They swarm onto the South Side street fired up for another “cracker-jacking,” as they call these protests aimed at construction sites filled mostly with white workers.
Once they got so excited they grabbed shovels and tools out of workers’ hands. They’ve also been arrested for trespassing.
Usually they just mill around, young and old, jobless and job-starved construction workers-swept up by the hopes stirred by activist Eddie Read, president of Chicago Black United Communities, a grass-roots community group.
This self-appointed Pied Piper began his protests two years ago and stepped them up this summer.
Read picks his targets almost at random, relying on tips or a street-corner head count of white faces.
On this sweaty afternoon, he tells the roaring crowd that 70 percent of Chicago’s building trades jobs must be theirs to make up for years of racism. Nothing else will do. Nothing.
And the high-paying jobs must be turned over now. This minute.
Such tactics infuriate building contractors and union leaders. They anger white construction workers, embarrass blacks on the job and fan a corrosive resentment among minorities. This is extortion, they say, nothing more.
Yet the truth is, Read has a point-and an important one.
A generation after the civil rights awakening of the 1960s, building trades jobs appear beyond the reach of many Chicago-area blacks. Whatever the reason-and racial discrimination, whether blatant or institutional, undoubtedly plays a major role-far fewer African-Americans are in the trades than their numbers would suggest.
This is true for all parts of the region, the 1990 census shows, whether you take the city of Chicago or Cook County alone, or look at the entire metropolitan area from northwest Indiana all the way around to Kenosha, Wis.
African-Americans comprise 20 percent of the region’s population. Yet they account for only 9 percent of the workers in its largest trades-carpenter, electrician, plumber and painter. In some unions, the disparity is even wider.
More Top Picks Best Compression Shirts For Autism
“For black males, this industry could have been one of the major job sources, given the erosion of the industrial sector,” said Herbert Hill, professor of industrial relations at the University of Wisconsin, referring to Chicago’s 1980s building boom that transformed the Loop skyline.
“But it has not, because blacks were blocked out.”
Veteran cement finisher Grady Alexander is one black male who knows about being blocked out.
The U.S. Department of Labor this spring got back pay for him and a black co-worker after they were sacked from a Kennedy Expressway repair job while white workers with less seniority were kept on.
The foreman for Pittsburgh-based contractor Dick Enterprises made statements like, “This is white man’s work,” Alexander told investigators.
“We were laid off a week before Thanksgiving,” Alexander said. “That kind of hurts you, especially when you’ve got a family.”
The best measure of whether the industry is giving black workers their fair share would be a job count at Chicago-area construction sites-and a quick look certainly shows there are few or no black hardhats at many jobs. But in general, solid figures just aren’t available in that form.
Unions and contractors must supply minority membership and employment data to the government, but they rarely make it public. The government is reluctant to release the data on the grounds that doing so would make the unions and contractors clam up, and has rejected most Tribune Freedom of Information Act requests.
But the evidence that is available shows that exclusion and harassment of blacks persist in the industry. For example:
– While Chicago’s population is nearly 40 percent black, only 14.6 percent of the city’s carpenters, the largest skilled trade, are black. In contrast, Hispanics, who account for 20 percent of Chicago’s population, make up 21 percent of its carpenters, according to the 1990 census.
– In the metropolitan area, only 44 of 1,456 carpenter supervisors are black-none from outside the city of Chicago, the census shows. And only 9 of 529 plumber/pipefitter supervisors are black-again, none from outside Chicago.
– In the carpenters union only 11 percent of 1,875 apprentices were black as of June, according to U.S. Bureau of Apprenticeship and Training figures. Of 54 apprentices who completed the program this spring, one was black.
– At the $287 million main post office being built in Chicago, even the government is failing to meet its minority-hiring goals in the skilled trades. And this is despite the fact those goals are widely acknowledged to be minimal and outdated. Only about 11 percent of the skilled-trades hours on this project have been worked by blacks.
Though minorities have complained for decades about discrimination, some unions continue to ignore court rulings and government warnings. In a consent order last year against Pipefitters Union Local 597, which agreed 20 years ago to raise its minority ranks, a federal court monitor said a “culture of racism has permeated and continues to permeate” the local. The union refuses to talk about the case.
This exlcusionary attitude is particularly harmful in a region such as Chicago, where as much as 85 percent of new-construction work is done by unions.
The problem is not unique to the area. Across the nation, it is not unusual to find mostly white faces in the building trades even in areas with large numbers of minorities. About 12 percent of the U.S. population is black, but less than 5 percent of its 1.28 million carpenters are black, the census shows.
There may be other explanations than discrimination. Some contractors, for example, say it is bad business to constantly change work crews to meet minority hiring goals. So, too, there is a long tradition of hiring family and friends in construction jobs.
Much construction work has also shifted beyond the city’s core to the suburbs and even farther. This has caused transportation problems for minorities concentrated in Chicago.
The construction industry’s collapse in the early 1990s also squeezed out of the trade many of those last hired: black, female and other minority workers.
And there are the broader reasons such as the failure of the schools-or society itself-to prepare some blacks for the workplace.
But it is clear there is no lack of interest in trades by black and other minority workers.
Job-placement officials in Chicago with the state Department of Employment Services say minorities account for the overwhelming share of their apprenticeship program referrals. Several unions themselves point out that with help and support minorities have great success getting through their programs.
And it is clear the other problems can be overcome.
Some unions, either from pressure from the courts or by their own will, have begun to open their doors to a greater number of minority and female workers.
And at the McCormick Place expansion project, which started in mid-1993, nearly 34 percent of skilled trade work and 66 percent of the lesser-paying laborer-level work goes to minorities. The reason: close monitoring of hiring by state and local officials.
“It can’t be done unless there’s commitment, because it doesn’t happen naturally,” said Daniel Walsh, president of Walsh Construction Co., which is erecting the 9-1-1 center building being built by the City of Chicago, another project getting high marks for its affirmative-action work.
When there is not continued tough enforcement, though, minority hiring falls quickly by the wayside.
A U.S. Labor Department review of the main post office construction project in downtown Chicago from June 1992 through April showed only 10.8 percent of the skilled-trades hours were worked by blacks and 6.4 percent by Hispanics. Since 1970, the federal government has required minorities to account for 19.6 percent of the work done on government-funded projects.
Black men and women worked 10.8 percent of carpenter hours, 10 percent of electrician hours and 8.7 percent of pipefitter hours. Among iron workers, who worked the most hours on the project during the time period, only 5.6 percent of the hours were worked by African-Americans.
The figures seem especially stark when set against the fact the project is federally funded and monitored for minority participation. It also is the headquarters of a Chicago postal district work force that is nearly 80 percent black.
Laborers, who earn as much as 30 percent less than the other building trades workers, are the only workers on the project whose minority ranks are high. About 31 percent of laborer hours were worked by African-Americans and another 31 percent by Hispanics.
Daniel Araiza, the U.S. Labor Department’s federal contract compliance chief, admitted he may have been “remiss” in not looking at the poor numbers posted by minorities in the skilled trades on the project, which his office is in charge of monitoring.
More Top Picks Irlen Syndrome After A Concussion Or Tbi What To Know
“We’ve been looking at minorities in terms of overall numbers, not by trade, but there is concern there as well,” Araiza said.
These figures translate into dismay for job-seekers such as Hope Mayes, 29, a single mother, who searched for most of this year for a job so she could qualify as a journey-level carpenter, which requires 5,500 work hours.
Weekly when she called the carpenters’ apprentice school in Elk Grove Village she was told there was no work. When she went to seek jobs on construction sites, it was even worse, she said.
The carpenters do not run a hiring hall, so most of their members find work on their own.
“There is a lot of intimidation when you are by yourself. I have walked in a trailer and looked for a job and every damn face in there is white and everything stopped and every eyeball is looking at me,” said Mayes.
In frustration, she joined Read’s protest group. That paid off with a highway job adjacent to the McCormick Place expansion project.
On the work sites, these demonstrations have drawn very mixed reactions, however.
“I don’t think it’s right at all,” complained Tim Ayres, a white cement finisher from Broadview working at McCormick Place. “Some people aren’t capable of doing the work-but I’m not saying minorities can’t do the job.”
Some black construction workers, even those who can’t get jobs, are equally uneasy about the tactics.
Kerry Gale, an iron worker at the McCormick Place expansion project, said Read’s approach creates bad relationships on the job site for workers who do get hired that way. “There are more intelligent ways to do it,” he said.
On the other hand, Terry Morrow, a laborer unemployed for several months, joined Read’s protests in early June and eventually got a laborer’s job with Mellon-Stuart, a Pittsburgh-based contractor.
“Nobody wants to go to gangsterism, but you have to get your point across some way,” said Morrow, a Marine veteran. “I have a family like any other person. And I feel I should have a fair shot at getting a good job.”
———-
Monday: Some building trades unions still fight to keep blacks out, while others are just starting to open up.