In a saner city, government contracts would follow the laws of supply and demand. A city department would issue a request for proposals, outside vendors would submit them, and the lowest bidder offering the highest-value services would win the contract.
But that’s not the city we live in.
Instead, the law requires city officials to adhere to a bevy of “social policies” when selecting contractors — everything from a vendor’s domestic-partner benefits to its adherence to labor-relations standards in Northern Ireland to “sweat-free” working conditions in factories on the other side of the planet. Because so many contracts are relatively small in value, officials end up spending “a disproportionate amount of energy and resources on a relatively small share” of procurement dollars, according to the city administrator.
In other words, securing essential goods and services becomes costly and time-consuming, all because our lawmakers decided to let “social policy” trump good governance.
All of this brings us to a bill written by Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman that would simplify how the city selects contractors. This should have been a no-brainer for supervisors looking to put easy policy wins on the scoreboard. Instead, it has become a classic kerfuffle over “San Francisco values” and a damning example of organized labor’s power to obstruct progress.
The result is a grim preview of how little the supervisors might accomplish in the months ahead, when measures to reform the number of volunteer commissions and the city charter are put to political tests.
Mandelman’s legislation aims to rewrite contracting laws in myriad ways, notably by removing social-policy restrictions on “low-value” contracts — those paying out less than $230,000. That’s a good idea considering that the city administrator in 2024 found that of the total contracts issued over the previous five years, 59% were for less than $200,000 but accounted for just 2% of overall spending.
Reducing the amount of time spent on scrutinizing the “values” of small-time vendors seems like a reasonable fix — at least if you believe in cutting government bloat and lowering expenses for taxpayers. Mandelman took up the cause after a successful effort to repeal another batch of city restrictions on doing business with companies in states that had laws that were hostile to the LGBTQ+ community. The rationale was simple: Such policies drove up the city’s costs without changing the hearts, minds, or policies of other states.
Unfortunately for Mandelman, his elegant solution ran into an infuriating wall of labor obstructionism and political cowardice. This is because the legislation also tried to do away with one of the city’s many powerless volunteer bodies, the Sweatfree Procurement Advisory Group, which, for obscure reasons, organized labor has decided it needs to fight tooth and nail to protect. This in spite of the “advisory group’s” difficulty finding enough advisers to fill its 11 seats. (The group, which scrutinizes the far-flung textile industry, has five vacancies and is required to meet just once a year.)
Regardless, labor’s vehement opposition to axing the Sweatfree Procurement Advisory Group was enough to convince a majority of supervisors to hit the pause button on Mandelman’s latest bill. Tellingly, labor’s disapproval seems to have caused one particularly vulnerable legislator, Joel Engardio, to withhold his support for the bill — even though the Sunset supervisor had previously backed it. The upshot is that the measure is on hold, mired in parliamentary procedure by the board’s progressive minority, aided by Engardio.
How to ‘accomplish nothing’
This result should anger San Franciscans across the political spectrum. Mandelman’s bill would make the city work better and more fairly. And labor doesn’t even have much to protect here, beyond making a stand as a show of its strength. What’s more, the bill is incremental: It doesn’t do away with restrictions on sweatshop labor other than for “low-value” contracts, which, again, constitute a drop in the city’s spending bucket.
In fact, at least one supervisor, District 6’s Matt Dorsey, wishes Mandelman’s bill had gone further. A champion of marriage equality, Dorsey told me he thinks provisions punishing businesses without domestic-partner benefits, for example, are outmoded now that gay marriage is legal everywhere. “That’s a moral principle that went away,” Dorsey said. “We won.”
Dorsey is as passionate as Mandelman about removing outdated legislation. “We build in things that make sure we accomplish nothing,” he said. “The party that believes in government can’t suck at governing.”
Though Mandelman contends that city staff already oversees the work of a nonprofit that monitors the vendors San Francisco works with, labor backers see the advisory group as critical. Kim Evon, executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union Local 2015, wrote a letter to Mandelman, telling him that eliminating the group would hurt transparency and fail to rein in bad-acting subcontractors. It’s unclear, though, how familiar Evon is with the panel, which she referred to incorrectly as the “Sweatfree Purchasing Advisory Group.”
As I observed during the city’s recent budget debate, San Francisco’s labor unions view job cuts the way the National Rifle Association sees gun control laws: There’s no such thing as a good one. I suspect the unions view citizen panels that advise on labor-adjacent policy the same way — even when that policy has nothing to do with protecting jobs.
As for the members of the Sweatfree Procurement Advisory Group, they see themselves as helping the city enforce its laws. “We’re trying to get the contractors to be compliant,” said Jason Oringer, a member of the group and a research coordinator for SEIU. “We want to address violations.”
I don’t doubt that members of the SPAG, as they refer to it, are well-meaning. The problem is that the panel is powerless, beyond an ability to bear witness. Unlike, say, the Police Commission or the Planning Commission, it doesn’t oversee a department. None of its actions are binding.
The very obscurity of the Sweatfree group makes it a microcosm of the larger debate over the 133 or so commissions, committees, panels, task forces, and other entities that gum up San Francisco’s government. They are a pure form of citizen democracy, but they are also sludge factories, forcing public officials to spend as much time cranking out reports and presentations for commissions as doing their jobs.
Voters last year approved Proposition E, which created, yes, a task force to recommend cutting the number of commissions. That group’s work is ongoing, and its existence gave Engardio, who is facing a recall election, a justification for voting to stymie Mandelman’s legislation.
“It feels like it’s a good compromise to let 99% of this great legislation go through and take a pause on the sweatshop part and talk about that a little bit more,” he said at a board hearing last week. He told me he questions the merits of singling out one advisory body when the Prop. E task force will consider all of them.
And while Engardio acknowledged a desire to “listen” to labor, he denied that he had traded his support for their beloved SPAG for the unions getting behind his anti-recall fight. “I don’t know what labor is going to do,” he said.
Absent from this debate is Mayor Daniel Lurie, who ought to be supportive of legislation that makes government more efficient — and not just because it uses his favorite slogan in its title, the Open for Business Contract Streamlining Act of 2025. The mayor’s spokesman declined to comment on the bill.
More likely, Lurie is on a roll with labor, having given it a win by proposing few layoffs — and then accepting even fewer — in his recent budget. And he’s not looking to ruffle the unions’ feathers unnecessarily.
It seems likely that the Sweatfree Procurement Advisory Group will survive for now and that the board will pass the rest of Mandelman’s legislation in September, though Mandelman told me he isn’t even sure of that.
The board president, whose term ends in 2027 and who cannot run for reelection, is grumpy about the prospects for reform generally, given how difficult this one measure has been to pass. He said it well in a speech to the board that “advancing our San Francisco values and having an efficient and effective government” would require “a willingness to tiptoe up to our sacred cows and inquire whether there are some things we might be able to do, not necessarily to kill them, but to make them work better for San Francisco.”
Watching this episode play out, I am grumpy about those prospects too.