When Mayor Daniel Lurie and Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman unveiled proposals this month to reform City Hall to give the mayor more authority and make it harder to qualify ballot measures, San Francisco Labor Council Executive Director Kim Tavaglione bluntly cried foul.
Tavaglione, the spokesperson for a coalition of more than 150 unions that include a majority of city employees, had been a member of a City Charter reform working group that Lurie and Mandelman launched in December. It met for four two-hour sessions and did not vote on the subsequent proposals, which could end up on the November ballot.
“Is that really enough time to dive into these problems that they say exist?” Tavaglione said of the working group in an interview. “We didn’t dive deeply into anything. They were like, ‘What words are important to you? Democracy, transparency,’ you know, like that type of s—. And I’m like, I don’t feel that that’s a dive into real charter reform. It’s a bogus focus group, is what it was.”
Tavaglione is known for such strident, and at times confrontational rhetoric. It’s a style that has offended some and fostered esteem in others.
“She has developed a reputation for telling it like it is,” said Rudy Gonzalez, the secretary-treasurer of the San Francisco Building & Construction Trades Council.
“She has earned the respect of labor leaders, because she will tell the truth to people at City Hall and without hesitation, and she’ll tell her colleagues in organized labor the truth without hesitation, and we don’t always like to hear that from our colleagues,” said Gonzalez, who is on the Labor Council’s 30-member executive committee.
Gonzalez, who was executive director of the Labor Council himself for three years, said Tavaglione’s job is “kind of impossible” because the person in the position doesn’t get to negotiate union contracts and doesn’t have a big budget, but is nevertheless the “public face of what organized labor cares about and what they’re willing to fight for. It’s a very important position.”
The head of the council is a “convener,” Gonzalez said.
“If you’re effective and you’re strategic and you’re a good organizer — and she is all those things — you can kind of harness the power of all these other resourced, otherwise independent organizations,” he said.
Tavaglione’s focus on the welfare of working people has “made enemies for her over the years,” but nobody in the labor sector questions where her loyalties lie, he said.
A mayoral spokesperson responded to Tavaglione’s immediate broadside by citing Lurie’s thank-you remarks to the working group, in which he acknowledged members would not agree on every issue.
The spokesperson also highlighted a letter Lurie and Mandelman issued in which they said their proposals would align The City “more closely with other California cities while preserving voters’ ability to participate directly in lawmaking.”
Born in Seoul, South Korea — where her father met her mother while in the U.S. Army — Tavaglione, 57, said she grew up in “a union family.” Her father, a UPS driver, was a Teamster like her grandfather.
After her parents split up, Tavaglione led a bicoastal life, coming from New Jersey to San Francisco in summers to visit her mother, who owned the Tunnel Top Lounge and Bar at 601 Bush St., above the Stockton Tunnel. Tavaglione moved to The City at age 18 and got a bachelor’s degree in political science and government from San Francisco State University.
Tavaglione worked various jobs in the private sector — including stints at the Golden Gate Restaurant Association and Wells Fargo & Co. — and helping the left-leaning muckraking journalist Warren Hinckle during a period when he published The Argonaut, a literary and political journal.
Her union-member grandfather had counseled her to go work for a downtown corporation and make some money, but Tavaglione eventually turned to unions after determining “the world was kind of f—ed up” and “upside down.”
“I found out it was more than just about money,” she said. “It’s like, you gotta look at yourself in the mirror at the end of the day.”
Tavaglione said she recalled being disturbed by a bank official who was pushing hard for a United Way campaign at the same time his company was laying off 3,000 workers.
Today, she said, she sees with dismay an expensive city filled with many millionaires and billionaires, and she is wary of its popular mayor, himself an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune.
“Working people built this city and have a right to live in it, and people need to look at the unaffordability, other than trying to consolidate power,” she said.
Tavaglione’s first union job was as an organizer at San Francisco General Hospital with Service Employees International Union Local 250, and she expressed particular pride in that institution and Laguna Honda Hospital.
“We have to guard those for future generations, for the wellness of The City,” she said.
Tavaglione later worked as an organizer for the National Union of Healthcare Workers for about seven years — more than four of them as political director, a position in which she traveled to communities across the state.
For nearly 10 years, Tavaglione was a member of the San Francisco Labor Council’s executive committee. She joined the staff in 2018 as a campaign director and in 2020 was named executive director, becoming the first woman to hold the position. She must be reelected every three years by union delegates.
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The Labor Council is the local body of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations. It was chartered in 1893 to coordinate union cooperation. It endorses candidates and ballot measures, educates its members on issues, and donates to and makes independent expenditures on behalf of candidates and ballot measures, though more spending on elections is done by individual member unions.
The council is active in local politics largely through political organizing, especially working to get out the vote.
As executive director, Tavaglione assists unions with strategy, directs legislative and political programs, and serves as the council’s organization’s spokesperson, in addition to running the council’s day-to-day operations.
Unions go to the Labor Council to be sanctioned to strike, and Tavaglione can grant emergency sanction between meetings. The organization also runs the city-supported We Rise San Francisco Labor Center for Immigrant Justice, which provides services to immigrant union members and their families, and it co-sponsors a pre-apprenticeship program for Black and Latina women in unionized construction trades, among other community programs.
Taviglione is currently a member of The City’s Workforce Investment San Francisco Board, an advisory body that meets quarterly to address supply and demand in employment.
The Labor Council’s membership includes 18 unions that represent 29,000 of The City’s more than 34,000 employees, and it has committees for city and public-school employees, Tavaglione said.
In addition, some member unions represent private-sector workers, including orchestra musicians, janitors, electricians, home-care workers and hotel workers.
In November of 2024, the Labor Council endorsed two winning supervisorial candidates — Connie Chan in District 1 and Myrna Melgar in District 7. But Danny Sauter beat out the Labor Council’s preferred candidates for the open seat in District 3, and Bilal Mahmood bested incumbent Dean Preston in District 5. A new moderate majority on the board has brought a marked shift away from the progressive policies of recent years.
The council has not yet endorsed candidates for supervisor in the upcoming June primary, but it has backed Chan to succeed U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi in California’s 11th congressional district, which covers most of San Francisco.
As far as the amount of influence labor unions will be able to have on city politics going forward, Tavaglione offered a cautionary note.
“I always say that workers scorned are something that you should not ever experience,” she said. “Some of these supervisors may learn the hard way.”
Currently, city employees are facing the possibility of layoffs after the mayor’s budget director sent out an email telling city department officials to reduce salary and benefits spending by at least $100 million — which Tavaglione said equates to a reduction of at least 500 budgeted positions, including “filled positions.”
Last year, the Labor Council was central in organizing protests against possible layoffs, which were largely avoided. The Council also supported a boycott against Airbnb, the online short-term lodging-rental service, which sued The City for $120 million over business taxes but settled this month for nothing.
“Airbnb’s greedy tax avoidance has been costing The City, but now this money is freed up to support essential services for San Franciscans,” Tavaglione said after the settlement.
Tavaglione said she is hoping to prevent layoffs this year by working with the Board of Supervisors and by getting voter approval in June for Proposition D, which would increase The City’s Overpaid Executive Tax. Advocates of the measure say it would raise more than $200 million for city services.
City plans call for a final budget for the coming year to be finalized by July 31. The mayor, who opposes Prop. D, has said that any tax approved by voters would not go into effect until later so it wouldn’t help with the immediate deficit.
Taviglione also argues The City should tap into rainy-day reserve funds that contain hundreds of millions of dollars.
“If it’s not raining, I don’t know what their definition of rainy is,” she said.
Aside from what might be possible with reserves, however, Lurie has talked about bringing ongoing expenses in line with revenues.
The Prop. D campaign — which is energetically opposed by business interests that have offered up a competing ballot measure — has been spearheaded by two Labor Council member organizations, SEIU locals 2015 and 1021.
The measure targets large corporations with at least 1,000 employees and more than $1 billion in revenue at which the top executive earns more than 100 times the median salary of employees.
Tavaglione said passing the tax is “extremely important.”
“Vital services are on the line for San Franciscans,” ranging from tree trimming to behavioral-health programs, she said. “And as much as people believe that philanthropy can pick up the mantle, they won’t.”