New Squeeze on Construction
BROOKS, THOMAS R.
DISCRIMINATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS New Squeeze on Construction By Thomas R. Brooks ALREADY FEELING the tightmoney squeeze beginning to affect various sectors of the nation's economy, the...
...A group of volunteers from Eastern Electric pitched in to help tutor the young men in math, spacial relations and vocabulary...
...What we need is more work,' he told me...
...Among craftsmen out of work there are tensions and some bitterness...
...Thomas R. Brooks, a previous contributor, is a freelance writer who specializes in labor affairs...
...What kind of civil rights is that...
...Significantly, one-half of employed Negro men work in manual or menial service jobs, many of which are subject to mechanization...
...No one walks off the job when I come on," a Negro electrician told me...
...Not by a long shot...
...The building and construction unions were organized around the skills possessed and the tools used by workers in the various trades...
...And William H. Booth, chairman of the City's Commission on Human Rights, has announced that a new series of public hearings on hiring practices in the building and construction trades will be held next month...
...His office carries little direct power, since it is essentially a lobbying operation...
...Last year, Brennan prodded the Council into adopting a set of guidelines for the hiring of new journeymen without discrimination...
...Employment in the industry has grown from 2.3 million in 1950 to 3.2 million in 1965, and is expected to reach 3.7 million by 1970 -a rise of 15 per cent and the largest and most rapid growth projected outside of state and local government and service industry employment...
...But they also gave credence to racist rumors afloat in the industry...
...One can join a laborers union by getting a job off the street, which may be difficult yet can be done...
...At such meetings, the employer is asked to spell out his progress in, or program for, hiring minority group members...
...But Roye, like most Negro spokesmen, is vehemently opposed to placing the responsibility for recruitment upon the civil rights or Negro movements...
...What's progress for them, is not progress for us," I was told again and again...
...Early in January 1965, the Sheet Metal Union announced that it would offer its first objective test on February 13...
...During the summer of 1963, Negro and white civil rights activists picketed publicly-financed building projects in most major cities...
...Recruiting, however, is said to be slow...
...While there are some signs of ethnic lines becoming blurred in recent years, craft lines remain strong...
...Nonetheless, though an Irish carpenters local may have excluded Italians, the Italians as well as most of the other ethnic groups in the city have managed to secure a share of the skilled work in the industry...
...If for any reason he is not taken in promptly he may continue on the job," Brennan explained...
...The Negro leaders I interviewed, though, were unanimous in denying that this was so...
...Negro spokesmen also took a dim view of the progress claimed by white trade union leaders and construction contractors...
...And since Negro organizations cannot possibly keep up the pressure at all times, there is a fear that once the heat is off, the number of Negroes admitted will fall off sharply...
...Both industry and union spokesmen praised the WDL program highly in talking with me...
...Once hired, he must become a member of the union after seven days on the job...
...Other Negro craftsmen on the job back up the apprentices...
...In other words, 100 Negro apprentices were placed by 11 centers, or less than 10 by each center...
...The results...
...Brennan is sometimes blamed for things over which he has no real control...
...We decided to go for high school graduates only the second time," Murphy said...
...In 1964, apprenticeship information centers operated by the U.S...
...Part of it, at least, lies in the current effort of the NAACP to encourage Negro contractors to bid on publicly-financed construction...
...The National Urban League, with a three year $366,000 Ford Foundation grant and in cooperation with the AFL-CIO, is developing a preapprenticeship training program for selected occupations in several key cities...
...As Human Rights Commission Chairman Booth pointed out, "Some standards were set only recently...
...The tutorial for the second examination, was on a higher level and lasted three weeks...
...Most of the Negro leaders I interviewed believe that the qualifications for entry into most building and construction trades are unnecessarily high...
...The courts ordered a second test, which took place on October 24, 1965...
...It is unlikely, however, that the upward trend can now be reversed...
...Thus, the fact that between 1950-60 the number of Negroes employed as construction laborers rose 50 per cent, so that they now constitute 26 per cent of the men employed in this category-and are also well established in other categories at the bottom rungs of the construction ladder-is less telling than the fact that among the electricians they constitute only a little more than 1 per cent...
...everything's all right...
...Their replacements, however, have stayed on...
...Negroes are the glaring exception...
...But they must either bend or break before the growing campaign against discrimination within the industry...
...I asked a white carpenter, one of a five-man crew working on cement forms, what he thought about working with Negroes...
...Kenneth Clark, noted Negro psychologist and director of the Social Dynamics Institute at City College of New York, helped set up a tutorial program...
...The U.S...
...The supply of labor is controlled by limiting the number pf journeymen admitted to the unions and to their apprenticeship programs...
...A court order backed the Commission...
...Department of Labor in 11 major cities placed 400 apprenticeship applicants, onefourth of them Negroes...
...Whether or not the Negro organizations and their allies can mount sufficient pressure to budge the unions remains to be seen...
...A New York State law requires recognized apprenticeship programs to adopt "objective standards which permit review...
...The crew was all white as it happened...
...Unhappily, entry into the industry is not as simple as it may seem from the outside, and the higher the job the more difficult it is to break in...
...This has nurtured covert as well as overt "father-and-son" and "friends-andrelations" admission policies...
...Requirements vary, but generally you must be between 17-27, have at least a 10th grade education (today more and more trades are demanding a high school diploma), be of good character and have the sponsorship of two or more union members...
...Though the minimum educational requirement for taking the examination was 10th grade, the math level of the passing group was much higher...
...And the industry, by all accounts, would be willing to expand existing apprenticeship training programs only if Federal funds were provided for training...
...The intensification of effort paid off...
...I realized that a guy's got to be strong and rugged...
...What is the answer...
...If the man is qualified-he must have five years experience and pass the journeyman's test-he is placed on the referral list on a "first come" basis...
...Though the parishioners may have protested out of race pride, they were also responding to the economic plight of the urban Negro worker...
...The skilled crafts, as a whole, did poorly...
...Of the 360 who competed for 65 openings, 30 were Negroes...
...You could lower them to the eighth grade but that would just enlarge the number taking the examination...
...The State Commission Against Discrimination reported, however, that in 1958 of 15,000 registered apprentices in the state (not all of these in building and construction), only 2 per cent were Negro, with none at all in the programs of the plumbers, steamfitters, sheet metal workers, structural iron workers and related trades...
...One sad-faced watcher at a Harlem building site told me, "I just don't understand...
...We must have a job for the fellow to go to," Brennan said...
...There has been some upward movement, but it has been very slow...
...The steamfitters and metal lathers did even less well...
...Does that excuse them...
...The rest, semiskilled or unskilled, are perhaps more accurately classified simply as non-apprenticeship trades, and it is here that most of the Negroes in the industry are now employed...
...Cuff, according to the Commission's report, promised "aggressively to seek applicants from within the Negro community...
...The contractor can no longer say, 'this is what the union sent me,' or 'I can't find them,' I was told by Murray Geller, director of the New York office of the Department of Labor's Office of Federal Contract Compliance...
...The old exclusionist practices, then, remain powerful...
...Cuff declared that 78-80 per cent of the Negroes who applied for membership in his local were afraid of heights...
...But few showed any fear that the admission of Negro apprentices would downgrade their own craft-at least not in present numbers...
...Out of 130 tested, 11 WDL applicants placed in the top 22...
...I can't put people out of the unions," he told me...
...A three-man Action Panel, appointed by Mayor Robert F. Wagner, reported that the city's building and construction trades union local's ranged in composition from all white to 70 per cent non-white...
...Discrimination on the job, on the other hand, does not appear to be a major factor in the dropout rate for Negro apprentices...
...At issue, however, is not merely the question of the Negro getting an adequate share of the jobs available in this expanding industry, but the level of jobs available to him...
...Apprenticeship is an on-the-job affair so that without work there can be no expansion of apprenticeship openings, at least not under the present system...
...The Federal agency, however, is reluctant about using its "ultimate weapon"-contract cancellation...
...mint now being erected in the City of Brotherly Love...
...That's an escape hatch," he told me...
...As a result, various investigations were launched...
...We figured it doesn't matter what you do with qualifications,' Murphy said...
...DISCRIMINATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS New Squeeze on Construction By Thomas R. Brooks ALREADY FEELING the tightmoney squeeze beginning to affect various sectors of the nation's economy, the building and construction industry, especially in the North, may soon find itself in a squeeze of a different kind...
...If we cancel,' an agency spokesman explained, "we run the risk of shutting down a project that may be more essential to the community than a handful of jobs...
...The unemployment rate for Negroes (8.3 per cent in 1965) is twice that of whites, and there is every reason to believe that the rate of "hidden" unemployment is also higher among Negroes than whites...
...Recently, the latter requirement has been relaxed under civil rights pressures to allow sponsorship by clergymen or others of upright character...
...As the WDL experience indicates, there is some need for pre-apprenticeship training, or briefing...
...In addition, many of the new buildings going up are in slums where the sidewalk superintendents are often unemployed Negroes watching men who frequently come from considerable distances to work in the black ghettos...
...If union men walk off the job, Cleveland will take a leaf from NAACP successes in St...
...The number of Negroes entering apprenticeships, therefore, may remain very small even if the programs are opened and construction picks up...
...The WDL experience shows that merely opening doors to nondiscriminatory competitive examinations is not enough...
...The plan provides for joint (unionemployer) industry boards in each trade to process applications...
...More than a majority of our people are doing the right thing," insists Peter J. Brennan, president of the Building and Construction Trades Council...
...In any event, without outside aid the unions show no disposition to increase the number of apprentices admitted each year...
...We're union men, too,' he added...
...12 were graduates of the tutorial...
...We had like two weeks to prepare," Ray Murphy, the soft-spoken WDL program director recalls...
...The Cleveland NAACP chapter has lined up Negro sub-contractors, most of them non-union, to bid on all construction projects involving public funds...
...The new housing, ironically, is sponsored by two Negro churches whose members were dismayed to discover that all the work was being done by white union members...
...The ones we sent just didn't have the muscle and we had not warned them about what to expect...
...Over onehalf had schooling beyond high school...
...Still, he is not without influence...
...Department of Commerce last winter forecast that outlays for new construction would reach an alltime high of about $72.7 billion in 1966...
...Unions with an existing Negro membership admitted Negroes in fairly large number...
...When some white youths dropped out, however, one Negro, Scott Green, a lanky Air Force veteran, was admitted...
...12 white-"we're integrated") blamed current unemployment in the industry...
...He jerked his thumb at a hefty black man in blue coveralls, "There's the boss [he was crew foreman], if I don't mind him I don't see how I can mind the others...
...But, he admits, "we have a few throwing me curves...
...The normal route to a union card in the skilled crafts, though, is by apprenticeship...
...Despite unemployment in the industry, both contractors and the union leaders say that they are seeking qualified Negroes...
...The Catholic charities don't run around getting job applicants...
...Union leaders and industry spokesmen echoed this claim: "They don't apply" becomes "they're not available...
...If the program, or his past performance, is unsatisfactory, he will be by-passed when the contract is handed out...
...This, he feels, will circumvent any attempts at discrimination...
...Now who do you think he's going to send out on a job...
...Should government agencies refuse to comply, the NAACP promises to seek court enforcement of civil right laws and to back up its demands with "massive demonstrations...
...Some job placement experts claim, "The problem is getting Negroes to apply for craft union jobs...
...We shall probably find out soon...
...Fourteen out of the 25 applicants referred by the WDL were admitted to the apprenticeship program...
...The unions, he maintains, have made strides over the past two years in opening the doors to Negroes and Puerto Ricans...
...According to the Building and Construction Trades Council, Negroes and Puerto Ricans now comprise 15-20 per cent of its membership, with the great majority still confined to the non-apprenticeship or "trowel" trades...
...But there have been some breakthroughs, notably the admission of 240 Negroes into the 1,200-member apprenticeship class of Local 3, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers...
...He and his assistant, Ernest Green, interviewed 90 youngsters, giving them the Otis Quick Scoring Test of Mental Abilities...
...The basic problems of Negro privation will remain...
...The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has served notice that it wants strict enforcement within the building trades of city, state and Federal laws against job discrimination, including provisions for contract cancellation...
...Over the past two years, working on a small budget financed by the Taconic Foundation, Murphy and Green have placed 76 young Negroes and Puerto Ricans in apprenticeships-50 in the building and construction trades...
...some were going to college at night...
...Local 3's 1962 contract, which established a 30-hour work week, opened up some new jobs and created an unusually large number of apprenticeship openings...
...About 20, he said, had sought membership between 1960-63...
...An analysis by the WDL staff of the 65 who made the class revealed that most were from white, middleclass suburban schools...
...To cite one example, the two plumbers' locals, with a combined membership of nearly 7,000 and a scant dozen or so Negroes, admitted 33 non-white apprentices and 25 journeymen over the past three years...
...After a series of hearings, the New York City Commission on Human Rights found a "pattern of exclusion in a substantial portion of the building and construction industry which effectively bars nonwhites from participation in this area of the city's economic life...
...There must be somethin' in there I could do...
...They were set to exclude, and we take it, to exclude Negroes...
...In New York, sit-downs and lie-downs held up work at Harlem Hospital, the Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn and the Rochdale Village project in Queens...
...The 250,000 workers covered by the New York City Building and Construction Trades Council comprise 122 local union affiliates and break down into 18 arbitrarily distinguished trades...
...Why should they when they can easily go somewhere else where there has been a real breakthrough...
...When it comes to recruiting Negro youth, it seems, what white building tradesmen have in mind are middle-class, well-behaved Negro youngsters, who are not interested in apprenticeships, and not the slum kids who turn up wanting jobs...
...As Roye put it, "We've gone past the pilot placement phase...
...It's practically inevitable," Roye of the Urban League said...
...The Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 outlawed the union shop and exclusive hiring arrangements, but they persist in scarcely disguised forms and the greater the job skill the tighter the job control exercised by the union...
...The closed shop (where union membership is a condition of employment) and the union hiring hall (where employers hire only workers referred by the union) are the means of job control...
...The place is so big...
...Murphy, who recently climbed the upper reaches of a still rising building to check out why several Negro iron worker apprentices quit, told me that he found the work "much more difficult than we anticipated...
...None made the top 65 to be admitted as apprentices...
...Hugh Cuff, president and business manager of Local 1, International Union of Elevator Constructors, with a jurisdiction that runs from Red Bank, New Jersey, to "35 miles north of City Hall," told the City's Human Rights Commission in 1963 that out of 2,300 construction mechanics and 600 probationary helpers, "perhaps three" were Negroes...
...In New York City, for example, the industry is a complex of ethnic job holdings protected by the intricate uses of union power...
...One problem of the moment, as Brennan sees it, is not discrimination but unemployment, which ran as high as 35-40 per cent this spring...
...The business agent," said one, "he's white...
...Most saw the exclusionist practices of their unions as a way of guaranteeing work for themselves, not as a tactic aimed at the Negro...
...The organization's aim, he explained, is to speed up the process...
...In Philadelphia, NAACP leader Cecil Moore has threatened "a kind of scorched earth" policy...
...In 1964, the New York State Commission for Human Rights found Local 28 of the Sheet Metal Union guilty of "systematically excluding Negroes from membership for 75 years" and ordered the union to discard its "lily white" waiting list of applicants for training and to subject all applicants to an aptitude test supervised by New York University...
...The rate of integration in the skilled craft unions of the building and construction industry in the North is slower than the rate of integration in the public schools of the South over the past decade," I was told by Herbert Hill, NAACP Labor Secretary...
...We may also penalize other workers in the effort to get a single contractor...
...Michael Stewart, the first Negro iron worker apprentice in Local 361 (membership 1,000, mostly Irish, Italian and Southern White and 60 Indians) says, "They've all treated me fair from the beginning, and all I want to prove is that I can do the work...
...Consequently, the Federal compliance people are relying on precontract award meetings with wouldbe bidders for Federally-financed work...
...We feel it imperative," director Whitney M. Young Jr., said in describing the new program, "that we assist minority youth in making early vocational choices based upon first-hand knowledge of the requirements necessary to enter apprenticeships...
...What has happened since 1963...
...Several Negro carpenters told me, for example, that they were out of work because of discrimination...
...Who is getting them the white people...
...They're only sending Negroes out on jobs," one white carpenter told me...
...It's taking a twist that's not too good," Brennan noted...
...Altogether the system, in the past, has worked against the admission of Negroes, not so much because of discrimination per se but as a result of the exclusionist practices rooted in the job consciousness of the unions...
...About two-thirds of these are classified as highly skilled, requiring an apprenticeship of three-to-five years before a worker is a fully-qualified journeyman or mechanic...
...They pay $4 an hour but a guy really has to earn it, hustling coffee-and that's not so easy up 60 foot ladders -and baskets full of iron bolts...
...In New York City, where Mayor John V. Lindsay has let it be known that he will use his authority to cancel municipal contracts of employers who discriminate, the NAACP chapter is recruiting a cadre of "qualified journeymen" for "surprise" picketing wherever such pressure might quicken the hiring of Negroes...
...In practice, this has meant a growing reliance upon competitive examinations that test aptitude or capabilities -preventing the old nepotism but not necessarily opening the way for Negroes or Puerto Ricans...
...Meanwhile construction, particularly publicly-financed construction, has been booming in most cities...
...It is no surprise to find Murphy and Green in great demand as consultants...
...The experience of the Workers Defense League's Apprenticeship Training Program with the sheet metal workers illustrates this process...
...If they want them, they can find them," I was told by Wendell J. Roye, the associate executive director of the Urban League of Greater New York...
...But a business agent of the Harlem Carpenters Local 1888 (285 Negro members...
...they're not status jobs...
...For at least three decades, the Negro has been doing our backbreaking work in the North...
...Only 10 per cent, as against the 80 per cent in the past, were children of sheet metal union members...
...Roye conceded that "top Negro graduates probably are not going in for apprenticeships...
...When I asked Scott Green, the first Negro sheet metal worker apprentice, about discrimination on the job, he told me, "There hasn't been anything out of the ordinary...
...We're asked to send, say, 50 people and we can't...
...Target for demonstrations is the new U.S...
...Competitive examinations or "objective standards" now required by state law for state approved apprenticeship programs actually reinforce the raising of apprenticeship standards...
...Some of the white craftsmen indicated that they felt that some construction jobs-laborers, cement work and the unskilled and semiskilled generally-were "Negro jobs...
...Courts have already held that the unions cannot force the employes of such contractors off the job, even though they are non-union, since the unions have denied them membership...
...None were taken on...
...Unemployed white craftsmen, naturally, shared the sentiment...
...Louis where court injunctions now bar such walkouts on the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Arch and at a Federally-financed suburban housing development, Primm Gardens in Elmwood Park...
...One possibility is the use of War on Poverty funds for the renovation of slum buildings by unemployed Negroes working under the guidance of skilled union craftsmen or other instructors...
...Negro youth do often suffer disadvantages rooted in the education they get and often lack the motivation needed to succeed in apprenticeship training...
...But pre-apprenticeship training is not of much use if there are not enough apprenticeship openings available...
...Non-farm laborers have declined steadily from 9.4 per cent to the labor force in 1940 to about 5 per cent at present...
...During that same period his aspirations have been rising steadily, with the next step up being entrance into the ranks of skilled workmen...
...The unnecessary upping of apprenticeship qualifications is indirectly confirmed by building trades unionists who complained to me that employers push up apprentice standards as a way of getting "cheap quality labor...
...We feel that 'affirmative action' is another 'spec' in the contract, a clear obligation assumed by the contractor...
...He admitted two non-white apprentices last year...
...Federal standards for compliance with the equal opportunities provisions of the Civil Rights Act were recently tightened considerably by a Presidential order requiring contractors to take "affirmative action" to insure that employment is nondiscriminatory...
...But to join the electricians, plumbers or sheet metal unions, say, as a journeyman, you must have five years experience in the industry (which in some instances may be had by working for a non-union firm on the fringes of the industry), live in the Metropolitan area for three years and pass a journeyman's qualification examination...
Vol. 49 • August 1966 • No. 17
