Working in the White Man's World

If business fails us, there is no place to go.

--Richard Clarke

Black Management Recruiter

TO be a black seeking a job today is in many ways like being an immigrant in one's own country. Like immigrant groups of the past, blacks are victims of mass suspicion and slander--that they are too lazy, or too pushy, or not bright enough, or have aptitudes unsuited for the world of work, or do not fit in. Immigrants --Poles, Scandinavians, Italians, Irish--have overcome similar slanders and made their way ahead. But blacks are indelibly different. Because of their color, they cannot blend into the national melting scene as others did. In today's technological economy, they generally lack the education and training to move up. Yet that is the vicious circle: they cannot escape the ghetto and the inferior ghetto schools until they get at least an equal chance for jobs and promotions.

Many unions and corporations remain closed to all but a token number of "showcase" blacks. That is one reason why unemployment is usually twice as high among blacks as among whites and climbs alarmingly to 25% for Negro teenagers. The nationwide jobless rate is 4,2%, but it is 7% for blacks. The anti-discrimination laws have certainly been circumvented in the job area. As long ago as 1941, President Roosevelt signed an executive order forbidding discrimination by defense contractors; the 1964 Civil Rights Act forbade discrimination in most jobs. Yet, despite frequent violations, no supplier has ever lost a Government contract as a result of barring blacks. Help-wanted ads usually carry the legend AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER, but company personnel managers often do as they see fit, and many blacks call the classified section "the funny pages."

While discrimination exists on all levels of the economy, the focus of attention lately has been on the blue-collar trades. In the unionized trades there is an unwritten rule: the higher the pay, the harder for blacks to get in and get ahead. At latest count, in the high-paying trades--plumbers, sheet-metal workers, electrical workers, elevator constructors--less than 1% of the workers are black. Philadelphia counted proportionately more blacks in skilled trades 70 years ago than it does today, although its black population has increased by 1,000%.

Elite and Excluded. Even A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany admits that the elite unions used to "discriminate against everybody." The unions have loosened up lately, but still work with special dedication at the job of excluding blacks, who might offer direct competition for jobs and housing. In order to create an artificial shortage of skills and keep wages up, unions tightly limit their membership lists. Existing jobs are often parceled out to friends, relatives and neighbors, or at least to persons of the same ethnic group. Blacks are concentrated in the low-paying "trowel trades" and building services, mostly as common laborers.

Black rage today concentrates on the building trades largely because construction work offers some of the best opportunities for well-paying jobs in the central cities. The 17 unions in the building crafts--including the carpenters, plumbers, bricklayers and painters--control employment on construction jobs. The control is exercised through union hiring halls, where lists of available jobs are called out, or else simply by word of mouth; blacks are seldom told the news. Discrimination is often abetted by contractors who "checkerboard" their few black workers, shifting them from job to job to give the appearance of complying with equal-employment regulations.

Herbert Hill, national labor director of the N.A.A.C.P., warns that blacks and unions "are on a collision course." Demonstrations last summer in Chicago, Pittsburgh and Seattle showed what happens when they collide. In Pittsburgh, 40 people were injured in clashes between police and black and white demonstrators. At one site Nate Smith, a former professional boxer and at that time head of a self-help organization called Operation Dig, dragged a superintendent to the edge of a fifth-floor framework and told him, as Ebony magazine reported, "Look, m.f., if you don't hire my men, I'm gonna drop you." The superintendent hired eleven men.

Dodge and Delay. One immediate issue dividing blacks and union leaders is the apprenticeship system, in which trainees undergo a four-or five-year learning period before being admitted as full-fledged journeymen. Blacks charge, with considerable justice, that the system is often used more as a barrier than as an entranceway. Only 4% of the apprentices in the union-regulated programs are black. Union leaders argue that the apprenticeship system is necessary to maintain a high standard of skill. It takes only 16 months to train an Air Force jet pilot but five years to train a plumber. George Meany's rationale for that: the plumber must learn a greater variety of skills (Meany is a plumber). If blacks pass the rigid written tests needed to enter the apprenticeship program, they often fail the commonly rigged oral exams. One egregious case is that of Anderson L. Dobbins, a black who tried for four years to get into a Cincinnati electricians' local. Finally, he was admitted--but only after a federal judge found him better qualified than most of the union's white members. Letting the unions determine just who can or cannot become an apprentice is, in the words of the N.A.A.C.P.'s Hill, "like letting George Wallace decide who can vote in Alabama."

The A.F.L.-C.I.O. has responded with "Apprenticeship Outreach." A program that the union federation runs in cooperation with the Labor Department and several civil rights groups, Outreach offers special pre-apprenticeship training to ghetto youngsters. They are tutored for six to twelve weeks, mainly in math and reading comprehension, in preparation for apprenticeship exams. The program has been less than a great success, partly because blacks find it difficult to believe that after decades of discrimination they are now welcome in the blue collar areas. Since it began in 1967, Outreach has placed only 5,633 blacks, 56% of them in the construction trades.

A Zero Quota. An important test is under way in Philadelphia, where the Nixon Administration is backing a new approach. The "Philadelphia Plan" obliges contractors on large federal projects to increase their proportion of black workers from about 5% now to 25% in five years. The unions bitterly oppose the plan and, allied with contractors, are contesting it on the grounds that black or any other minority-group quotas would violate the 1964 Civil Rights Act. There are indeed reasons to worry about the ultimate consequences of quotas. Other "left behind" minorities might start demanding their own quotas of better jobs. Next they might argue that some groups are "overrepresented" in certain fields--too many Wasps in banking, too many Jews in education and communications--and that their numbers should be systematically reduced. Blacks angrily retort that they have always been subjected to a quota, usually a zero quota. They feel that quotas, having been used to keep them out, now should be used to get them in.

The labor picture is brighter for blacks in the big, broad industrial unions than in the narrow, elitist crafts. Unions like the teamsters and the auto workers take in most of the workers in a plant, from sweepers to production specialists, and seldom have a vested interest in restricting members. Companies do the hiring, and the new employee automatically becomes a union member. The United Auto Workers has encouraged the auto industry to hire and train people from the ghetto, and management has often acted conscientiously.

Fully 13% of General Motors' employees are black, as are 20% of Ford's and 21% of Chrysler's. But relatively few rise to jobs where they boss white men. Detroit's chiefs are trying to do better. Henry Ford II, for example, has established a department of urban affairs, endowed with a capable staff, money, and power to act, to ensure equal opportunity throughout the company.

The National Alliance of Businessmen has had only limited success with its much-publicized JOBS program (for Job Opportunities in the Business Sector). Under it, the Government gives grants averaging $2,260 per man to companies that hire and train the hard-core unemployed. The program has placed 380,000 men and women in jobs since 1968, and has a goal of 614,000 by July 1, 1971. Many of the biggest U.S. companies participate, but JOBS has not effectively reached smaller firms, where much discrimination persists. Despite constant rumors that companies apply for high federal grants to train maids and dishwashers, most jobs are in clerical work and machining trades or other manufacturing. A more valid criticism is that trainees are put into dead-end jobs that quickly bore and frustrate them. Not surprisingly, nearly 50% of those hired under the program have left their jobs.

Blacks sometimes find direct, militant action more effective than Government programs. Retailers have been an especially vulnerable target. Last week in Pittsburgh, for instance, Sears, Roebuck and Co. capitulated to a boycott by the N.A.A.C.P. and the United Black Protest Committee and agreed to employ up to 30% blacks in its city stores as well as 15% in the suburbs. Sears further pledged to conduct a black recruiting program, promote deserving blacks to management jobs and provide "sensitivity training" for all employees to acquaint them with the black workers' point of view. Beyond that, Sears will consider preferential buying for black-manufactured goods and encourage equal employment among firms with which it deals.

Clash of Values. The best-intentioned companies find that they must work hard not only to train ghetto workers but to keep them on the job and overcome their ever-present fear of being rebuffed. For almost anyone from a ghetto, the world outside seems unfamiliar, bewildering and often hostile. Precisely because blacks have been segregated and barred from good jobs, schools and housing, they have developed a separate and different culture. It does not always put a premium on the white man's values of work, thrift and discipline. To the ghetto dweller, the job is often secondary to other interests and demands. The New York Telephone Co., which teaches its black employees remedial reading, geography, elocution and grooming, cites the typical case of a Harlem woman who stayed home from work to baby-sit when her mother was called away. Baby-sitting has a high priority in the ghetto but is seldom an excuse for skipping work in the white world. The telephone company tries to put its new girls beside experienced black operators, whom it calls "big sisters," to learn both discipline and skills on the job.

In offices and executive suites, blacks face more subtle problems. Whitney Young Jr., executive director of the National Urban League, has a vivid description of how the world of white-collar work appears to a black man. "We can still usually tell what floor we are on in a corporation by the whiteness of it," he says. "In the basement, it might be all black; on the first floor, it's sort of polka dot. But as you go up, it gets whiter, and soon you get near the top, and except for that guard or receptionist out front you don't see many blacks." Certainly the union leaders have a point when they complain that integration is being forced on them while business has been slow to integrate its of fice staffs and executive ranks. A recent survey of 441 of the largest U.S. corporations and some universities showed that blacks accounted for 7.9% of the employees but not more than .9% of managers and officials and 1.2% of professional staff members.

Part of the problem is that many companies have long promoted only from within, from white staffs, and most blacks are brought in at the lowest levels. Since 1966, the 1,900 largest U.S. banks have more than tripled their share of black employees to an average of 6% . Heading the list: Chase Manhattan, Chemical Bank and Bankers Trust. But almost all the Negroes are clerks or tellers. There are practically no black executives in banks, brokerage houses or accounting firms. Of the 1,366 seats on the New York Stock Exchange, one is held by a Negro. Only four blacks are known to be directors of major companies.* For blacks, there are practically no corporate heroes to emulate.

Policy Sabotage. Top management often makes a no-discrimination proclamation but neglects to get the message across to department supervisors --the men who actually hire, fire and promote. The result is a type of policy sabotage that Tom Sims, a black advertising man in Manhattan, calls the "not-in-my-department syndrome." That is, in spite of orders from the summit, middle management resists and undercuts the policy of equal opportunity. The resistance is not necessarily based on racism. Some supervisors are simply reluctant to depart from the status quo or make the considerable extra effort to provide training for employees from the ghetto, many of whom start without basics that a new white employee would know.

Sometimes blacks are hired simply for their statistical value in winning Government contract awards. An entirely white company, for instance, might come under criticism from civil rights groups and then find it difficult to get new federal contracts. A recruiter for one large textile firm, interviewing business students at Atlanta University, confided, "We want a token nigger."

There are a number of companies, however, that offer real opportunities for black managers, supervisors, lawyers, accountants and engineers. Those firms are generally founded on the newer technology, in which competition is so intense that discrimination is a costly luxury. They tend to have young managers and are located near university centers or in communities that have a tradition of liberalism. They are also growing faster than established companies and offer more rapid promotion. In the eyes of many black management recruiters, IBM rates highest. Polaroid, Xerox, Control Data and Honeywell also offer considerable opportunities for blacks, as do many food, liquor and clothing companies, which make products that blacks buy in large quantities. The fewest opportunities are generally in big, old industries that have a record of political conservatism. Among them: steel, paper, airlines and railroads.

Invisible Ceiling. Wherever a black man happens to be on the economic scale, his race weighs heavily upon him. "You can never, unless you know people well, feel comfortable," says Gilbert Daspit, 36, a sales trainee with American Can Co. in Chicago. "Breaking into the economic mainstream, you realize how culturally deprived you've been. I have found myself eating at much better restaurants than I'd been accustomed to, and being ill at ease as a result of wondering constantly 'Am I doing this right? Am I picking up the fork right, folding the napkin right?' Of course, through practice you learn, but this is something that white people just don't realize exists within the black man."

In all but a few companies, blacks feel that they bump up against an "invisible ceiling," usually at a salary level of about $15,000 a year. Fairly frequently, a black executive is given a big title and small responsibility. He is put in charge of something like "special markets" (meaning Negro markets). If he is in a management line job and reaches a certain level, he is shifted off the executive escalator into a staff position or limited department with scant chance for further promotion.

Making it, rising close to the top, does not erase the dark doubts. Only about 25 black men have climbed to vice-presidencies in big white-owned corporations. The first to do so was Harvey Russell, the PepsiCo community affairs chief, who eight years ago was named a vice president. "Even though I was proud, I remember at the time feeling that all the attention just pointed up the gross inequities," he says. "It made me even more aware of how little progress really had been made." Russell considers that "much of what industry does today is a smoke screen."

One of the troubles at the top is the relative immobility. "With a white executive," says Russell, "if you get to the point where you are reasonably high, then the headhunters, the executive recruiters, are swarming all over you. With blacks, we're either too old, too young and inexperienced, or we're statesmen"--meaning that blacks often have executive perquisites but no real authority. "I would find it difficult." Russell adds, "to say with a straight face to any young black person, 'Come into industry. Everything's fine.' "

Whatever his talents, the black is still likely to rise slower and stop sooner than other Americans. If blacks are to be convinced that business' commitment to equal opportunity is sincere, top management must sooner rather than later address itself to the question of discrimination in the executive suite. While the emphasis now is on finding qualified black management trainees, many blacks have been in business long enough to expect promotions to the policy-shaping field. Other minority groups, for example. Italians and Jews, encountered similar barriers in making their way to the top and in some companies are still kept out. But the barriers are breaking down for them, and it is entirely possible that history will repeat itself in the case of America's blacks.

* Former General Sessions Court Judge Samuel R. Pierce Jr., a director of both Prudential and U.S. Industries; Robert C. Weaver of Metropolitan Life; Asa T. Spaulding of W.T. Grant; and Daniel A. Collins of Harcourt, Brace & World.

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