Roger Berg will tell you-he is not one of those angry white males looking for somebody, anybody, to blame for the economic turmoil around him.
He knows he’s not the first middle-aged white man to discover that the rungs up the corporate ladder get slippery and hard to reach. And he knows that downsizing, a term that didn’t even exist when he joined Ryerson Steel Co. 22 years ago, is a given in a struggling industry that once could claim the omnipotent title “Big Steel.”
Berg has little to complain about anyway. He has a good job, as a customer-service specialist at Ryerson Coil Processing, now a subsidiary of Inland Steel Industries. He likes his co-workers. And, unlike tens of thousands of others in the steel industry, he hasn’t lost anything.
Except that warm sense of security, the bedrock belief that he can still advance and prosper in a turbulent economy.
That’s why the needle on the 46-year-old’s emotional thermostat flickers when he talks about his midcareer acquaintance-affirmative action-and the volatility he believes it has injected into his life.
“You have some very vocal minorities finally being listened to who are pushing very strongly, and that sometimes concerns me,” Berg said during a midmorning break.
“I’ve felt threatened, very definitely,” he concedes. “But I also have enough confidence in my own ability.”
In a company that is scrambling to compete against sometimes ruthless international competition, the effort by Inland and its subsidiary, Ryerson, to diversify the work force may prove a far more intricate and difficult undertaking.
The one-story Ryerson complex, in the historic Pullman community of Chicago’s Far Southeast Side, offers a state-of-the-art technological response to the competitive threat from overseas. But there is no high-tech answer to Berg and his co-workers, no laboratory research and development that will tell them where they fit in a company that nearly 60 years ago defined itself in a magazine ad as “The Mill & the Men . . . That’s Inland.”
The debate over affirmative action may be the rage in Washington, D.C., but at places like Ryerson Steel, as well as at thousands of other workplaces nationwide, the issue is far more complex and personal than it is political.
This “is all about personal security and self-esteem,” said Vivian Cosey, Ryerson’s general manager for human relations. “It goes to the core of who we are, not just what we are.”
From hundreds of workplace interviews conducted by Tribune reporters in the last three months with people on all sides of the issue, it’s also clear that even the best-intentioned efforts to provide equal opportunity on the job run into enormous obstacles.
And it’s apparent that regardless of the political debate, many companies are coming to grips with affirmative action because of reasons that have nothing to do with the law.
Study after study indicates that job growth in the next 10 years will be dominated by women and minorities. As a result, an issue that had always been framed in the context of a moral imperative-equal rights-is now being driven by workplace efficiency and the green tint of money.
Affirmative action, however defined, is quietly gaining momentum in the private sector. It is taking root in Chicago-area companies like Allstate Corp., Ameritech Inc., First Chicago Corp., Leo Burnett Co. and Inland, the nation’s fifth-largest steel company.
And, to many of these companies, what happens in Washington is practically irrelevant. “Affirmative action may be under fire in Washington, but we are going to stay on track and stay true to the company’s culture,” Sandy Nelson, Inland’s president, told a recent meeting of managers.
“If we made an attempt to go back to the ’50s and ’60s, our corporation would lose its edge,” said John Villard, Washington, D.C.-area human resources manager for Allstate Insurance Co., which launched an aggressive effort to recruit minority salespeople to, as many companies do, serve the growing minority population.
Beyond the image
Inland Steel is a curious champion of equal opportunity in an industry that, for more than a century, could be characterized by two words: white and male.
Though the upper levels of the company, like nearly all major corporations, remain overwhelmingly white male, it is changing below.
Inland provided Tribune reporters unusually open access to its employees to discuss its effort to change not only the gender and complexion of the company, but to get employees, through mandatory diversity and sensitivity training, to understand cultural differences and why a mixed work force is important.
“The answer isn’t in the numbers,” said Steven Bowsher, Inland’s 46-year-old vice president of sales and marketing and the engine driving the company’s diversity program.
“We’re talking about basic human dignity here. We’re not talking about changing your politics.”
It is, however, all about changing attitudes, a change that cannot be mandated, legislated or otherwise brought about quickly. Inland’s diversity effort is part of a complex and sometimes poignant story affecting individual dreams and expectations of workaday Americans in an economy that seems to offer scant hope of long-term security.
Their stories provide an intricate human rebuttal to the media tendency to present affirmative action in terms of polar extremes-black and white, male and female, Republican and Democrat, good and bad.
There is no final conclusion to be drawn, because the effort is ongoing. In its own tortured and complex way, it is a window on America.
It opens onto the lives of people like Paula Dent.
The 46-year-old Dent is the day-shift production supervisor at Ryerson Coil Processing. She is black, a native of North Carolina, and-because she’s one of only nine women in the 147-worker steel processing plant-the hard-hatted Dent is conspicuous as she easily maneuvers her golf cart around the machinery and coils of steel.
Dent, who had been a supervisor in another Chicago plant, has held this job 2 1/2 years and feels she has earned the respect of her mostly male work force.
Dent recalls during the early 1980s at another Chicago manufacturing plant seeing applications for the Ku Klux Klan, and she expresses relief that the days of overt hostility are apparently over. Still, echoes of tokenism, quota-filling and reverse discrimination linger.
Weary of the sniping, her response is direct and typical of other women and minorities at Ryerson and elsewhere: Shrug it off and work harder to prove the doubters wrong. Dent has no doubts about her qualifications, but she harbors no illusions about why she is where she is.
“What I’m doing is not strictly on my own ability but is also filling a need of the company. I always felt that I could be counted as two, a woman and a minority,” she said matter of factly. “I felt I was qualified, but that doesn’t always open doors. Sometimes the powers that be don’t see the qualifications.”
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Even when they do, the victors in job competitions-especially women and blacks-shoulder an unwanted burden. Being a “twofer” can help going into the interview but hurt coming out. Talk of tokenism is “a fact of life,” albeit unfortunate, Dent said. And it has not lost its sting. “I wouldn’t say it doesn’t bother me, but it doesn’t annoy me enough not to take the job. That’s the reality. I wasn’t going to say `no’ to this.”
To Dent and others-namely minorities and women-affirmative action means being given a chance where a chance did not previously exist. But the equal opportunity that sounded so simple, so rooted in logic when Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act 31 years ago now carries negative baggage.
Part of that stems from the actions of the private sector itself. By hiring and promoting strictly on the basis of race or gender-with little regard to qualifications-companies have instilled a sense of cynicism that often surrounds affirmative action efforts.
Susan Sjodin, a senior outside sales representative at Ryerson, was one of 10 children, including six boys, growing up in rural Minnesota. “You fought for everything you got,” she said of herself and her sisters, each of whom moved into male-dominated professions.
Before coming to Ryerson last spring, the 47-year old Sjodin spent 14 years at another Chicago-area steel company, one of only a few women in the work force.
“My knowledge from being in the industry has allowed me to earn their respect,” she said. “I’ve been in male roles for a long time. I accepted challenges and don’t look at them as hurdles.”
Following new rules
The fine line between challenge and hurdle is an important one, which is why companies like Ryerson have to be aware of rumors and signs of potential trouble that can undermine work-force morale. This is a tough challenge, especially when lifelong employee expectations are factored into the equation.
For many white males, especially in the steel industry, affirmative action means a loss of what has grown to be a sense of entitlement. “They’re taking something away from me,” said Chet Lucianek, a buyer and a 21-year Ryerson veteran. “I know there were no promises . . . but the rules are changing and will continue to change.”
Perceptions of affirmative action are powerful. A 1994 poll conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago showed that the vast majority of those polled believe that less qualified blacks will get job preference over whites. But when asked if they, family members or friends had witnessed such actions or if they have seen examples of this at work, no more than one in five said they had.
References to the “angry white male” bring a slight smile to the face of Paula Dent.
“They’re mad because it’s not as easy as it used to be. Hey, I’d be mad, too,” she said with a laugh. “Maybe it’s not fair that it comes in your generation. But it’s not fair that others in my generation and those before me didn’t have the same chance, either.”
Jo Ann Kata, who describes herself as “white, South Side Irish,” says white men have little cause to complain. “It doesn’t seem to me that any white males are lacking,” said Kata, who works in sales administration. Then she added: “But this is a personal thing.”
But it is not all-consuming. Pat Goeringer, Ryerson’s second-shift supervisor, doesn’t see herself as a big beneficiary of affirmative action. She approaches the debate about diversifying the work force just as she would fixing a break in the electrical system: You do it and then get back to work.
“I think white males have a right to complain about reverse discrimination, because they might get passed up,” Goeringer said. “I think it’s wrong to blame white males for everything that’s gone wrong . . . it’s not fair.”
Dividing the spoils
Some black men complain that their job opportunities are being eroded by women and Hispanics, who are making the greatest inroads in the job market. Franklin Turner, a buyer at Ryerson, is one who feels the black male, an intended beneficiary of affirmative action, is becoming more of a victim.
“Broadening the definition of minority has diluted it. It confuses the issue,” said Turner, who said the promotion policy has white and black females ahead of black males.
Turner firmly believes the political attack on affirmative action will only encourage companies to back away from diversifying their work force because they feel a retreat is politically acceptable.
“White males will always find a way to evade the issue, and if you give them an opportunity to delay and stall, they will,” Turner said emphatically.
Sure, the work force is changing and the security of whites is threatened, Turner acknowledged. “I have to understand what they’re going through, but they don’t understand what I’m going through,” he said. “That’s hard.”
Inherent in the process, said Nathaniel Lott, a district sales representative at Ryerson and black, is an inequ-ity that says “minorities are required to prove themselves to an extent not required of non-minorities.”
Jackie Page, a customer-service representative, discovered that when she came to Ryerson seven years ago, she was judged by stereotypes. “I felt I had to work harder, but I’ve always been an overachiever,” she said.
“It’s up to the individual to succeed. It’s not up to the company to make sure you succeed. . . . People should be promoted if they are qualified.”
At Ryerson, corporate downsizing took a 30 percent chunk out of the blue-collar work force and 20 percent from white-collar ranks.
There is an almost certain prospect of more layoffs at Inland, which has elevated anxiety levels, and the potential competitive threat of affirmative action seems to have heightened it.
The issue sometimes comes up in talk around the office.
“People react negatively to the way it is portrayed in the media, which is quotas,” said Cosey, the company’s human resources chief.
“Our employees have a concern that what they hear in the media will happen, that they won’t get an opportunity. They hear that white males won’t have a job . . . but then we show them the numbers and say, `Here is the reality.’ “
Reality struck Bowsher, the son of a truck driver and housewife from a blue-collar neighborhood in Kankakee, in 1989 when a group of frustrated black employees in the Inland sales department complained the company was not offering equal opportunities to minorities and women. After being convinced of the inequity, Bowsher implemented tough sensitivity training for mid- and upper-level managers, led by Charles King, who ran a diversity consulting service in Atlanta. The reverberations of what followed still are being felt.
The thrust of the sensitivity training is that whites are responsible for the economic plight of blacks. This is a controversial premise and approach that many executives at other companies flatly reject, but it is one that Inland embraces as a means to establish a foundation of discussion and understanding.
“This is a very difficult issue here,” said Lucianek. “I’m a white male. You go into these sessions and they say you are the problem. This guy (King) is there to intimidate and make me look like a horse’s ass. And he was pretty successful at it.”
Those sessions were followed up with a series of diversity training classes in Chicago designed to make employees more sensitive to cultural differences.
Lucianek said he feels “positive” about the sessions, because “we’ve learned to respect individuals.”
“But I’m concerned, for selfish reasons,” he said. “If we’re on equal footing, I want an equal shot.”
Not everyone feels he or she has had that.
John Velasquez, a production scheduler who has worked at Ryerson since 1976, has only to walk out of his cubicle and look through the glass partitions to grow impatient with the reality behind the glass: The top leadership in his office is white and male.
“Whites get tired of continually hearing about how they’re to blame,” Velasquez said. “And I agree. There’s too much backlashing. So we now have an understanding.
“It’s beautiful, in a sense, but there’s no way we’ll change society.”
Many Ryerson employees say cultural barriers are coming down because training sessions have thrown people together who would not have otherwise interacted. Mike Martinelli, a customer-service specialist, said people are more sensitive to differences now.
“A lot of things are perceptions. If you can get those misconceptions eliminated, that’s good,” Martinelli said.
This Ryerson facility is in the shadow of industrialist George Pullman’s rail plant, in the community where Pullman tried and failed to create a dream town, free from the conflicts of daily society.
This effort has a long way to go. Diversity training has not yet reached into the blue-collar ranks, where machine operators Michael Erkan, Lorenzo Orona and Lance Ermon-one Turkish, one Hispanic, one black-have worked as a team for 4 1/2 years.
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They have worked well together, they say, because individual respect comes from hard work.
“It’s not the same here on the floor,” said Orona. “Here you can talk straight. You can’t do that in the office.”
Watching and waiting
Though workers generally say they accept the company’s claim that it is not engaged in quota-filling, there are plenty of unofficial monitors of the hiring and promotion practices at the office: the workers who watch this social engineering with a keen sense of self-interest.
“If you look at hiring practices of the past 24 months, you can’t say that that one there is fishy or that one didn’t make sense,” Martinelli said, adding there has not been a large-scale swing, one way or another. “So, many different people are looking at things from a different starting point.”
And that is the nub of the problem: Affirmative action swirls around in a caldron of expectations and frustrations, molded by race, gender, education, upbringing and economic status. Little wonder there is conflict.
Martinelli said the really difficult decisions-those dealing with promotions to upper management-have not been made. In many ways, that will be the ultimate acid test of the company’s commitment to diversity.
Roger Berg and Paula Dent and John Velasquez and Franklin Turner will not be the only ones watching.
This is, after all, a personal thing.
———-
The three-part series
Sunday: Diversity in the workplace is a way of life for many companies-and with good reason.
Monday: For many workers, the promise of affirmative action remains far from fulfilled.
Tuesday: The doors can open for everybody when a company is determined to make it happen.