The United Educators of San Francisco, the teachers' union, filed the complaint with the California Public Employees Relations Board alleging that San Francisco Unified School District has failed to live up to its contract agreement and has denied and interfered with teachers' rights.
The issue stems from January of this year when the district implemented a new payroll system that has failed to pay or has under paid hundreds of teachers.
The complaint lays a lion’s share of the blame on SFUSD’s new EMPower system, which calls it “an unmitigated disaster from the start."
The union claims that hundreds of its members continue to be “unpaid, underpaid, and/or incorrectly stripped of benefits since the District first began using its EMPower system.”
Since the problem arose, teachers have held protests, shown up en masse at school board meetings, staged a week-long sit-in at district offices and filed hundreds of grievances, according to union officials.
The payroll troubles have resulted in serious harm to many teachers, some of whom have struggled to pay rent or provide basic necessities like food and clothing for themselves and their families, union officials said in a news release Tuesday.
On Monday, new SFUSD Superintendent Matt Wayne declared a "payroll state of emergency," intended to help the district resolve the problem. In a press release, Wayne pledged to “escalate this issue and take aggressive action.”
