Lowball Landscaping

[November 28th, 2007]

Picking up wet leaves in the cold for 5 cents an hour is an opportunity to “develop appropriate work habits,” according to the Oregon Department of Corrections and Portland Parks and Recreation.

It’s also an opportunity for Portland Parks to save $387 a day by hiring state prisoners to do work that city union officials say should be done by its full-time employees.

“Any way they can figure out how to lowball people, they’re gonna do it,” says Richard “Buz” Beetle, business manager for Laborers’ Local 483, which represents about 150 parks workers. “We’re slowly eroding the difference between us and China.”

On Nov. 21, the City Council voted unanimously to approve a two-year, $180,000 contract with the state prisons department. The contract, which provides the city with inmate work crews from the minimum-security Columbia River Correctional Institution in Northeast Portland, formalizes an on-the-fly arrangement that dates back at least six years. But city managers never told union leadership that state prisoners would be sharing the workload, and shop stewards never complained.

Bob Downing, a Portland Parks manager, says there was no intention to “short-circuit” the unions. Rather, he says, the city was guilty of a “communication flub.”

Beetle brought his concerns to the council on Nov. 14, after WW asked for his take on the inmate work contract he didn’t know about. Beetle’s “heartburn” delayed passage of the contract by a week—which in turn delayed the annual leaf pickup in the city’s 180-plus parks.

So, if you’re upset about soggy autumn leaves decomposing in your neighborhood park, blame WW . “Why do you have to read our agenda so closely?” joked Commissioner Dan Saltzman, who oversees the parks bureau.

Saltzman argued that having strapping young criminals do the heavy lifting saved older full-time parks employees from potential injury.

“That wasn’t very heartwarming,” says Beetle, a 30-year city employee.

Parks director Zari Santner wrote Beetle that the department does not intend to “supplant” employees with inmate workers, but rather to “supplement” them.

The union wants the city to confine the inmates to unskilled, “pick and shovel”-type work. In addition to picking up leaves, the inmates will build trails, haul equipment, plant, water, weed, mow and cut on the city’s 10,500 acres of park land.

Though the city claims to have “no interest” in expanding the program, Santner did not rule out the possibility that inmates could do other jobs in the future. “If the need arises,” Santner wrote, “expansion would not occur without the involvement and consent of Local 483.”

Oregon’s inmate work program was created by a 1994 ballot measure. Critics say Measure 17, which was backed by the pro-business Oregon Roundtable, was always intended to be a union-buster, though it was sold as a way to get tough on crime.

Prison labor “puts a huge amount of downward pressure on the value of our work,” Beetle says.

Parks officials say about 25 percent of their maintenance backlog is handled by volunteers, inmate crews or other non-staffers. The bureau employs just two full-time maintenance workers, who each make about $23,000 a year. Why hire more, when the city can rent a crew of 10 inmates from the state for the low, low price of $400 a day?

That daily rate is likely to increase, because it falls about $135 short of covering the Corrections Department’s costs, says Columbia River Correctional Institution spokeswoman Susan Erickson. Of course, a rate increase would cut into the city’s cost savings.

Money, not safety, was the union’s chief concern. Erickson says sex offenders, arsonists and prisoners with a history of escape or behavioral problems (as opposed to well-behaved criminals) do not work outside.

The parks bureau’s Downing says inmates may work in a park where children play, but they won’t work in the kids’ immediate vicinity. Schools and day cares are notified in advance when an inmate crew is scheduled to work nearby, Downing says.

He also says the city’s union-represented crews like having the jailbirds around because “they’re highly productive.”