SLUG's success

Your article on SLUG was full of errors ["SLUGs and Suckers," 3/10/04]. Our crewmembers' vests are yellow, not forest green. All of our crewmembers are on welfare, not some of them. The Transitional Employment Program budget is $4.8 million dollars for four years (2004-08) not one year (2004-05). We do not place our people in "dead-end jobs that [pay] so poorly that the workers were eligible for welfare." For many years, beginning in 1998, our workers became gardeners at the Water Department, the Recreation and Parks Department, and the Department of Public Works. Their starting salary is $17 an hour. I think these jobs have something to do with plants (in reference to your statement that our "biggest project has nothing to do with plants"). TEP crewmembers were taught gardening skills in SLUG's Landscape Training class. Obviously they learned these skills well enough to be hired by three city departments. Mr. Buick was right. When it comes to finding jobs, we do "blow away" other welfare-to-work programs. Muni and BART as well as the Department of Public Works hire many of our street sweepers.

It is true that our placement numbers have fallen since 2002. So have the job placement numbers for the whole state. In 2002 the unemployment rate in California climbed from 5.3 percent to 6.1 percent. For blacks in that same year it rose from 8.6 percent to 12.1 percent. Most of our TEP workers are black. NAFTA and all the other free-trade agreements our government signed have sold the jobs of the American people to the lowest bidder. SLUG cannot control the job market, nor can we control the U.S. government. Our program has existed since 1998 and will continue through good times and bad. We will continue to pick up the very people that society has thrown away and give them a chance to join the mainstream.

You stated that we abandoned our contractual obligations with the city. This is not correct. Our former board of directors decided to cease operations on July 22, 2003.

City agencies are understandably reluctant to renew our contracts until the situation stabilizes. We now have a new board of directors and a new executive director. A new report has just come out from the board that addresses the concerns of many of the city agencies.

You ask what the people of the city will get for their money. They will get clean streets, fewer people on welfare (our workers transition off welfare in three months), fewer drug addicts and alcoholics, fewer prison inmates. I'd call that a bargain.

Patti Maloney
Transitional Employment Program, San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners

A.C. Thompson responds: I don't see the connection between pushing a broom and gardening. By the city's definition, the program's goal is "to teach the skills needed to become employable in the sidewalk cleaning business." SLUG insiders tell me many workers in this particular program don't learn anything about plants, and SLUG records show graduates often go on to jobs that have nothing to do with gardening or landscaping – like working for McCoy's Patrol Services.

The Department of Public Works told us, in writing, that the contract we mentioned "will pay $4.8 million through the end of 2005." SLUG and Public Works should get their stories straight.

In the summer of 2003, SLUG bailed on the Tool Lending Center it was running for the San Francisco Public Library and a wetlands restoration project it was doing for the Port of San Francisco, according to those two agencies. That would be "abandoning contractual obligations." In fact, those agencies say they collectively advanced SLUG about $40,000 for work that was never performed.

I wrote that "many" SLUG workers are on welfare to allow for the possibility that some workers may get off public assistance while at SLUG. The SLUG contract indeed calls for SLUG to take on people referred by the Department of Human Services, the city's welfare office.

As to the claim that SLUG doesn't place people in dead-end, low-wage jobs: the information SLUG supplied to the DHS clearly shows that many SLUG graduates – 90 percent according to one statistical snapshot – get jobs that pay so poorly they have to keep getting welfare.

Of course, it's impossible to know how accurate these stats are since SLUG, according to memos on file at the DHS, has a history of giving the city "extraordinarily inconsistent" data, with key figures "missing" and "numbers and percentages [that] don't add up." DHS deputy director Jim Buick confirmed this in an interview with me.

For the Record