Deadly city contracts

San Francisco has an entire body of law devoted to managing public contracts. There are requirements that companies doing business with the city pay their workers a decent wage and extend any benefits to the domestic partners of lesbian and gay employees. Firms owned by minorities and women get preference in contract awards.
But as A.C. Thompson reports on page 15, none of that has stopped more than $166,000 in city contracts since 1997 from going to 101 Roofing, a company with an extensive record of workplace-safety violations that is currently under indictment for manslaughter (in the death of a worker who wasn't wearing safety equipment) as well as tax fraud. In fact, even after the District Attorney's Office filed its criminal charges, in July 2002, 101 Roofing kept getting city contracts.
Labor leaders point out a serious loophole in the city's contracting law: there's no requirement that a contractor have an adequate safety record, and no penalty for Occupational Safety and Health Administration violations, even willful, aggravated, and extensive violations. In other words, there's nothing in the city's contracting rules that requires companies to make any effort to keep their workers from dying on the job.
This is just the latest example of a city contracting process that's way, way out of control. At least City Attorney Dennis Herrera has taken the positive step of moving to sue airport contractor Tutor-Saliba for a long list of alleged problems, but all of the minority-contracting and sole-source procedures need to be overhauled. City contracting is a mess - deals are cut in secret, records are kept secret, political friends of Mayor Willie Brown get juicy deals - and reform ought to be a major issue in the mayor's race.
Meanwhile, the San Francisco Board of Supervisor should adopt legislation that would:

• Require anyone bidding on a city contract to disclose any OSHA violations, or criminal or civil actions related to workplace safety, that have been filed against the company in the past five years. Companies with extensive violations should be disqualified, and any serious OSHA problems should count against the company in bid evaluations.

• Require all bidders to submit evidence that they make good-faith efforts to train their workers in on-the-job safety and that they provide all safety equipment required by federal and state law.

• Require the district attorney and city attorney to inform the Human Rights Commission and Purchasing Department whenever they take criminal or civil action against anyone they know to be a city contractor - and require city departments to withhold any future contracts until those cases are resolved.

But the case of 101 Roofing points to a much larger problem at the state level - and to labor activists, it's nothing new. The California Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Cal/OSHA) has nowhere near the number of inspectors it needs to monitor the hundreds of thousands of workplaces around the state, and when inspectors do find problems, and press for serious fines, they're often overruled by the political appointees who run the agency. Stiff fines are reduced to the equivalent of traffic tickets, which a lot of firms just consider a cost of doing business.

It's not likely that Cal/OSHA is going to get any more money for increased staff anytime soon. So the supervisors should look into creating a local system to monitor the safety performance of city contractors. Many of the people working for roofing companies in the city (and probably for some other city contractors, especially in the construction trades) are undocumented immigrants who are unlikely to complain about working conditions. But even one or two city inspectors, making random spot checks of jobs sites, might have a significant impact on the willingness of these companies to expose their employees to life-threatening conditions, with impunity - and get public money for doing it.