Page One

I’m writing in response to some recent sensationalized headlines in the Planet that conveyed a very different story about what BOSS is going through than what I know the reality to be.  

Established in 1971, BOSS has provided housing, jobs, education, and multiple support services to Berkeley’s homeless and poor for over thirty years. In 1994, BOSS employees organized to form a union. BOSS fully respects all unions, including our own, with the deep understanding that they exist to protect workers and to ensure safe and supportive working conditions. But the marriages of unions and nonprofits have inescapable differences from traditional union-company marriages. Are some of these differences irreconcilable? We prefer to think not. But hard facts remain at the foundation of nonprofit existence. By definition, nonprofits do not generate profit, but raise revenue to cover costs. And when revenues dip (public funding, private grants, donations), as they have for BOSS and so many nonprofits in our community, the only recourse for responsibly maintaining a balanced budget is to make cuts – cuts in staffing, cuts in services, cuts in operating expenditures. But the union-nonprofit marriage can make it difficult to pursue this course, even when the fallout is red ink and financial instability.  

All workers have rights, not just unionized workers. And BOSS has striven to respect the rights and needs of all our employees. BOSS has a long tradition of hiring from our target population – homeless and low-income workers who often come to us with lower skill or education levels than other applicants. Yet for each job description, we have not matched wages to skill or education levels, and because BOSS’s mission is to create opportunity and equity for our constituents, wage increases have followed from accomplishment, progress, or longevity (anniversaries) rather than having a headstart on the playing field. 

The fact is, despite the difficult period BOSS is going through right now in terms of funding and procedural changes, we have done our best to manage the organization while inflicting minimal harm on our employees. Thus far nothing has changed for them except for a higher health plan co-payment that saved the organization thousands of dollars in its operating budget while still ensuring that all employees have health care, and two delays distributing paychecks due to cash flow. In each instance, employees received advance notice. 

The funding environment will remain difficult for the foreseeable future, and some procedural shifts we are making will take a while. At the same time, our employee union is here to stay, and so is the press. As BOSS has done throughout its thirty-two year history, we will continue to do our best to manage the organization responsibly while supporting our employees as best we can, and we hope local headlines will do the same justice to this steady if unsensational effort that they do to publicize bumps in the road.  

boona cheema is Executive Director of Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency (BOSS).