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.