San Francisco was the last place on Earth I expected to find a discriminatory and hostile work environment for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, but find it here I did. It took a few years to learn this about the City and County's Department of Parking and Traffic's enforcement division. Such things are not discussed openly. Instead, employees live in fear.
The Municipal Transportation Agency, the entity responsible for administering DPT, will tell you that both the agency and the department are in full compliance with all relevant equal employment opportunity law. Whenever the MTA executive offices receive a report about a LGBT employee being harassed or threatened at DPT, the agency is quick to pull in the suspect employee and have a talk with them. They will also instruct the General Enforcement Division's Assistant Director office to post (ad nauseum) the city's Workplace Non-Harassment policy, where employees are sure to see it. These actions, MTA will assure, prove the the agency does not tolerate a discriminatory and hostile work environment. What MTA will not tell you is that most of DPT's LGBT community knows better than to file sexual preference discrimination complaints, because they have proven to be a waste of time.
"Gays employed at the MTA are afraid to stand up for other gays," a former MTA administrator who keeps in touch with some former workmates wrote to me recently, "because of the fear they might lose their jobs. Gays stand by and watch as promotions and new positions go to family and friends of favored and powerful SFMTA/DPT employees, who may or may not be qualified, instead of to eligible gay candidates.
"Management is sidestepping the laws and policies in place, without any consequences, to prevent such favoritism and nepotism from occurring. Morale is very low for gay employees, except for those who are in the favored group. The MTA is very slow to enforce equal employment opportunity laws for gays," the former administrator concludes, "simply because cronyism, favoritism and nepotism are deeply engrained in the new hire and promotional protocol."
Such corroded hiring and promoting practices may have something to do with the low morale of gay employees at DPT's General Enforcement Division, but there is something afoot there that is even more sinister. LGBT employees know that a gay officer worked fruitlessly for years, beginning in 2000, to see that justice was done after he walked in on two other DPT parking officers attempting to assault another gay colleague. They also know that, more recently, at least one of their own has suffered a nervous breakdown due to a fear that DPT's Assistant Directors would become aware of their sexual preference.
All of these issues have been reported for years to City Hall--including the Mayor's office when Gavin Newsom was at the helm. But MTA and DPT remain cesspools of employment law malpractice.
Since May of this year, San Francisco civil grand jury and news reports have revealed the breakdown of the City and County's self-regulating policing mechanisms. Both the Ethics Commission and San Francisco civil servants' Whistleblower Program have been shown to be shams. San Francisco employees who have dared to take on the corruption after their own offices have failed to do the right thing in response to their complaints have known this about CCSF administration for years.
When KGO-TV aired an expose in May of the breakdown of the Whistleblower Program, San Francisco County Supervisor Mark Farrell, who sits on the Board's Government Audit and Oversight Committee, told KGO's reporter "If we have a lot of complaints and a lot of people coming to us . . . talking about how this might not be as effective as they want it to be, it's absolutely something that we're going to look at." It is still unclear if the Board of Supervisors will take a look, even after a civil grand jury issued a report since then stating "The whistleblower program could be described as (a) bad joke, except there's nothing funny about employees suffering abusive and career-killing treatment."
Nor is there anything funny, or even understandable, about the hostile work environment at SFMTA/DPT that exists for LGBT employees.
When will the "good" people within San Francisco government take action of behalf of all of the employees who serve within their ranks?
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