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It seems memories are short on San Francisco's progressive left, at least when it comes to tech companies and it happens to be union contract negotiating time.

Supervisor David Campos marched at the head of a protest Tuesday by the city's largest public employee union to denounce the Mid-Market tax break, designed to attract companies to the downtrodden area, as a corporate giveaway. He took the microphone as the throng blocked Market Street in front of Twitter's headquarters.

"We're simply here to say that these corporations have to pay their fair share," Campos told the crowd, mostly members of Service Employees International Union Local 1021, a progressive powerhouse on the city's political scene that organized the protest as it seeks pay raises for its workers.

This is the same David Campos who co-sponsored legislation in 2011 with a fellow progressive supervisor at the time, Ross Mirkarimi, that created a six-year tax break for startup companies' stock options.

That legislation was aimed at helping tech companies, like Zynga and Yelp, that were preparing to go public and would have seen a big spike in their tax bills if they remained in San Francisco, the only jurisdiction in the state that taxed gains on stock options.

The view of many at City Hall was that the stock-option tax break was a way to keep tech companies in San Francisco that didn't stand to benefit from a tax break the city had carved out for businesses that moved to, or grew in, the forlorn Mid-Market area. That tax break was designed, in part, to keep Twitter from fleeing to the suburbs.

While SEIU members attack the Mid-Market tax break as a failed form of trickle-down economics, the stock option tax break authored by progressives has so far cost the city more money.

The city wound up not collecting $1.9 million in taxes from the Mid-Market incentive through the end of 2012, while the stock-option break amounted to almost $4.9 million over the same period, according to the city's tax collector.

Figures are still being compiled for 2013, which included Twitter's lucrative initial public offering. Analysts project the tax break will allow the company to save more than $56 million on its tax bill over six years.

SEIU official Gabriel Haaland told the San Francisco Bay Guardian in 2011 that the Mid-Market tax break was "a sleazy land grab," while praising the Mirkarimi-led effort as "honestly trying to deal with tax policy," even though the Mid-Market incentive has led to a resurgence in the area and the stock option tax break doesn't require larger companies to provide community benefits, like local purchasing and volunteering, as the Mid-Market break does.

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Progressives rip one corporate tax break, laud another