We met for lunch at his favorite place in Greek Town and right away it was clear that Paul King, one of Chicago’s biggest minority contractors, had something to get off his chest.
“With all the grief going on in the black community, with all the drugs, the crime, the unemployment, why do they want to go into the one corner where a little light is shining and snuff it out?”
He was talking, of course, about affirmative action.
More to the point, Paul King wanted to talk about the precarious state of government “set-aside” programs–the programs that have given companies like his UBM Inc. a toehold in the megabuck world of heavy construction.
I used to write about the big public works projects in town–the O’Hare Development Program, the McCormick Place expansion, the new Comiskey Park–and over the years King has become a valued source. Maybe even a friend. He’s no angel, but in his business, angels get their wings clipped. King knows where the side doors are located in City Hall (He was one of the African-American businessmen who took heat for organizing a re-election fundraiser for Mayor Richard Daley) and he can cuss rings around any cement crew foreman.
Even so, his UBM Inc. has a reputation for showing up, for finishing on time and for staying within budget. UBM does not, like certain minority-owned contractors of yore, quietly subcontract their work to white-owned companies, while taking a cut off the top.
In the early days of set-asides such shams were the bane of King’s existence, which is one reason he was such a good source.
“Not only did they steal jobs from blacks,” he says of the shams “but they provided the anecdotes that are now fueling the fires against affirmative action.”
Actually, the current attack on set-asides is much more fundamental than complaints about a few bad apples. The entire notion of officially favoring one race or gender is under political and legal attack. Resentful white males and the Republican majority they helped send to Congress are out to deep-six government-sponsored affirmative action programs, period. And earlier this month the U.S. Supreme Court, which has been known to peek at the election returns, threw out a Colorado set-aside program because there was no direct evidence that minority contractors there had been discriminated against.
That ruling doesn’t affect Chicago’s “25 and 5” program, which requires that 25 percent of city contracts go to minority-owned firms and another 5 percent to female-owned. Not long ago, the Daley administration redrew the city’s program so as to acknowledge historic discrimination here in the building trades–a wrinkle that was missing from the Colorado program.
But the handwriting is on the wall. Congress is going after affirmative action, and Bill Clinton’s political handlers are advising the president he’d be a fool to get in Congress’ way.
All of which had Paul King waving his fork at me over his Greek salad.
“In 1969, when we started marching and shutting down construction sites, there were no blacks in the ironworkers union or the sheet metal workers. I mean zero. None. And there were no black contractors to speak of.
“Then Nixon came up with this idea of black capitalism. That, with a little help from government, you could start some black-owned companies that would have a ripple effect in the black community. And you know what? It worked. Look at UBM. Over the last five years we’ve paid $11 million in wages, $4.2 million in payroll taxes. And we haven’t only helped blacks. About half our people are white, especially in the trades where it’s still hard to find qualified minorities.
“At first we were getting a special break but pretty soon the industry found out we don’t have horns, that we do the work, and so now we get calls from the big outfits who say, `Hey, that last job worked out OK. Why don’t we get together again and bid on this bigger one.’
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“Now we’re actually competing against the big boys on a low-bid basis. We’re doing the concrete at the new University of Chicago diagnostic clinic not because we’re minority, but because we had the best price.”
Over coffee and baklava I tried to explain to King the thinking of the resentful white male. Like the contractors who under-bid minority firms but don’t get the job. And the taxpayers who get stuck paying the difference. And most importantly, the white construction workers, none of whom ever owned slaves, who must wait at the hiring hall while blacks with less experience get the call.
“But we’re only asking for a tiny piece,” Paul King shot back. “The biggest white-owned contractor in America does $25 billion a year. All the black contractors in America don’t do $2.5 billion. You’ve got 5 million construction workers in this country and only 250,000 of them are black. There are more Hispanics in construction than there are blacks.
“Slavery has gone,” he went on, “but not racism. The epithets are gone but the access is not there. You know the figures for black unemployment. You know the poverty and the despair that’s out there. Affirmative action has been the one ray of hope. It hasn’t worked in every field, but in mine it has been a big success. And now they say we don’t need it anymore? Now they’re going to take it away?
“If that happens,” he said, “we’ll be marching again. We did it in ’69. Some of us remember how to shut down a job site.”
The problem with that, I cautioned as we parted, is that white America might not respond the same way it did in ’69.
He just shook his head. “Affirmative action has become the new racial sound-bite. It’s a shame. It was working.”