Constructing Affirmative Action: The Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity

5. Constructing Affirmative Action, 1970-1973

143 Chapter 5 Constructing Affirmative Action, 1970–1973 These “home-town solutions,” which are being substituted for the Philadelphia Plan, are a meaningless hodgepodge of quackery and deception, of doubletalk and doublethink. —Herbert Hill, June 30, 1970 In 1970 three trained steamfitters—George Rios, a Puerto Rican, and Eugene Jenkins and Eric O. Lewis, bothAfricanAmerican—were rebuffed when they attempted to obtain “A Branch” journeyman membership in New York City Steamfitters Local #638. The union refused to refer them to work, and they were refused jobs by all members of the local Mechanical Contractors’ Association (MCA). Wylie B. Rutledge, another African American, was rejected by the local JAC when he applied for apprenticeship as a steamfitter.1 Local #638 maintained two grades of steamfitters: “A Branch,” whose members were referred to lucrative, specialized jobs in construction, and “B Branch,” whose members worked primarily in repair shops, performing routine maintenance. The union’s A Branch admitted its first black steamfitter in 1967, but only after a probe by the New York City Human Rights Commission. The union did not maintain a hiring hall per se, since the MCA, an organization of steamfitting contractors in the city, maintained fairly stable work crews, moving them from job to job. The union and the MCA had a generally good relationship, and together they ran the JAC to the detriment of black applicants like Rutledge. Rios, Jenkins, and Lewis claimed that “employment was denied . . . because of the many barriers to membership and employment [which] included age and residence requirements, unnecessary long periods of apprenticeship and institutional training, tests which were not in any way related to the work to be per- 144 Constructing Affirmative Action formed, formal educational requirements and artificial restrictions on the size of union membership.”2 As the steamfitters’JAC received increasing pressure from the Bureau of Apprenticeship and Training to admit blacks during the late 1960s, it agreed to establish an affirmative action plan. What this meant in practice , as Rutledge discovered in 1970, was that the JAC would advertise the formation of each new apprenticeship class in a local black newspaper , the New York Amsterdam News, and then promptly reject any black applicant on whatever grounds the committee found most convenient. For instance, if most of the white applicants were residents of Staten Island and the blacks were residents of Harlem or Bushwick, the union would call it a Staten Island steamfitters’ apprenticeship class, exclude black applicants for failure to meet residency requirements, and grant a waiver to white applicants who resided elsewhere. If the black applicants lacked high school diplomas, the union would make high school graduation a requirement for admission and grant a family waiver to any white nongraduate who had a father or an uncle in the trade (indeed, George Meany had received such a waiver decades earlier). If the black applicants were all older than twenty-five years, the union would create an age limit and admit only the younger whites. Or if the blacks were under twenty-one and the whites were older, it would do the opposite. Meanwhile, the lie of the “Steamfitters Accepting Apprentices” advertisement blared out of the Amsterdam News, luring unwitting black youths into what usually amounted to little more than a waste of time.3 But not this time. Rios, Jenkins, Lewis, and Rutledge sought help from two organizations: Harlem’s Fight Back and Columbia University’s Employment Project. The brainchild of James Haughton, a local black activist, Fight Back was dedicated to fighting for fair employment in the New York construction industry. Haughton was a veteran of earlier successful pushes to get skilled blacks employed in the construction of the Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, the Harlem State Office Building (later renamed the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building), and the World Trade Center, and he had recently denounced the New York Plan, a union-devised knockoff of the Philadelphia Plan, as a “perpetuation of racism . . . not worth the paper on which it is written.” In 1964 he had founded the Harlem Unemployment Center, and by 1971, having renamed the center Fight Back, Haughton spent his mornings at job sites cajoling shop stewards and foremen to hire more blacks and his afternoons at his office on 125th Street in Harlem registering skilled black construc- Constructing Affirmative Action 145 tion...