Celebrating the “Second Chance” program he helped create, CTA President Dorval Carter lauded it recently as a way to give “individuals with barriers to employment the opportunity to really turn their lives around and provide them with really good CTA, union-paying jobs.”
But the Chicago Transit Authority ends up hiring few of the ex-offenders enrolled in its yearlong apprentice program, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation has found.
Instead, most Second Chance participants get strung along for a second, third and sometimes fourth term as the transit agency’s lowest-paid workers — amid a worker shortage that has curtailed bus and rail service.
Since 2011, the Sun-Times found, the CTA has promoted only 14% of its apprentices into full-time jobs with benefits such as health insurance and paid sick leave.
During that time, the agency has extended 26% of its apprentices beyond 12 months, with some of them ending up spending more than three years in the program.
Second Chance aims to give people with criminal records and other barriers to employment an opportunity to gain job skills by cleaning bus and L car interiors. But some former apprentices say they feel the agency is taking advantage of them.
“They’re using us,” says Gregory Dixon, who spent more than two years as an apprentice, mainly at the Kimball Avenue CTA station yard cleaning trains overnight. “They use us to do the little stuff. When I was working at Kimball, they had me training people. I trained some of them, a lot of them, on how to clean the train. And I’m still without a job.”
Dixon, who’s the father of two preschoolers, says he’s now unemployed after applying unsuccessfully for more than 15 jobs and, for financial reasons, is living with a relative.
The unions representing CTA bus and L workers want the program’s rules to be rewritten to better protect the apprentices, who often have the same duties as full-time L and bus servicers — at half the pay — and sometimes find themselves assigned to dangerous tasks. Beyond that, a union official says, they’re held to a tougher disciplinary standard.
“Managers are very abusive and take advantage of these people,” says Eric Basir, who’s on the executive board of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 308 and has proposed major changes to the program. “This is a slave-making program.”
CTA managers weren’t made available for interviews about the program, which currently has 315 positions. CTA payroll records show a total of 1,953 names listed as apprentices between May 2011 and November 2023, and 282 of them match names of those hired for permanent jobs.
The agency touts Second Chance as helping “hundreds of people turn their lives around and provide for their families.”
CTA spokesman Manny Gonzales says the program offers “not a job per se but rather an opportunity for returning residents and others with barriers to employment to gain work experience, job skills training and career coaching.”
Gonzales cites a higher hiring rate, of about 25%. But that counts apprentices who end up with part-time work as well as full-time jobs.
Gonzales says Second Chance participants can return for a second year, though that isn’t guaranteed, “if they have maintained the required work record, and there is an open slot available” in another program.
He didn’t respond to questions about why some apprentices remain in those posts for a third year. Nor did he answer other questions after asking that they be submitted in writing.
Joe Burnett — who completed a Cook County drug court program and got his drug conviction expunged — is an exception to the 86% of the people in the program who don’t end up with full-time CTA jobs.
The Salvation Army referred him to the Second Chance program, and he started out cleaning buses as part of a team of 10 ex-offenders and a supervisor.
Burnett, 52, was promoted from an apprentice to a service operator. He got a forklift operator license for that job. Then, he was approved to become a bus operator and got his commercial driver’s license. He says he became a full-time CTA employee in only eight months.
“I was eager to advance, and getting to work on time was never a problem,” he says. “I connected with my managers. I was passionate. To succeed, you need to have good job performance, good attendance records. And they monitor your behavior.”
Now driving a bus on the South Side, he says, “I enjoy communicating with the public.”
Despite Burnett’s success story, other Second Chance participants say they were set up to fail.
In interviews, some say they’ve been pushed to do dangerous work outside the scope of their apprenticeships — without the safety net of having health insurance or paid sick time. They say they agreed to do such work in hopes that might help them be hired permanently, setting them on a career path.
They describe being asked to clean up blood and feces inside buses and trains and scrubbing graffiti off of L cars using a harsh chemical wash even though the train workers union’s contract says apprentices aren’t supposed to be doing “graffiti removal from the exterior of rail cars.”
They’re paid $15.80 an hour for this work and are given a regional transit pass but have no insurance benefits.
Second Chance participants say they have been hesitant about speaking about the problems out of fear they’d lose a chance to get hired permanently.
“It’s a program that CTA boasted about teaching criminals how to work, but they took advantage of it,” says Mark Lozano, an apprentice for 26 months who got a workers compensation payment after suffering chemical burns on his right wrist while removing graffiti, as he was told to do, from the outside of a train. “They made us do the dirtiest jobs, the most dangerous jobs.”
Lozano says he was offered a permanent job in 2022 as a flagger but that the offer was rescinded. He filed a complaint with the CTA over that. Meantime, he says he suffered the chemical burns on the job in 2022.
“They wanted us to do exterior wash, which has to do with acids,” Lozano says. “I didn’t want to do that job. They didn’t give us insurance. A whole crew of Second Chancers were forced to do it.”
Lozano was awarded $3,600 in workers compensation.
Dixon says his supervisor repeatedly threatened him. At one point, in October 2022, he says the boss told him at the Howard Avenue terminal where they worked, “I’ll kill you but not on CTA property.”
Dixon called the police, a move he thinks landed him on a blacklist.
The supervisor, who faced a misdemeanor assault charge that later was dropped, resigned in lieu of termination in January 2023. The boss had a history of problems at his previous job with Metra, including unpaid suspensions.
Joseph Green of the Westside Health Authority, one of about 20 social service agencies that refer apprentices to the CTA, says the problems the Second Chance participants describe are disturbing.
“Nobody should be treated any differently whether they came through a program or not,” says Green, who’s the health authority’s director of workforce and job development. “Everybody needs to be respected.”
The Westside Health Authority says that about 27% of the apprentices it sent to the CTA between 2011 and 2022 ended up being hired permanently. Some have been promoted to managerial positions. Green says his agency provides extra training to applicants — job skills, “soft” people skills — and continues to mentor them after they’re on the job.
“We’re not just sending anyone down just because they want to be in the program,” he says. “When we send people down there, we want to make sure they are clean, and they are ready for a change. There’s not going to be a success story for everybody.”
A criminal record or even a bad driving record in some cases can be an impediment for someone who’s in the Second Chance program and is seeking a permanent CTA job. For instance, apprentices need a valid driver’s license — with no unpaid fines — to be eligible to be hired as a CTA bus driver.
State Rep. LaShawn Ford, D-Chicago, who has championed Second Chance since it started in 2011, says not everyone who gets the apprenticeships is looking for permanent work. He likes the training and experience it affords to people facing barriers to employment, like a criminal background or homelessness.
Rich Hein / Sun-Times
State Rep. LaShawn Ford, D-Chicago, who has championed Second Chance since it started in 2011, says not everyone who gets the apprenticeships is looking for permanent work.
“Some people, believe it or not, are content with $15 an hour,” Ford says. “This is the truth. It keeps them on Medicaid. If they have Section 8, they get to keep their Section 8. And all these reasons are reasons why some people don’t want to move into permanency. Because it changes their tax bracket, they lose their SNAP benefits. If they have childcare, they lose childcare. And so, if it’s not enough to sustain them with a living wage right away, they shy away from it.”
He calls the 14% hiring rate “low” but says the CTA is still providing much-needed opportunities for people whose criminal histories create obstacles to them being hired.
“This is a risk and a chance that they’re taking to try to improve their workforce with those with backgrounds,” Ford says. “So it’s not worth it for them to do it for cost savings at all. It’s really them trying to move people into the workforce.”
