Mission Local is publishing campaign dispatches for each of the major contenders in the mayor’s race, alternating among candidates weekly until November. This week: Ahsha Safaí. Read earlier dispatches here.
On Friday morning, Ahsha Safaí arrived at the San Francisco Labor Council’s pre-Labor Day breakfast at the InterContinental Hotel downtown at around 10 a.m.
Safaí, who was eight years into a labor career when he first ran for public office in 2016 for District 11 supervisor, sat down next to Olga Miranda, the president of SEIU Local 87 and his former boss.
Safaí knows Miranda well: He was the political director for Local 87, which represents janitors, from 2008 to 2016, working on signing up new members in non-unionized workplaces, organizing strikes, and pressuring politicians to support the union’s various campaigns, like involving custodians in talks when the city asked residents and downtown buildings to use recycling bins.
“He’s the only candidate that came out of organized labor,” said Miranda. “He sees from the working families’ perspective, which has shrunk year by year, month by month with each administration.”
At breakfast, unionized hotel workers served bacon, sausage, egg and pastries. “It’s better in a union” stickers were handed out to union reps and politicians. The room stood up when Rep. Nancy Pelosi ambled to the stage and gave a speech applauding labor and mobilizing them for the presidential campaign.
In a brief moment of enmity, a woman holding a handwritten “Stop genocide” sign was escorted out of the hall; she had been protesting Israel’s war on Gaza.
Safaí, the major mayoral candidate who has the longest history in organized labor — “I got my master’s in city planning, but my Ph.D in the labor movement,” he has said — was there to gather support.
The Labor Council, which covers more than 150 unions representing over 100,000 union members in the city, has endorsed Connie Chan, Dean Preston and Myrna Melgar for the supervisorial races, but has not yet waded into the mayor’s race.
But that endorsement may be elusive. The Labor Council may not have any official pick for mayor, as no candidate is likely to hit the two-thirds threshold required for its endorsement, said its executive director, Kim Tavaglione.
“It’s a weird cycle,” Tavaglione said. “With so many people running in the mayor’s race, there doesn’t seem to be a coalescing around any one candidate.”
“The mayor’s race never worked out for labor, in general, very well,” Tavaglione added. “I think people just have a natural aversion to it.”
Instead, the Labor Council’s priority is to focus on the races in Districts 1 and 5, where both incumbents Chan and Preston face a tough re-election bid — they have both been targeted by the public pressure group GrowSF, which has poured $297,347 into a “Dump Dean” political action committee and $72,101 into a similar “Clear Out Connie” committee.
Still, Safaí has received other labor backing: The San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, representing 32 trade unions, endorsed both Safaí and Mark Farrell as first-place picks; the United Educators of San Francisco endorsed Safaí and Aaron Peskin; National Union of Healthcare Workers and Unite Here Local 2 both endorsed Peskin first and Safaí second.
SEIU Local 87, Safaí’s old union, is making a decision on its endorsement soon. To get its blessing, Miranda said, candidates have to work a day in the shoes of janitors — Safaí has done it three times, Mayor London Breed has done it, Daniel Lurie worked a shift, but Peskin has not.
But there are also gaps in the roster of unions that stand behind Safaí: San Francisco Fire Fighters Local 798 sole endorsed Farrell, and SEIU 1021, the city’s largest union, solely endorsed Peskin.
That SEIU endorsement accrued to Peskin even though Safaí is working with the union on Prop. I, a ballot measure to improve recruitment and retention of unionized 911 operators and nurses by bolstering their pension benefits.
Brenda Barros, SEIU 1021 SF General Hospital Chair, said the lack of endorsement did not mean any bad blood between the union and Safaí. “When we have protests with Black workers, he’s 100 percent supportive,” she said. “He will show up for us when nobody else would.”
But Barros said there is a dominant narrative, “propaganda,” she called it, that Safaí cannot win.
Rudy Gonzalez, secretary-treasurer of the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, doesn’t think Safaí is short of labor endorsements. “There’s no consensus candidate for organized labor,” Gonzalez said.
And Miranda, Safaí’s former boss and strongest labor ally, does not see the lack of consensus as the end all be all. “Ahsha wasn’t endorsed by all of the labor unions every time he ran, we still walked him to City Hall,” Miranda said with pride.
Gonzalez, for his part, did worry about Safaí’s name recognition. Being a district supervisor who “is lacking in controversy, lacking in scandal and just does his job really well” doesn’t come with a lot of headlines, Gonzalez said. And when taking on the six-year incumbent, Breed, and the 20-plus year political fixture Peskin, “it’s a lot of ground to cover.”
“Ahsha has a tough hill to climb to win,” Gonzalez continued. “But there is a ranked-choice strategy to be considered. I know he’s going to run a clean campaign and a value-based campaign, and we’ll see what happens in November.”
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