit capacity every single day,” said Negron, the RN in the Emergency Department. Patients are regularly placed on beds in the hallways, he said. Wait times for the Emergency Department can last four to six hours, or even longer. The hospital is working on limiting those waits, not just because it’s better in practice, but because timely patient care is mandated under ACA.

“Now, we have 26 or 27 licensed beds in our Emergency Department,” Negron said. But in reality, on a regular basis, “We function with 45 to 50 patients.”

A nurse who works in the Psychiatric Emergency Services unit described her work environment as “a traffic jam with all lanes blocked. This is totally business as usual.”

The workload is on the rise, she added. “The psych emergency room used to see 500 patients a month,” she said. “Now we see 600 patients a month, sometimes more. People are moving faster and faster through the system.”

Her unit is the receiving facility for anyone who is placed on an involuntary psychiatric hold, known as a 5150, for individuals who are a danger to themselves or others or gravely disabled.

“It doesn’t matter who they are,” she said. “We get homeless and destitute. We get CEOs. And we have had CEOs — it’s an experience for everyone involved.” Some patients have been involved in criminal activity. “I’ve had high profile people in my unit; people who have done things that, if I tell you what they did, you would easily be able to Google them.”

Patients who come to her wing need to be evaluated, because someone has determined that they are dangerous. It could be that they are “eating rotten food, or running naked in the street, or suicidal, or want to jump off Golden Gate Bridge, or their family thinks they’re out of control.” Sometimes, patients have to be let go once they’re no longer deemed to be a threat, but they still aren’t altogether recovered, she said.

In the psychiatric inpatient unit, meanwhile, the total number of beds has declined from 87 to 44 in the past five years — leading some staff members to voice concerns.

“There is more to do, and there’s less time to do it,” said another staff member who did not want to be named. This person said one psych unit was essentially shut down and another left open — “but then … a patient climbed up into the ceiling, broke some pipes, and flooded the room” in the open unit, so everything was shifted back to the closed unit.

In part, the daily patient crunch is due to a vacancy rate in the hospital nursing staff that hovers around 18 percent — but steps are being taken to address this problem, caused in part by the city’s Byzantine hiring process.

“The nurses are concerned about how, on a day-to-day basis, they don’t feel they have the support and resources they need,” said Nato Green, who represented the nurses’ union, SEIU Local 1021, in recent contract negotiations. “Staff was expected to do more with less. SF General chronically operates at a higher capacity than what it is budgeted for.”

Currin, the hospital CEO — who started out as a nurse herself — rejected this assertion, saying it is not the norm for the hospital to operate over budget. She added that she would like to reduce the nursing staff vacancy rate down to just 5 percent.

“We have had a fairly significant vacancy rate,” she acknowledged. “But just like any other hospital in the city and the country, you have countermeasures that you put in place to address staffing shortages. And so we use nurse travelers. We use as-needed staff, who work here part-time. We’ve been able to fill those gaps with these other staffing measures. We do want to have a more permanent workforce. We’re working with the city and [DPH] to bring in new hires.”

Roland Pickens, director of the San Francisco Health Network (the patient-care division of the Department of Public Health), said he was working with the city’s Human Resources Department to further streamline operations and get a jump on filling vacancies.

“[Chief Financial Officer] Greg Wagner is working with City Controller’s office and the Mayor’s Office, so everyone is addressing the issue of having a more expedited hiring process,” he said.

Negron, the RN, seemed to think it couldn’t happen soon enough. “For us, at the end of the day, who do we actually have that’s on the schedule, that’s on the floor?” he said. Being fully staffed is important, he added, “so we don’t have any more shortages. So we don’t close beds, or go on divert unnecessarily.”

Staff members, who deal hands-on with a vulnerable patient population, lament that there doesn’t seem to be enough resources flowing into the system to care for people who are at the mercy of the public safety net. After all, San Francisco is a city of incredible wealth — shouldn’t there be adequate funding to care for the people who are the most in need?

“Poor people are not profitable,” Green said. “Without regulatory intervention, poor people would not have adequate health care.”

 

EVOLVING INTO THE FUTURE

For all the concerns about staffing and the financial uncertainty caused by ACA, SF General still has plenty to brag about. For one, it’s moving into a brand new, nine-story facility in December 2015, which will be equipped with a seventh-floor disaster preparedness center and nearly twice as much space in the Emergency Department.

It will have 283 acute care beds, 31 more than there are now. Most of the patient rooms will be private, and the new hospital will be seismically sound — a critical upgrade in a city prone to earthquakes. The hospital construction was funded with an $887.4 million bond approved by voters in 2008.

“In a new care environment, it will be more comfortable for the patients and the staff,” Currin said. “It’s just a much better environment. We’re hoping with the expansion … the wait times [in the Emergency Department], instead of taking four to six hours, we’re hoping to decrease that by 50 percent,” she said. “There will be more nurses, physicians, housekeepers.”

Pickens, the Health Network director, said he felt that “the stars had aligned” to have the hospital rebuild nearing completion just as ACA gets into full swing, since the new facility can help attract the patients needed to make sure the health system is fully funded.

The hospital has also launched an initiative to reduce patient mortality linked to a deadly infection. “Sepsis is a reaction the body has to a severe infection,” explained Joe Clement, a medical surgical unit clinical nurse specialist. “It causes organ dysfunction, and in some cases death. It’s very common, it’s growing, there’s more and more of it every year, and about a third of hospital deaths have been associated with sepsis in some way.”

In 2011, SF General began implementing new practices — and successfully reduced the hospital mortality rate from 20 percent in 2010 to 8.8 percent in 2014.

SF General was also recently lauded in The New York Times for being a top performer in quality and safety scores for childbirth. In San Francisco, low-income women who may be uninsured and dealing with harsh life circumstances can nevertheless get full access to multilingual doctors, midwives, lactation consultants, and doulas. The World Health Organization has even designated it as “Baby Friendly,” because of practices that support breastfeeding.

As things move ahead, management is projecting a sense of confidence that SF General’s high-quality care will allow the hospital to attract patients and maintain a healthy system that can continue to support the insured and uninsured alike.

“Value, we usually define as improving health outcomes, and optimizing the resources we have, for as many people as we can,” said William Huen, associate chief medical officer.

Speaking about the sepsis initiative, he said, “This is kind of our model program of, how do you focus on one area where you know you can improve health outcomes, with integration throughout the system, education at every level … and then having the data and perfecting the care. That can be applied to anything. So as a system, I think we’ve developed infrastructure to support that type of work.”

But for the staff members who are actively involved in the union, it continues to be a waiting game to see if the promises of new staffing levels are realized. Until then, many have said that the low staffing levels are a threat to patient safety. “They are waiting to see if DPH lives up to its commitment to hire the people they said they were going to hire, and staff it at the level they were going to staff at,” Green said.

It all comes down to providing care for people who really have nowhere else to turn, Negron told us in the Emergency Department. “I’m sure we see the highest portion of uninsured patients in the city,” he said. “We’re doing that in many different languages, with people from all over the world. I feel like it’s a real honor to be able to work there in that context. I feel honored to meet a need — that’s not always able to be met.”

Photo Gallery: Graffiti artists tagging in the sunshine at Precita Park

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Normally the sound of 20 or so artists rattling and spraying aerosol cans would be quickly followed by the sound of sirens. But Sat/19 the fades went up with gusto. 

Artists tagged free standing art boards at Precita Park for the Urban Youth Arts Festival, an event that brings the ultimate underground art into a safe space. Attendees munched on burgers and listened to some good tunes at the festival, which is now in its 18th year.

Many of the street style murals paid homage to the Bay Area, from SF to Oakland. “We’re showing our love to the aesthetic of the community,” Xavier Schmidt, a 25-year-old organizer of the event and SF native, told us. One muralist hand painted a robot adorned in SF Giants and 49ers gear punching out a Google Glass-wearing Godzilla. 

“We’ve been doing this since 1987,” Schmidt said, speaking to the event’s roots. Even the event’s hosts, the Precita Eyes Muralists Association, have deep SF bonafides: they’ve been around since 1977.

“This is for solidarity, for community,” he said. “It’s a family event.”

Kids sprayed paint and played, adults kicked back and kvetched about youngsters, SF natives complained about tech employees, and many chowed down on burgers, hot dogs, and veggies donated by the local YMCA. Local musicians A-1 and Hazel Rose came out to play too, adding the head-banging element to the day. We’ve embedded one of A-1’s tracks below. Consider it your photo gallery soundtrack.

Names of the artists have been withheld because callin’ them out on the internet would be wack. All photos by Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKpwI4aRAzM

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This dude’s head was bangin’ as he sprayed. We’re not sure how he managed to make it look so good.

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This kid was super into it, which was hilarious.

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A San Francisco robot takes down a Google Glass wearing tech-zilla.

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Hazel Rose performed a bombastic set that the crowd, below, felt all sorts of love for. 

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Oakland got plenty of love too.

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Xavier Schmidt, one of the event’s organizers, said this high schooler is a real up and comer in the graffiti scene.

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alienexperience

Some of the art boards were for everyone to paint, leading to some dooby-ous results. (Get it? Ha!)

homer

Mmmm, donuts. 

puppy


Grown-up GRMLN

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esilvers@sfbg.com

LEFT OF THE DIAL Yoodoo Park is the kind of musician who might make some people — people who didn’t find their calling until well into their 40s, or 50s, or 60s, aka lots of people — a little angry.

As GRMLN — a band name he chose when he realized the word “Gremlin” wasn’t Google search-friendly — the singer-guitarist’s new album, Soon Away (out Sept. 16 on Carpark records), is 10 tracks packed into 45 minutes of introspective yet confident, caffeine- and hormone-fueled energy, with nods to power pop and an eye toward the grittier side of the ’90s punk spectrum.

A follow-up to Park’s full-length, 2013’s far dreamier, poppier Empire, GRMLN’s sophomore effort (if you don’t count the self-produced EP he put out in 2011) still contains fairly simple songwriting, is still maybe a little overly concerned with being catchy — but on the whole, the album reads like evidence of maturation, of a songwriter stepping off the suburban curb and tentatively into the street; it’s the sound of someone picking up speed, realizing potential, realizing he’s just getting started. (He’ll debut songs from the record July 30 at the Rickshaw Stop.)

In the meantime, Park turned 21 last month.

“You know, we were in the van driving back from Texas, and it was, like, barren,” says Park, who’s Korean-American, but grew up splitting time between Japan and Orange County, of how he spent the milestone birthday. “I would’ve stopped somewhere to get a couple drinks just because, but there was really nothing.”

If the new weight and levels of distortion on this album (recorded and mixed at a breakneck pace at SF’s Different Fur) speak to the familiar pains of growing up — “Go, go, go outside/be the one you want,” Park urges in the album’s first single, “Jaded,” over the peal of an electric guitar hook that lodged itself in my head the first time I heard it — Park, the person, seems far less angst-ridden. Either that, or he doesn’t believe in showing it.

Still, there’s a musical genealogy here that calls to mind Weezer’s most jagged, honest (best) stuff, a little Teenage Fanclub here and there, with a breezy understanding of pop-punk structure that he seems to have learned by osmosis (Orange County tap water?) and a tone that could maybe be described as “what you sound like when you grow up thinking of Social Distortion as senior citizens and then start a punk band. “

“I guess writing-wise I got way more darker and aggressive on this one,” he muses in the easy, sunny, pseudo-stoned drawl of which only kids who grow up in Southern California are truly capable. “This album is about how a lot of things don’t work out the way you want to, and how in life in general, getting attached to things really isn’t good, emotionally or materialistically. I’ve been reading about Krishna, and how the best thing you can do to make yourself a better person has to do with letting things go…so, yeah.”

What kind of things is he letting go of at the moment? Well, there’s school, for one. He just talked to his counselor from UC Santa Cruz, and it turns out he could graduate in one quarter but he’d have to take a lot of credits, which sounds like a lot on top of touring. So the plan right now is to move to SF and take the whole next year off for playing live, which is, he says, “way more fun” than any other aspect of being a musician (especially now that he and his friends can drink legally). It probably helps that his band is made up of his brother, Tae San Park, on bass, and a friend from high school, Keith Frerichs, on drums.

To be fair, he knows he has it good. “Part of what I wanted with this record was to send a message about how life really isn’t that bad,” says Park. “Life is great in California, but if you pay attention to what’s happening in the world, you watch any documentaries, see how people live other places&ldots;I’m really blessed. I think people take it for granted.”

GRMLN

With Everyone Is Dirty, Mall Walk (Different Fur showcase)

July 30, 8pm, $10

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

www.rickshawstop.com

 

Fests, fests, fests

Just like the line for Bi-Rite ice cream on a day when the temperature climbs above 70 degrees, summer festival season seems to be getting longer all the time. This past week brought the announcement of two different festivals that promise solid lineups of local acts alongside serious grub, hopefully warm weather (as is usually the case when fall begins) and, of course, fine excuses for day drinking. The 20th Street Block Party, a free food and music festival brought to you by Noise Pop and the darlings of the SF culinary world (Thomas McNaughton and David White’s love-child of a restaurant group, made up of flour + water, Central Kitchen, Salumeria, and Trick Dog), will take over, yes, 20th Street in the Mission on August 23 for performances by Rogue Wave, Melted Toys (whose new release we highly recommend), Cayucas, The Bilinda Butchers, Myron & E, and more. Oh yeah, did we mention it’s all free? www.20thstreetblockparty.com

And on Oct. 14 – 15, the Culture Collide Fest, a long-running favorite in LA, will debut its first Bay Area event, with a thoroughly international lineup of bands from the US, Korea, the Netherlands, and Costa Rica: Cloud Nothings, Beat Connection, GRMLN, Go Back to the Zoo, Glen Check, Glass Towers, Alphabetics, KLP, and more. Participating venues include The Chapel and the Elbo Room; we’ll have more as the party gets closer. www.culturecollide.com

Security officers target Apple over contractor’s unfair labor practices

Next time you head to your neighborhood Apple store to get that smooth and harmonious feel that can only comes with the gentle touch of an iPad air, you might be greeted by an unhappy security officer picketing outside. The officer might share some choice words about the working conditions at Apple’s security guard contractor, Security Industry Specialists.

Over the next few weeks, the SEIU United Service Workers West has organized a series of actions with security guards to demand Apple choose a more responsible security contractor.

Currently, Apple, Google, and Ebay all have contracts with SIS, a firm the SEIU claims has unfairly terminated employees and surveiled union meetings. The SIS denies these allegations, devoting an entire page on its website to confronting what it’s termed “SEIU lies and distortion.”

“The contrast between Apple’s boom times and worker’s decrease in wages is incredibly startling,” said Alfredo Fletes, communications specialist for SEIU. “You would think that a company that has benefited so much from what Silicon Valley has to offer would support the jobs for workers – not just in their engineering department, but at all levels.”

Since the launch of the iPod in 2007 to 2012, Apple saw a 600 percent growth in its stock. Meanwhile, from 2008 to 2012, average worker wages in Santa Clara County dropped by 3 percent. On average, Silicon Valley’s security officers make $15 an hour through SIS.

But the actions SEIU has organized aren’t just about wages, nor are they just about Apple. Walter Redding, for instance, was one security officer working for SIS through Google. He’ll be attending some of the actions, because he’s angry. He was fired for taking a phone call from his girlfriend while she was in labor.

“I thought I was doing great,” Redding said. “But I got screwed. I only got two checks since I got fired. It’s been almost a year. My friends got fired for things, too. Everybody gets treated unfairly. I love the products. I’d buy them everyday. But when it comes to working for Google or Apple, I don’t know about that.”

Bryce Miller-Williams, an organizer for SEIU’s Stand for Security campaign, says that the SIS is harsh everywhere, but Apple is where security officers really don’t want to work.

“There’s a very militaristic atmosphere there,” he said. “One gentleman sat down to tie his shoe. Guards are supposed to be standing at all times, and so he was let go because of that.”

Although Apple doesn’t employ the security guards directly, Fletes said the tech company still has the power to select a better security guard contractor. To him, changes at Foxconn, one of Apple’s largest suppliers, offers proof. When labor activists launched an outcry following a series of suicides at Foxconn, Apple stepped in. According to a report from the Fair Labor Association last December, working conditions at Foxconn have since steadily improved.

“I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to ask Apple to look into workplace issues for security officers in the Bay Area,” Fletes said. “Or, at the very least for them to meet with security officers who, despite working for one of the most valuable companies in the world, are still struggling to survive.”

Apple does at least give the appearance of wanting to do good. The Cupertino company requires its suppliers meet a “code of conduct” and issues a Supplier Responsibility report to document its progress each year. This past December, Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke about his company’s code of conduct in a video message sent in a company-wide email urging employees to behave like good, righteous Apple employees.

“As Dr. Martin Luther King once said, the time is always right to do what’s right,” Cook proclaimed. “At Apple, we do the right thing. Even when it’s not easy. If you see something that doesn’t meet our standards, speak up. Whether it’s a quality issue or a business practice, if it affects Apple’s integrity, we need to know about it.”

Fletes said that when SEIU members protested outside an Apple shareholder meeting last February, Cook said he would look into job quality issues. The allegations of unfair treatment by SIS’ security officers have since continued. Apple did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for comment.

The actions will continue throughout the Bay Area throughout the summer, ending in San Francisco on August 28th.

Reinstate the 42: SF protest in solidarity with Brazilian transit workers

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Hey there, lovers and haters of the World Cup, if you missed out on the protest of Google and FIFA at Pride, there’s still time on the clock to score that goal: there will be another protest tomorrow [Thu/3] to support Brazilian transit workers and their quest for higher wages.

In solidarity with Brazilian protestors, a group of queer anarchists blocked the joint Google/FIFA float in the SF Pride Parade on Sunday. The group saw the float protest as an opportunity to draw together two issues linking San Francisco and Brazil: gentrification in the Bay Area and the displacement of Brazilians in order to make this year’s World Cup possible.

As the protestors said, “We couldn’t pass up the opportunity to connect issues of gentrification and evictions in the Bay Area with the violent displacement of Brazilians who live in the Favelas. The Google/FIFA float was a perfect target for direct action to raise awareness about these issues!”

According to Al Jazeera and Solidar Suisse, more than 150,000 people were evicted from their homes to create the World Cup arenas, including parking lots. Following the Brazilian government’s pacification initiative, Brazilian police occupied multiple favelas, or slums, housing around 1.5 million people total, near the airport and roads leading to the World Cup stadiums in order to make the communities more presentable. Besides minimizing gang activity temporarily, there are no programs implemented to help favela residents in the long run.

Brazilian transit workers also felt cheated by World Cup preparations. Despite Brazil’s underfunded transit system and low wages for workers, Brazil’s government poured $11.5 billion into World Cup preparations. Protestors with the Subway Workers Union of Sao Paulo were beaten and attacked with tear gas by police during a five-day strike for higher wages.

Brazilian Justice Ministry declared the strike illegal and implemented a $250,000 per day fee, and allowed the Brazilian government to fire employees that continue to strike. The workers suspended the strike before the Cup, but the 42 transit workers fired during the strike have not been reinstated.

The SF protest joins the Subway Workers Union in asking for the 42 fired workers to be reinstated. You can root for that goal Thu/3 outside the Brazilian Consulate, 300 Montgomery, SF. 4-5pm.

Workers’ new website demands: Hey, Tech, do better

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Can Silicon Valley tech companies “do better?” With the launch of a new website, the tech industry’s security guards are coming forward with tales of inequality in Silicon Valley, and asking Google and other big tech companies to do just that.

Protesting security guards outside Google’s IO conference last week used the annual developers’ conference to demand tech companies pay them living wages — as well as to broadcast their new website, TechCanDoBetter.org.

“We’re trying to change the conversation, because so much of the narrative is around tech and what good it’s doing,” said Alfredo Fletes, communications specialist for Service Employees International Union. “Our website is a safe space to learn more about workers who face the challenge of making it.”

Fletes said a Google spokesperson recently agreed to meet with SEIU to address the security guards’ concerns, but also mentioned this was the first the union heard from the spokesperson since last year.

Google hasn’t yet addressed the issue head on. The tech giant’s spokesperson wrote in press statement: “Thousands of Googlers call the Bay Area home, and we want to be good neighbors. Since 2011 we’ve given more than $70 million to local projects and employees have volunteered thousands of hours in the community. We’re excited to be expanding that work in 2014 with the recent Bay Area Impact Challenge winners – several of them have even joined us at I/O!”

The spokesperson added, in reference to the protestors’ Darth Vader-themed attire, “May the force be with them.”

Google’s Bay Area Impact Challenge means that Hack the Hood, Health Trust, Bring Me a Book, and Center for Employment Opportunities will all be receiving awards of $500,000 each. But donations aren’t the same as fair pay: The average Silicon Valley Security guard, Fletes said, will be receiving $22,000 this year.

 

Charles Justin Wilson, a security guard in Silicon Valley, speaks out about pay equity at the Google I/O conference last week. Photo by Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez.

In TechCanDoBetter.org’s video game (aptly named Dream Crushers), users are invited to play the role of a struggling security guard. The gameplay forces the player to make tough budget choices. Maybe, for instance, you’d like your security guard to eat. Maybe you’d like him to pay his utility bills. But if you try to do all the basic necessities – transportation, food, utilities, child care – you lose.

“You’re not meant to win. Security officers who played the game said it was frustrating,” Fletes explained. “But they also said their lives were way more difficult.”

It’s not just about wages, either. “Look at at Apple and Google’s security contractor record of harrassment, discrimination, and surveillance,” Fletes said. Those are the kinds of stories security guards are invited to send to TechCanDoBetter.org. Workers can also fill in surveys on the website to help SEIU advocate for them, and sign up to receive text message alerts from SEIU.

Charles Justin Wilson, 31, moved from Chicago to Silicon Valley to build a life for himself. Now he’s a security guard, and he spends his days “dealing with everything from giving someone directions to a [fighting a] knife-carrying nut job.” He said he’d like to see Silicon Valley tech workers “even try to do” what he does. Like many security guards, he makes $12 an hour.

“Anyone who thinks you can survive on $12 in Silicon Valley is either out of touch, really stupid, or just plain evil,” he said.

Google has been the center of a series of protests since January when San Francisco residents began blocking the company’s buses. Google’s profits rose 36.5 percent to $2.9 billion last fall. The average worker wages in Silicon Valley dropped 3 percent even as the cost of basic needs for a family of four in Silicon Valley rose by nearly 20 percent between 2008 and 2012.

“They’re not doing a lot,” Samuel Kehinde, another security guard, said outside Google’s conference. “So, we are just asking them to pay attention to their home and to give back to their community. They cannot turn a blind eye on the community.”

Maybe they can. Or, they could do better. For tech giants, there are options.

Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez contributed to this report.

Making waves

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arts@sfbg.com

THEATER The Fourth of July kicked off a revolution once; could it happen again? Each year in Dolores Park the San Francisco Mime Troupe gives it a shot, kicking off its touring season of free outdoor shows with a musical-comical call to arms — an appeal to popular solidarity against the very real forces of oppression on a holiday gleefully synonymous with keg-tapping.

It’s a task the legendary 55-year-old artist-run collective pursues with passion and its own unique flair: a larger-than-life mix of Italian commedia dell’arte storytelling and American-style melodrama, with a smattering of original songs thrown in for good measure. It’s an eye and ear catching spectacle that this year hits close to home, wading into the conflicts and displacement churned by a rapidly transforming high-tech, high-cost city.

Ripple Effect is set in present-day San Francisco, or just offshore in the bay, in a small tour boat where three women of very different backgrounds reckon with one another. The boat’s captain is an ardent but paranoid Lefty activist (played by Velina Brown). Her passengers are a Vietnamese beautician and all-American immigrant (Keiko Shimosato Carreiro) and a newbie tech worker from small-town Nebraska (Lisa Hori-Garcia) whose popular app landed her a corporate job in the big city.

Against the backdrop of a yawning wealth gap, real estate speculation, an epidemic of evictions, Google bus protests, and diminishing diversity, Ripple Effect‘s three protagonists (all played by longtime Mime Troupe members) explore the tensions that divide them and the common ground beneath them. (The Mime Troupe is also linking the play to a series of community forums, at its Mission studio and after select performances, in which various community leaders will facilitate public dialogue around the show’s themes and the growing divide in the city.)

“It’s always tough because we do tour the shows, so we don’t want to make them too specific to San Francisco,” says Mime Troupe actor-writer Michael Gene Sullivan, who plays several secondary roles in Ripple Effect, including a certain wily CEO. “But we feel like there are so many issues going on within the city that people around the state, really around the country, will be able to relate to — not just housing and how the cities are changing, but also the struggle within the working class, the way people are being pitted against each other while the incredibly rich are getting incredibly richer. It’s just that it’s more pointed here.”

There is precedent for SF-centric plays in past Mime Troupe offerings. In fact, the company’s 1999 show, City For Sale, took on the housing crisis of the last real estate and dot-com bubble. But Sullivan says the issue has also changed. “This show, while it touches on [housing], is much more about a change in the culture of the city. Not just what does it mean to be living in San Francisco, but what is San Francisco now?”

Ripple Effect is a departure in some other ways too. It’s a more concentrated drama, less concerned with a particular impending disaster to push the plot than in the precise relationship between the main characters. “In this show the dilemma is, to a large extent, how the characters see each other,” notes Sullivan. To this end, Sullivan, head writer for the collective since 2000, shared the writing this time around with Bay Area playwrights Eugenie Chan and Tanya Shaffer, each of whom explored specific aspects of the characters’ back stories. The show also sports two directors (Hugo E. Carbajal and Wilma Bonet) and comes with a new musical team: composer-lyricist Ira Marlowe and musical director Michael Bello, who together fill roles covered in recent years by Pat Moran.

The Mime Troupe has not been immune to the financial upheaval shaking the city. Last year, the collective had to launch an emergency fundraising campaign called the Cost of Free to make up for a serious budget shortfall that jeopardized its ability to offer its annual show. Velina Brown, Sullivan’s life partner as well as fellow artist, explains that the 2008 economic downturn had reduced the offerings of arts foundations by as much as 40 percent. “Being already a really lean organization anyway, 40 percent going away is huge.” But where another theater might have folded up shop, the Mime Troupe, with help from its audience, bounced back.

“One of the things that’s helped us over the years with all these ups and downs is that we are a collective,” says Brown. “It’s not all on one or two people and if they feel like that’s it, then that’s it — there’s a larger group of people that have to agree that that’s it before the doors close. We also own our building, and that has definitely saved our behinds. We haven’t had to be at the mercy of a landlord — who says, “Hey, I could get 10 times what you people are paying” — and kicked to the curb.”

“Because we’re a collective it takes people a lot longer to get burned out,” agrees Sullivan. “Because we’re worker-owners of our company we are willing to put in more time, do things for a little less pay, come to meetings when we’re not paid to be there. We do get paid; it’s an [Actors] Equity company. But we have a sense of ownership you don’t get at other places, and that also helps the company in the most difficult times.” *

 

THE RIPPLE EFFECT

Through Sept. 1 at various NorCal venues

Fri/4-Sat/5, 2pm, free

Dolores Park

19th St at Dolores, SF

Also Sun/6, 2pm, free

Yerba Buena Gardens

760 Howard, SF

www.sfmt.org

Google Bus sewers

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STREET FIGHT With most city officials supporting the accommodation of private transit in some form, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is now vetting where tech workers should board and egress the private corporate commuter buses that ply the 101 and I-280 between San Francisco and Silicon Valley suburbs. A list of proposed bus stops was circulated in June, and the first round of bus stop proposals is set for approval in August.

Short of a proper environmental study, which is the subject of ongoing litigation, the list deserves more scrutiny and deliberation because certain areas of the city — such as Hayes Street in the Western Addition and 18th Street in the Mission — might be effectively made into Google Bus sewers.

I hope SFMTA is open to reconsidering some of these proposed bus stops.

Rather than jamming oversized interstate highway-scale coaches on human-scaled, walkable, and bikeable streets with important Muni routes, SFMTA ought to steer them where they are more appropriate: on the wider, car-oriented streets that bifurcate the city.

For example, the current proposal for private commuter buses in the Western Addition is to have these mammoth and incongruent buses running on Hayes Street using Muni stops at Clayton, Steiner, Laguna, and Buchanan.

This is bad news for passengers on the 21-Hayes, a key neighborhood-serving electric trolley bus that has gotten short shrift in the city planning process. With 12,500 boardings daily, the 21-Hayes is often at capacity every morning before it crosses Van Ness.

Just last week, I was on a packed 21 that was blocked (illegally) by a huge corporate bus on Hayes. With an already dense and slow traffic situation, this added at least 30 seconds to the trip before the 21 could access its stop. Repeat that multiple times in the morning and afternoon and you can see that this will be a mess. It’s not worth the dollar the SFMTA collects for such stops, that’s for sure.

Concentrating the private buses on the 21 line (or the 33 in the Mission) will block Muni where Muni is already slow, unreliable, and overcrowded. It will also diminish walkability and bicycle safety on Hayes and other streets identified in the current list (including the commercial corridors on Divisadero and 18th Street in the Mission.)

Rather than streets such as Hayes, SFTMA should redirect the private buses to the multilane, one-way couplet on Fell and Oak streets, only one block south. Along the corridor, SFMTA could collaborate with the private systems to establish new bus stops (red paint) at Clayton, Masonic, Divisadaro, Fillmore, and near Octavia. This scheme would limit clunky turn movements onto neighborhood streets by oversized buses and contribute to traffic calming.

In the mornings, the buses would pick up passengers on Oak Street, starting along the Panhandle, then travel towards Octavia Boulevard before swinging onto the freeway southbound. In the evenings the buses would exit the freeway at Octavia, and stop at drop-off hubs on Fell, between Octavia and Laguna, and then stop incrementally toward Golden Gate Park.

Additionally, the city needs to consider a space for the underpaid, nonunionized drivers to pull over and rest before and after long segments of freeway driving. We want these buses to be safe.

Similar arrangements should be made to spare 18th Street in the Mission from reverting to a Google bus sewer, with emphasis on private corporate bus stops on South Van Ness or Guerrero-San Jose. Surely there are other examples in other parts of the city.

The urgent affordable housing crisis aside, this could be a win-win from a transportation perspective. Tech workers would no longer get blamed for blocking Muni and they can know that while waiting for their bus, they are contributing to calming erstwhile hazardous streets.

There’s a lot of opportunity to combine these new bus stops with traffic calming at dangerous intersections such as Fell and Masonic or Oak and Octavia, all without mucking up Muni or diminishing the walkable human scale of nearby neighborhood commercial streets. And hey, since this is all a “pilot program,” no pesky and expensive EIR is needed — right?

Thinking long-term, this scheme could be a template to jumpstart making this ridiculous private transit system into a regional public bus system modeled on AC transit or Golden Gate Transit, a service open to all. Our car-centric streets are ripe for express bus service and this would help relieve parallel lines like the N-Judah, while enabling the city to attain its aspiration of 30 percent mode share on transit.

And for Mayor Ed Lee and pro-tech-bus members of the Board of Supervisors, it helps with their “vision zero” rhetoric of increasing pedestrian safety because placing the buses on car-centric one-way couplets can help calm traffic.

With a little cajoling by the mayor, he could get his tech sponsors to underwrite streetscape and beautification at the bus stops along these kinds of streets.

After all, Mayor Lee needs to find the money, because last month he betrayed pedestrian and bicycle safety and Muni when he abandoned support for increasing the Vehicle License Fee locally this fall, all the while misleading the public about the important role of Sunday metering. Perhaps it’s time for a tax or license fee on the ad hoc private transit system?

SLOWING DOWN

Speaking of vision zero, Sup. Eric Mar deserves hearty thanks for proposing to reduce speed limits citywide. This is one of the most effective ideas to come from the progressive wing of the Board of Supervisors in a long time and should be implemented yesterday. Higher speeds maim and kill, and the faster cars go the more voracious the appetite for both fuel and urban space.

With reduced speed, the motorist would still be able to drive, just more slowly, perhaps with less convenience than now. But over time the options of cycling, of walkable shopping, and improved public transit would synchronize more seamlessly as car space is ceded to separated cycletracks and transit lanes.

My suggestion is to make the city navigable by car at no greater than 15 miles per hour, a speed deemed not only to be comfortable on calmed pedestrian streets, but also to minimize injury and fatalities when there are collisions. Ultimately, our efforts to curb global warming, reduce injury and death from automobility, and make the city more livable obliges us to slow down, so looking at speeds is a step forward.

Street Fight is a monthly column by Jason Henderson, a geography professor at San Francisco State University and the author of Street Fight: The Politics of Mobility in San Francisco.