San Francisco court clerks struck over staffing shortages that caused paperwork errors keeping people in custody longer than their sentences

In February 2026, approximately 200 clerical workers at the San Francisco Superior Court launched an open-ended strike over chronic understaffing that had been festering since at least October 2024, when clerks staged a one-day walkout. The core complaint was not wages — it was that staffing levels were so low that overburdened clerks were making paperwork errors with life-altering consequences. Specifically, clerks reported that errors in processing release orders and sentence calculations resulted in people being kept in custody longer than they were supposed to be. Meanwhile, the San Francisco District Attorney filed 8,400 cases in 2025 compared to about 5,600 in 2021 — a 50% increase in caseload without a corresponding increase in clerical staff. Sacramento had cut court funding by $97 million statewide in 2024 due to budget concerns. The human cost of a clerical error in a courthouse is categorically different from a clerical error in almost any other workplace. When a clerk at a private company makes a data entry mistake, it might delay a shipment or miscalculate an invoice. When a court clerk makes a data entry mistake, a human being sits in a jail cell for days or weeks beyond their lawful release date. They miss work, their employer replaces them, their family does not know where they are, and they have no recourse because the 'error' is buried in a case management system that the person in custody cannot access or challenge in real time. The National Center for State Courts found that over 70% of courts reported staffing shortages, and 61% expect shortages to continue. This is not an isolated San Francisco problem — it is a systemic failure playing out in courthouses across the country. The structural cause is that court clerks are classified and compensated as low-level government administrative staff, despite performing work that directly affects people's liberty and legal rights. Starting salaries are typically $35,000-$50,000 in high-cost-of-living areas, making it impossible to recruit and retain competent staff. Courts compete for workers with every other employer in the market, but they cannot offer competitive salaries because their budgets are set by state legislatures that view court operations as a cost center to be minimized. When budgets get tight — as they did in California's $97 million cut — courts cannot raise prices or find new revenue; they simply do the same work with fewer people, and the errors compound. The work itself is also deeply unpleasant: processing violent crime cases, interacting with distressed litigants, navigating archaic case management software, all under the pressure of knowing that a mistake could keep someone in jail. The result is chronic turnover, institutional knowledge loss, and a workforce perpetually in crisis.