On Thursday, Berkeley Day Camp counselors demonstrated outside the summer program and began a two-day strike to draw attention to their salary and contract negotiations between management and the city’s largest workers’ union.
About a dozen counselors greeted campers and parents at the drop-off at the Berkeley Marina Thursday morning, handing them fliers expressing frustration with low wages and city officials’ approach to collective bargaining. They chanted protest slogans as well as union-related versions of the sing-alongs that generations of elementary and middle school children have sung at camp, such as a rendition of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” with the lyrics, “Bring collective bargaining back to Berkeley.”
The contracts of the consultants and about 600 other city employees in their chapter of Service Employees International Union Local 1021 — including after-school program workers, librarians and certain civil service, police and fire employees — expired in June.
The union and city government will return to the negotiating table on Monday.
Union members agreed to a contract in 2021 that increased wages by 7% over three years but did not index their pay to the cost of living. The union argues that this effectively meant workers took a pay cut because inflation soared shortly after the contract was signed.
At Berkeley Day Camp, younger and less experienced assistant counselors can earn more than the senior counselors who went on strike Thursday, union members said, because the assistant counselors received cost-of-living subsidies.
“We earn less than our trainees,” said supervisor Jasmin Clewis during the strike action on Thursday.
Because the city was having trouble finding staff for programs like Berkeley Day Camp, management proposed lowering the experience requirements for those positions rather than agreeing to the union’s proposals for higher pay, counselors said. Senior counselors currently make $22.84 an hour.
“They’re not showing us they care by not compensating us,” Clewis said. “I’ve literally given my blood, sweat and tears to this camp.”
City spokesman Matthai Chakko wrote in an email that Berkeley has not experienced a staffing shortage to supervise camp counselors, adding, “Our hourly workers in these categories are among the highest paid for this type of work in the Bay Area.”
The strike was “unexpected,” Chakko said, but Berkeley Day Camp went ahead as planned on Thursday. Striking counselors urged parents and guardians to bring their children home rather than breaking the picket line and asked them to make alternative child care arrangements for Friday.
Berkeley Day Camp is coming to an end for the year. Students will return to school next week.
But as the wage dispute affecting workers across the city drags on, union representative Chris Flink said the consultants’ two-day strike may not be the end of the disruption.
“There is a lot of organizational work going on,” said Flink.
