WHAT UNIONS ARE-AND ARE NOT-DOING FOR BLACKS

Organized labor and the black community are on a collision course.

--Herbert Hill, national labor director,

N.A.A.C.P.

They have a long way to go, but there is no question that they have come a long way. The militants want instant solutions for all problems. Of course, they are not going to get them.

--George Meany, president,

A.F.L.-C.I.O.

THE clash between those two viewpoints kindled tensions again last week in Pittsburgh, where 3,000 demonstrators paraded through downtown streets to demand more construction jobs for Negroes. "Freedom! Freedom!" chanted the marchers, as they raised clenched fists, waved black flags and circled building projects manned by unions whose memberships are almost exclusively white. More than 1,000 white demonstrators--clergymen, suburban housewives, students and even a few businessmen--marched along with ghetto militants.

The leaders of a coalition of black organizations are pressing for a guarantee of 2,500 journeymen's jobs in the Pittsburgh building trades over the next two years. After last week's march, the second in a month, contractors and unions offered 200 jobs but demanded a survey of the black community to see who wanted them. Incensed at such tactics, black leaders broke off negotiations. U.S. Labor Secretary George Shultz, responding to an appeal from Mayor Joseph Barr "to resolve the explosive situation," rushed a three-man mediating team to the tense city.

The Pittsburgh protests and similar outbursts in Chicago reflect the increasing determination of embittered blacks to force organized labor to drop its color lines. Negroes have picked the nation's 17 construction unions as the prime target because most of them still practice flagrant racial discrimination. The protesters' ultimate aim is to rouse enough public and political pressure to compel all unions to give blacks equal access to skilled, well-paid jobs. In Buffalo and Chicago, the N.A.A.C.P. this month filed the first of a threatened series of federal lawsuits to block publicly financed construction until unions, contractors and the Government comply with equal-opportunity laws. Until that happens, warns N.A.A.C.P. Labor Director Hill, "there will be more Pittsburghs."

More than Bigotry. The vast majority of unionized Negroes belong to industrial unions, notably the auto workers, steel workers and garment workers, in which they mainly hold jobs of low pay and skill. The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union has managed to negotiate big pay raises for cutters and pressers, who are mostly white, while settling for minuscule increases for many of its 150,000 nonwhite members. In construction, Negroes make up about 35% of the laborers' union. Black membership is also high in the so-called "mud trades"--bricklaying, plastering, hod carrying--that white workers increasingly shun. There are few Negro electricians, sheet-metal workers, glaziers, plumbers or pipe fitters. Particularly in the South, there are still several hundred segregated all-Negro locals--in the machinists, carmen, railway clerks, paper mill workers and other unions.

Labor promises reform, but so far has delivered only tokenism. As long ago as 1962, the heads of 119 A.F.L.-C.I.O. unions signed an anti-bias pledge at the White House. Yet today, Negroes account for only 1 1/2% of the 15,000 members of building unions in Boston. In Chicago, there are three "minority" journeymen among 900 boilermakers, two among 625 elevator constructors, and only one among 400 glaziers. Industrial unions sometimes have separate lines of promotion and seniority based on race. Nepotism, though on the wane today, has long been the principal way to gain admission to scores of union locals. Notably in craft unions, organized labor does not discriminate just against Negroes; it discriminates against almost everybody by trying to keep the labor pool lower than the number of available jobs.

Despite federal court rulings that race must not be a consideration in promotions, assignments or seniority, the United Papermakers angrily threatened to strike Crown Zellerbach's plant at Bogalusa, La., after the company agreed to end discrimination. After a lengthy legal battle, five New Jersey locals of the International Association of Bridge, Structural and Ornamental Iron Workers agreed for the first time in 1966 to admit Negroes into apprenticeship training. Today, only a handful of blacks have broken into the locals.

Labor's most successful device for excluding Negroes is rigid control of apprenticeship training. Applicants are often required to pass aptitude tests that include wholly irrelevant questions. Plumbing apprentices, for example, get problems in algebra and trigonometry. On top of that, most apprentices must start work at half of a journeyman's pay and stay in training for three to five years, a period that many experts consider at least twice as long as necessary. Union officials contend that the system is vital to maintain standards of workmanship. "The apprenticeship program is so rigged that it would take a college-level black to get in," .says Assistant Labor Secretary Arthur Fletcher. "Why should a Negro who can be a college-trained engineer want to be a plumber?"

Status and Security. A few unions deserve high marks for fighting racism. The United Auto Workers and the United Packinghouse Workers have revoked the charters of some locals rather than compromise on discrimination. Top officers of the Transport Workers and the American Federation of Teachers have repeatedly pressed their locals to end bias. Many other union leaders insist that they must move slowly or be voted out of office by white members who consider the Negro's rise a threat to their own status and security. Disputing that belief, U.A.W. President Walter Reuther argues that on-the-job friction between white and Negro workers reflects poor leadership. "Where there is a moral commitment and initiative by labor leaders," says Reuther, "there will be no trouble with the rank and file."

Helped and encouraged by the U.A.W. leadership, Detroit automakers have hired thousands of Negroes during the past two years. Many were among the 60,000 hard-core unemployed who have gone to work in auto plants. On the other hand, despite mounting shortages of skilled construction workers, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. building unions admitted only 5,168 Negro apprentices last year, 3.9% of all new apprentices.

Avoiding Muscle. The Nixon Administration earlier this year began requiring contractors in Philadelphia to present detailed plans for hiring Negroes in order to qualify to bid on federal construction projects. George Meany and many contractors argue that the "Philadelphia Plan" amounts to a racial-quota system barred by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In response to an inquiry from Arkansas Senator John McClellan, U.S. Comptroller General Elmer Staats recently held that the plan is illegal. The Labor Department, backed by a contrary opinion from Attorney General John Mitchell, is pushing ahead anyway. It expects to extend the plan to federal projects in Chicago, Boston, Pittsburgh and other cities.

For all that, the Government has so far failed to flex its muscle to prevent unions from practicing racism. Beyond question, labor's power to deliver votes has played a part in such inaction. In return for promises not to discriminate, President Neil Haggerty of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. construction trades union received what he considers "personal commitments" from Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to let unions remain the sole judge of "the quality of our membership." President Nixon has made no such promise. Still, the Administration has yet to use its power under the 1964 civil rights law to seek injunctions against obvious patterns of discrimination. Last week the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette condemned Attorney General Mitchell for avoiding such litigation. The paper editorialized: "How can we lecture people to respect the law when the highest enforcers of the law seem indifferent to enforcing it themselves?"

Federal pressure could go a long way toward forcing recalcitrant unions to accept minorities. One helpful step would be abolition of construction-union hiring halls, if not by agreement with employers then by legislative fiat. Through various covert devices of favoritism in the hiring halls, many local officials prevent Negroes and other outsiders from getting a fair share of work. Unions should be compelled to give up exclusive control over apprenticeship programs and standards, although it may be arguable whether industry or Government should take over. It is hardly an accident that in most industries where companies control hiring, training and promotion, the Negro gets a far better break than when such matters are left in labor's hands. Unions could have been a powerful force in helping to elevate the American Negro. Where labor has failed, the Government sooner or later seems almost certain to move into the gap.

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