Fight Against Bigotry Advances as Demographics Change
Not long ago, many employers and unionists in the construction industry had no compunction about loudly telling rotten jokes about their racist and sexist policies that excluded women and blacks and other minorities.
Such open bigotry wasn’t confined to construction, although that industry was a sore point and was symptomatic of the devastating problems caused by discrimination toward a majority of our population.
Some progress has been made, and it’s nice to know that the racist and sexist “humor” once bandied about so cruelly is pretty much gone these days.
One doesn’t often hear the kind of remarks that used to be made by some high-rise construction supervisors and relatively well-paid iron workers. These jobs often require workers to handle huge pieces of iron and steel while balancing themselves on narrow construction beams high above the ground.
Asked why no blacks or women held such jobs, many white workers and their bosses would scoffingly give what became a standard reply: “Hell, everybody knows blacks and girls can’t stand heights.” Laughter usually followed.
Responses like that don’t go over well when offered in court as evidence by plaintiffs in discrimination cases.
Laws discouraging such blatant racism and sexism were helpful, indeed essential, but prejudice in employment remains, imposing cruel economic punishment on its victims and thwarting essential utilization of the increasing number of women and minorities in the work force.
In recent years there has been a dramatic increase in women in the work force. But, unfortunately, many women have been forced to take jobs--not always attractive ones--because the declining real income of the average worker during the Reagan years has meant that one income isn’t enough to support a family these days.
There has been a meaningful increase in the variety of jobs opened to minorities since the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. But unemployment among minorities is still distressingly high--black unemployment is more than double that of whites--and far too many blacks continue living in poverty.
Maybe one can be encouraged by the improvements in job availability and variety for women and minority groups as a result of the very existence of the 1964 law and other federal and state civil rights measures.
But much more is needed than anti-discrimination laws. And it looks as though help might be at hand.
The fight against discrimination is growing stronger because of demographic changes that should hit two sensitive pressure points: employer profits and union membership. Both are already being affected by the dramatic increase in the number of women, minority members and immigrants entering the work force.
Before another dozen years go by, an astonishing 84% of all new workers will come from these three groups of people.
Employers must have them to fill job vacancies, and the profit motive should put much more muscle in the fight against discrimination than laws that prohibit it.
Unions, which were prime forces supporting enactment of civil rights legislation, will need those new workers as members to avoid further erosion of their strength.
But the need for those workers will not alone bring them into the work force, particularly not the members of minorities. Despite the costs, they must get a far better basic education than they now receive and then extensive training for skilled jobs--the number of which is increasing much faster than the number of jobs for which little or no skill is required.
Management, labor and government must all be involved in the effort to utilize the potential talents of the new entrants to the work force, even though most unions have little to say about employers’ hiring and promotion policies. If the boss of a unionized company hires few women or minority members, few will be in the union.
But unions do have a major voice in hiring practices in some industries, primarily in construction, and since women and minority workers were once rarities in that industry, unions there have long been a target of civil rights advocates.
There has been a major increase in the number of women and minorities in apprentice programs, offering interesting but not conclusive evidence that unions and management in the industry have made meaningful gains in curbing their once-blatantly discriminatory practices.
For example, in 1964 women and all minorities combined made up less than 10% of all workers in California’s apprenticeship programs, which is by far the largest such program in the nation. Now they make up 46% of all California apprentices.
The largest increase has been among Latinos, who now make up about 20% of the state’s apprentices; women make up 10.5% of the total and blacks, 9.8%.
Those once-exclusive iron workers had no women among their approximately 1,000 California apprentices in 1964, only five blacks and about 50 Latinos. Now minority members and women make up 34% of the 1,000 iron worker apprentices: 18% Latinos, 6% blacks, 5% women and 5% others.
Stanford Law Professor William Gould said those figures indicate dramatic progress. But he notes that many women and minority members who get into the apprentice program don’t end up with regular jobs in the industry, partly because of the steep decline in the unionized sector of the construction industry.
Even more positive is Eugene P. Janvier, deputy chief of California’s Division of Apprenticeship Standards, who says women and minorities complete the programs with about the same success rate as white males and then get into unionized jobs.
Robert Georgine, head of the AFL-CIO Building Trades Department, says a similar success pattern prevails nationally.
But there is a minority view: Herbert Hill, who for decades has been perhaps the harshest critic of discriminatory practices by unions and management, says that nothing much has really changed. Hill, now a professor at the University of Wisconsin, was for 25 years the national labor director for the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.
“Unions in the industry have just made a strategic accommodation to the requirements of the laws through the apprenticeship programs, but few blacks and women finish the program--and of those who do, few actually hold union cards,” he fumed by phone the other day.
However, it is clear that at least some progress in the fight against discrimination has been made as a result of civil rights laws.
Much more can be made, but only if the next Administration rigorously enforces those laws and if employers and unions respond sensibly to the pressure of diminishing numbers of white males and take advantage of women, members of minorities and immigrants as the primary source of new workers.
Former PATCO Leader Working for Dukakis
President Reagan’s destruction of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization in 1981 just might have a negative impact on George Bush’s presidential effort in California.
Charles Sheehan, a leader of the now-defunct PATCO, which endorsed Reagan and Bush in 1980, has been named as labor coordinator for the Michael Dukakis campaign. Sheehan is still boiling mad over the injustice done to him and his fellow unionists seven years ago when Reagan showed no mercy--as well as bad judgment--in permanently firing thousands of the air traffic controllers after they went on strike.
Sheehan’s understandable anger could translate into votes for the Massachusetts governor.
Sheehan was selected by William R. Robertson, head of the Los Angeles County Labor Federation, who says that another labor issue that should help Dukakis in California is the massive campaign that unions are mounting for Proposition 97. That is an initiative to restore Cal/OSHA, the state’s valuable health and safety program that was killed by Gov. George Deukmejian, thereby increasing the threat of job-site dangers to workers.
The measure has wide popular support, according to the polls and, if all goes well, it should bring out the labor vote for both it and Dukakis. Back in 1958, another popular labor issue, opposition to a so-called right-to-work measure, helped elect Democratic Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown by an overwhelming margin.
