Workers at Tenderloin Affordable Housing Leader Are Forming a Union

Workers at one of San Francisco’s leaders in affordable housing and social work — are forming a union to improve working conditions.

Around 350 social workers, community organizers, desk clerks, and other employees of the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation — will form a union with the Office and Professional Employees International Union Local 29, representatives announced Tuesday.

“It was like hope,” said Michael Chesney, a TNDC employee of 11 years, recalling when he heard employees were forming a union. “Man, hope shot out of my body, and there was brightness and colors again in my world.”

Chesney said he fought for the union for job security — because, he said, the nonprofit wanted to automate desk clerks’ roles using security cameras.

“That’s not a good idea,” Chesney said at a Tuesday event announcing the union. “But with the union, we have a voice now. And we can get to the table and let them know how we feel.”

TNDC declined to comment.

The move follows a yearslong trend of a growing number of Bay Area nonprofit workers who have opted to unionize with OPEIU Local 29 in recent years — including Hamilton Families, Episcopal Community Services, Impact Justice and the LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired.

Other nonprofit employees — including those late last year from the Anti Police-Terror Project — have also announced their intentions to form unions or unionize outside of OPEIU in a push to improve workplace conditions.

San Francisco Supervisor Bilal Mahmood noted that TNDC is one of the few affordable housing developers in the city that does not already have a unionized workforce.

“They have some of the lowest number of caseworkers at TNDC relative to other affordable housing operators in the neighborhood,” Mahmood told KQED. “And when you have such a high ratio [of providers to clients], that leads to worse outcomes.”

Representatives from OPEIU Local 29 previously told KQED that nonprofit workers are underpaid in comparison to workers in the public and private sectors.

Ray Orfiano, a resident at the Kelly Cullen Community, a single-room occupancy building that TNDC operates, said replacing desk clerks wouldn’t have helped him as a resident.

Orfiano said that when he moved into the Kelly Cullen Community building in 2020, he was battling an alcohol addiction when COVID-19 hit. Orfiano, a self-described “germaphobe,” said he would lock himself in his room and drink.

He credits two workers who frequently checked on him for keeping him alive.

“People work from the heart — they want to do more and have more and help more,” Orfiano told KQED. “Sometimes, like social workers especially, I know they have so much work that they can’t even do that.”

KQED’s Madi Bolaños contributed to this report.