The Hard Core in the Private Sector
Thimmesch, Nick
The Hard Core in The Private Sector by Nick Thimmesch Like the “proles” in George Orwell’s 1984, America’s unorganized and mute legions of “hard-core unemployed” refuse to be packaged and...
...The one discouraging aspect of the N.A.B...
...It stresses discipline, indoctrination, and “the rule of reason...
...Some argue for pre-job training, others for put-them-rightto-work...
...He chided them at the lunch for not having two black vice-presidents (as Pepsi does) and lamented how tough it is to be a sane, responsible black leader these days...
...The N.A.B...
...He hopes to be promoted to a more complicated pressing machine, where he would get $102.14 a week...
...Ex-convicts, including two-time losers...
...is just another group of do-gooders on a sabbatical from the rat race...
...Fine...
...GM decided to “focus on our organization” rather than the “prospective employee” because the “supervisor does, in some measure, determine whether a new employee is going to succeed on the job...
...And just as sales executives must meet quotas, so did the N.A.B...
...Then I was stockboy in a store...
...Kendall, then Pepsi’s international vice-president, told Nixon, “I’m dead if I don’t get a Pepsi into Khrushchev’s hand...
...The boss should assign his lieutenant the operating chore and “tell him that his success, not on the civic front but in the company, is dependent totally on his success in seeing that those thousand people get properly placed in the system...
...officials, in their second year, will pay less attention...
...probably the most valuable franchise at this moment in American business...
...The firms participating in N.A.B., particularly those which wouldn’t sign contracts for Department of Labor training money (MA-3, MA-4), soon learned there were too many ifs, ands, and buts to consider when confronted with real people...
...At the moment, Chrysler is training its new hard-core employees through four government programs, the most interesting of which is the “vestibule” program...
...There are arguments for mandatory compensatory education and for let-them-ask-for-it...
...Vestibule” training is a sort of 12-week dry run: trainees take math and communicationsskills courses, learn how to punch a time clock and use plant facilities, and go through simulated work conditions...
...President Lyndon B. Johnson wrapped a big arm around Henry Ford I1 and persuaded him to head N.A.B...
...The optimism must be tentative...
...can be called a conditional success...
...I’ve seen some strange things...
...A profile of the people hired and kept on the job showed that: 73 per cent are Negro, 17 per cent white, eight per cent of Latin origin, and two per cent “other...
...Kayser has already reorganized the N.A.B...
...and put it into action...
...It was a flop...
...Department of Labor as well as the politicians and labor leaders who pleaded on their behalf but never came up with workable solutions to their disadvantaged stat e. Finally the capitalists, through the organization of the National Alliance of Businessmen in 1968, decided to go after the problem...
...They stick with them through this and that...
...The goal of placing 100,000 hard-core by July 1, 1969, he said, was well over the top--146,000 had been placed by March 1. Sixty per cent of those hired were still at work...
...N.A.B.’s incoming chairman, Donald Kendall of Pepsi-Cola, told the diners: “...although you and I are good guys, because of the role you have played in the Alliance, that doesn’t mean that you were bad guys prior to the formation of the Alliance...
...He is one in a family of nine children and now helps support his mother and the three children still at home...
...All except one is a Negro...
...After last year’s riots, he decided to recruit hardcore blacks into his own firm...
...It benefits you...
...The hyper-active conscience of the auto industry is the United Autoworkers Union, whose expert on the hard-core is Jeff Washington, the assistant director of the union’s Manpower, Development and Training Department...
...As their acquaintance with it grew, a lore developed: these fellows never looked for work because they couldn’t read bus signs and were terrified of personnel departments...
...Once they’re hired, we use the advisor system...
...Indeed, as William Harris, assistant to the manpower administrator at Labor says: “Now that they’re in it, maybe they’ll go all the way and find all the disadvantaged...
...Nor was the plethora of acronymic programs of the Department of Labor...
...The “inverted seniority” plan offered to the Ford Motor Company would allow senior employees to receive high supplemental unemployment benefits (95 per cent of their regular pay) during layoffs...
...Unemployment in the preceding year averaged 25.4 weeks...
...Estimates run from one million on up...
...Some executives even began speaking their own version of With-It...
...Henry Ford 11, introduced as the man “who helped us realize that the business of business should also be soul business,” recited the record...
...among them were Whitney Young, executive director of the National Urban League...
...I think we could have a let-down in the second year,” Kendall said recently, “but if we appeal to businessmen’s competitive instincts, this thing will continue to go and get bigger...
...All too often we consider the impoverishment of some as punishment for their past sins...
...And to demonstrate that he understood, Kendall remarked: “Some of my conservative friends think that the N.A.B...
...yes, they’re absent a lot, but that’s because they’re not used to working...
...At least business has one year’s experience in this now...
...He has trained 63 such workers more than 5,600 employees at its inner-city offices and another 8,000 ghetto residents- hard-core and soft -at Ford’s regular off ices...
...for using federal money and for good old private enterprise initiative...
...Seventeen per cent were under 20, 70 per cent between 20 and 40, and 13 per cent over 40-an average age of 29...
...We took in 49 and have 13 left...
...at Ford and Chrysler, the figure hovers around 80...
...People accustomed to drifting can’t be expected to change that much...
...Personnel department pecksniffs are diminished for the moment...
...Business has only skimmed the cream...
...Business is Business “Pure altruism you won’t find in business,” said Erich Oppenheimer, 47, vice-president of manufacturing at Cat’s Paw...
...His feet have padded over the thickest executive rugs in the land...
...Whitney Young knows how to get to the business folk...
...It insists on hiring on its own premises and it still requires all applicants to fill out its standard &’-line application form (“If a man can’t do it, we’ll help him...
...As the most celebrated adventure in the recent national effort to locate, hire, train and keep the hard-core of America, N.A.B...
...Somewhere out there lay the “hard-core,” whoever and whatever they were...
...Chrysler’s with it too, now...
...Full-time father confessors...
...William Johnson, 21, referred to Cat’s Paw by the Concentrated Employment program in Baltimore, had been unemployed and living at home with his wife, his six-week-old daughter, and his 75-year-old grandmother...
...staff members) and says: “He’ll keep it going, if he’s given a chance...
...However, some of the essentially cultural barriers that had baffled or excluded hard-core applicants in the past-personnel departments, application forms, checks on police records-pretty much went by the boards...
...Roy Lebon, 20, is one of the few whites in the program at Cat’s Paw...
...He has slicked-back blond hair, is very thin, has a large welt on his left cheek, and seems greatly attached to the Negro supervisor who coaches him...
...The average education was 10th grade...
...That summer’s violence gave rise to urgent chatter about the role of the “private sector” in meeting the urban challenge...
...Johnson looked over the conditions and approved them...
...There was violence, and one guy got thrown down the stairs...
...He came to Cat’s Paw from the Job Corps, where he learned some math, reading, and spelling...
...A phone call from Henry has a way of triggering a hundred other this-is-damned-important calls: before long, 12,500 firms had pledged themselves to find jobs for the hard-core...
...But absenteeism runs high...
...Roche stood up there, saw the fires, and heard the shots...
...To show his fellow businessmen that he is a True Believer, Kendall laid it on at the N.A.B...
...There was plenty of Pepsi aboard the Nixon campaign plane last fall...
...Attitudinal training and concentrating on supervisors became more important than a man’s background...
...There is no formula for training and dealing with the hard-core...
...Getting them into jobs was one of our poorest experiences...
...Some people want to complicate the hell out of it...
...In another part of Baltimore, in a neighborhood where rioting occurred last year, sits a nondescript building with a small sign reading “Baltimore Electronic Associates, Inc .” Inside, its black president, Robert L. Douglass, 40, tells how his firm, an expanding business which sub-contracts from Ford and Bendix, got involved with the hard-core...
...Those who think it can be done in one more year are dreaming...
...The auto companies shudder to think about it, but it will come up in the next round of contract talks...
...The Hard Core in The Private Sector by Nick Thimmesch Like the “proles” in George Orwell’s 1984, America’s unorganized and mute legions of “hard-core unemployed” refuse to be packaged and placed...
...Today, after one year of trafficking with the hard-core, the N.A.B., in characteristic booster fashion, claims that it has already exceeded its goal of placing 100,000 on the job by June 30, 1969...
...But now, as N.A.B...
...It isn’t all good, but it’s mostly good...
...The businessmen not only exceeded their quotas (whatever that means), they learned once more that people are better than most of us are led to believe...
...The outgoing executive vice-chairman, Leo Beebe, provided theology and a pep talk...
...drifters named “Dynamite” and “Ding Dong...
...Most of them stayed on...
...He showed enough promise to be promoted to mill operator at $1.91 per hour...
...Lewis Moore, president of American Oil Company, fancied himself so hip to the problem of urban blacks, that he justified his firm’s involvement with: “We’re the cats with the bread...
...The average family size was four...
...was last summer’s program to find jobs for 200,000 disadvantaged young people...
...At Cat’s Paw, a group of 20 hard-core recruits are paid $11.35 each per day while learning the fine points of heel and sole manufacture in highly dusty circumstances...
...When Nixon came limping into New York in 1963 to practice law after the California disaster, the two men renewed their friendship, and Kendall accompanied Nixon on his forays...
...Some went to jail...
...marches into its Nick Thimmesch is a Washington columnist for Newsday...
...He heard more than that...
...they’re turning out much better than we expected, and if they’ll take some of the free basic education we’re offering, we’ll have some damned good workers...
...to accept any other assignment because you have got in the N.A.B...
...He receives all manner of phone calls from executives who would be disappointed these days if Whitney didn’t raise some hell...
...Ford reached into his own vice-presidential hierarchy for a persuasive and beguiling man named Leo C. Beebe to serve in N.A.B.’s top operating job as executive vice-chairman...
...One of our old guys yelled at one of the hard-core trainees and the kid started crying...
...His mother, four brothers, and one sister lived for years on welfare...
...is often considered a hopeless gesture in a hopeless situation...
...Kendall realizes that Henry Ford 11 is a hard act to follow...
...I got in vandalism trouble...
...Whitney knows them...
...There is more good -than bad in the program...
...I like this job better...
...The hard-core person usually becomes a reliable worker sooner than employers expected...
...Ford, a political supporter and sometime social companion of Mr...
...The President and Kendall became friends in July, 1959, when Nixon was in Moscow having his kitchen debate with Khrushchev...
...That’s a lot more than I made as a jumper off a newspaper truck,” testified William H. Smith, 23, who has done a little of everything since he quit eighth grade...
...We needed them and they needed us...
...They know nothing of alphabets or agencies,” he says of his charges...
...unmarried mothers looking for birth-control pills...
...We continue to be influenced,” he said, “by the obsolete, puritan ethic of charity, which believes in the right of the haves to determine how much the have-nots get...
...raised its goal of placements to 614,000 by 1971, it isn’t clear whether many of those hired wouldn’t have come into jobs on their own...
...And the free-enterprise approach had triumphed: two out of three placements did not involve government contracts...
...Black people need to see “their shade of sun tan” at the top, he said, so they can aspire...
...Mayor Richard D. Hatcher, of Gary...
...and men who were called “misfits” until they reached their forties and wanted one more chance-all were recruited, hired, and trained...
...officers feel competitive urges to meet their quotas of hard-core hirees, though the quotas were never made public...
...The angriest remarks came from Hatcher, who lambasted the Administration’s ABM proposal and charged that businessmen wanted it because of defense contracts and fear of a peacetime economy...
...You name it and we’ve had it,” he says of the hard-core program at Cat’s Paw...
...was such a sure thing, Beebe said, that a man “would have to be an idiot to fail in this job...
...While the N.A.B...
...Faces As more and more were hired, businessmen became reacquainted with the pluralism of American society and the mysteries of human nature...
...and the organization would be relatively free of the Labor Department guidelines and definitions which most businessmen consider hogwash...
...He decried “fancy new programs” and warned that breaking the hard-core problem starts with a commitment by the top individual in any company...
...Henry I1 staffed N.A.B.’s headquarters with Ford men, and the regional chairmen assigned top men from their own companies to run the regional offices...
...If he is pushed to explain why his huge corporation won’t sign contracts with the Department of Labor to provide pre-employment training (at a cost to the government of about $3,000 per trainee), Seaton finally smiles and says: “Cuz...
...a more thorough assessment of its merit is not yet possible...
...The union itself has signed a $2,135,000 contract with Labor to provide on-the-job training for 2,000-including 500 hard-core-and has farmed out much of the work to several major corporations...
...He said the jobs found by N.A.B...
...Many executives who got into the hard-core game became fascinated...
...This way, argues the union, the newer employees, including the hard-core, would be kept on the job...
...Unfortunately, our present system of welfare perpetuates this myth all too often...
...In the working session preceding the heavy-caloried luncheon, 13 speakers bathed the businessmen with rich praise, great challenge, dark warnings, and heartening numbers...
...Louis G. Seaton, GM’s vice-president in charge of personnel, makes it clear that GM wants to run its own show...
...By that, Washington means reliance on Labor Departmentfunded programs and UAW proposals like “inverted seniority...
...Its new management classes will be thoroughly inculcated in the techniques of working with the hardcore New Work Force which GM now sees as inevitable...
...fathers (they do exist...
...Johnson, agreed to head the new alliance, provided that: there would be an independent policy board...
...and Pearl Bailey...
...The deal was set...
...And even Labor Department bureaucrats are saying that the businessmen made it in the hard-core game where they had failed...
...Henry I1 became chairman and J. Paul Austin, president of CocaCola, vice-chairman...
...He makes $90 a week before deductions...
...We have a lot of absenteeism...
...When asked if he had ever heard of the term “hard-core unemployed,” he said no, then added: “It’s better to work than not to work...
...Preferential treatment is the order of the day, and the businessmen feel glad they have Whitney...
...The company has little interest in going hand in hand with the government on its hard-core programs...
...After being in the hard-core business for five years,” said William J. Harris, assistant to the Manpower Administrator at Labor, ‘we realized we weren’t reaching them...
...he could pick his own man to run the operation...
...Lebon’s father was in a mental hospital for seven years...
...Our job is to make the organization work in a big sense, to get corporations to start programs in all their branches and local units, to put this into the medium and small towns of America...
...it prides itself on systematic thinking and efficient organization...
...It’s going to take 15 to 20 years to reach all the hard-core...
...into the world’s trouble spots...
...Some disappeared...
...General Motors, although not the largest employer in Detroit, is still the largest corporation in the world...
...Some had disabilities...
...Henry I1 got on the phone and recruited board members from the nation’s executive cream to head N.A.B.’s operations in eight regions...
...college graduates who never found themselves...
...I don’t know where I can go from here...
...I’m encouraged by what we’ve done here...
...He now remarks about education: “I don’t want any part of it, I hate it...
...were “pathetically little...
...A chart relating family size to income (farm and non-farm) was issued...
...Johnson grosses $90 a week...
...When they complete the 20 weeks of training, the trainees become regular workers, receiving $1.88 per hour, plus bonuses for piecework...
...Lawrence J. Washington, 55, a New Orleans-born Negro, is the labor-relations staff man at Ford with primary responsibility for shepherding the hard-core into their jobs...
...But fortunately for us, the angry poor have adopted a wait-and-see attitude...
...We’ve got to keep it out of the political arena...
...It is nearly two years since Chairman of the Board James M. Roche of General Motors looked out over Detroit’s West Grand Boulevard and watched smoke and fire rise from the neighborhoods below...
...With 26,621 already hired-more than double its quota-it clearly has the largest...
...We provided a job coach, finances to get started, legal services-the whole bag...
...There is also the possibility that N.A.B...
...He did not attack the ABM directly, but he did warn the businessmen that unless there is a comparable expenditure for “the internal threat in this society,” the outside enemy will be insignificant...
...Kendall has installed his lieutenant, Paul Kayser, Pepsi’s vice-president of industrial relations, as Beebe’s successor...
...It’s not really complicated, putting a man in a job...
...Nixon obliged, and Kendall wound up serving Pepsis to the entire Soviet brass, a well-photographed and publicized event...
...I got us into this program because we wanted to hire people and felt an obligation to upgrade their skills...
...Washington staff with an eye to enlargement of N.A.B...
...They know there’s jobs somewhere, but they feel they can’t get at ’em, and they’re afraid of tests...
...Birthday Party The N.A.B.’s big day of rhetoric and observance came on March 15, 1969, when it held its second annual conference might have been lost, for in the cavernous room were the President of the United States, most of his cabinet, Walter Reuther, and top executives from 500 of the nation’s largest corporations...
...But critics point out that only 55 per cent of GM’s hard-core recruits are black...
...They started from scratch,” says Kayser of his predecessors, “and what they did was monumental...
...second year, with the baton passed to President Nixon’s old friend, Donald Kendall of Pepsi-Cola, the businessmen and their partners at Labor have come to realize that: No one knows how many hard-core there are in the U.S...
...His immediate ambition is to buy a car and a better television...
...A.D.C...
...Chrysler is Detroit’s biggest employer and, after the riots hit the city, Chairman of the Board Lynn A. Townsend decided that hiring the hard-core was fine but that broad education and training for ghetto people should also be part of the picture...
...GM may also have the best long-range training program in the auto industry...
...Some of my liberal friends think it is a group of fat cats running scared, that we are trying to buy off the angry poor...
...The best proof that GM is thinking long-range on the hard-core is its elaborate “New Work Force” program, designed to change attitudes of the present and future generation of managers...
...family income, $2,773...
...Since their discovery several years ago as one of our industrial democracy’s principal shames, the hard-core have defied the wizards at the U.S...
...Leonard Klishis, 26, is the personnel director of the grimy Cat’s Paw heel and sole factory in Baltimore...
...Many companies flailed about trying to hire blacks...
...We hired a basic education outfit, but trouble developed...
...I quit school in the 10th grade and mainly ran the streets after that,” Johnson said...
...Nixon was Pepsi’s lawyer...
...Henry Ford I1 dismisses such suspicions of Kendall (some expressed by N.A.B...
...from 50 to 125 metropolitan areas...
...conference...
...There are probably millions of invisible hard-core...
...There should be a total program...
...has clout...
...Most of the newcomers make under $100 a week...
...Our retention rate is 56 per cent...
...To the skeptics, N.A.B...
...A recession could lead many a businessman to backslide into epigrams like “Some people just don’t want a job...
...Many manpower experts across the country are beginning to question the solidity of N.A.B, success statistics...
...We learned that maybe what is good for the so-called hard core is also good for all our employees,” said George Jacoby, GM’s director of personnel relations...
...But will the well-intentioned businessman’s current urges for social responsibility and uplift survive a slowdown in the economy and a plentiful supply of labor...
...He was 18 when he reached 10th grade, so he quit school...
...But business can’t do it alone...
...We can only change this image by our immediate and forthright action-not pie-inthesky promises, but action...
...resist the temptation...
...These companies are well-intentioned, particularly Ford,” he says...
...Its official baptism as the National Alliance of Businessmen came in the President’s Manpower Message to Congress in January of 1968, as did its acronymic governmental partner, JOBS (for “Job Opportunities in the Business Sector...
...GM’s approach to the hard-core is characteristically earnest and businesslike...
...There was an appropriate sprinkling of blacks at the conference...
...Its retention rate for the hard-core is 60.6 per cent, highest among the Big Three and only 1.3 per cent below its overall retention rate...
...But their own institutionalized personnel departments, accustomed to screening people out rather than in, weren’t much help...
...The N.A.B...
...It does not countenance nonsense...
...A majority of them showed, in the first year, that they would stay on the job...
...But the businessmen pretty much ignored the Labor Department’s definition of what a “hard core” was-“a poor person who does not have suitable employment” and who is any of the following: (1) a school dropout, (2) minority member, (3) under 22 years of age, (4) over 45, or (5) handicapped...
...some favor special attention for the recruit, others belong to the leave-him-alone school...
...He has been roommate to Henry Ford I1 on overseas trips...
...President Johnson dispatched White House assistant James Gaither to Detroit to ask Ford to muster businessmen in 50 cities to hire, train, and retain-the words later became N.A.B.’s motto - hard-core unemployed who would be referred by anti-poverty and other social agencies...
...He admonished his fellow executives to “keep it simple” and to stick to the Alliance-“ go find jobs for these people and do it by the numbers...
Vol. 1 • May 1969 • No. 4
