One of the most curious situations going on in the political arena is the strong support construction unions get from Black elected officials and traditional civil rights organizations.
One of the most curious situations going on in the political arena is the strong support construction unions get from Black elected officials and traditional civil rights organizations.
This blind and unconditional love affair going on even though construction unions are the most racist organizations in the nation and defies all common sense. It is more than 44 years since the Civil Rights Act, and the construction trades are no better today than they were during the struggles of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Unions, per se, have been great and progressive, but the construction trades have hidden behind the “skirt” of that legacy to prolong their exclusive and discriminatory ways.
The same unions that put out a “contract” on the life of Dr. Arthur A. Fletcher when he went around the nation implementing Executive Order 11246 and the Civil Rights Act are still resisting diversity.
That made it easy for us to convince President George W. Bush to prohibit Project Labor Agreements involving federal money. PLAs are agreements that prohibit any business other than a union shop from working on a specific project.
Show me a PLA, and I will show you Jim Crow employment plus a locking out of most Black-owned firms that happen to be nonunion most of the time. A Project Labor Agreement is a license to discriminate against Black workers.
We showed President Bush that on the Wilson Bridge Project in the DC area if we were to have a Project Labor Agreement like Maryland as opposed to Virginia, it would reduce Black labor by 70%. When the President banned any PLA on the bridge, he actually said, “I want to support small business and stop discrimination in the work place."
That was a great moment for Black employment and business development.
With the new elections, the love affair between unions and the Democratic Party is about to emerge again. That is fine with me except with the bigoted construction unions. I feel that instead of screaming and complaining, perhaps this is a great time to make a long overdue change. Let’s make the construction unions integrate. President Elect Obama has promised groups like the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers that he will end the ban on PLAs.
As he makes good on this promise, we must be vigilant and qualify each and every PLA. We must look at the demographic goals of each geographical area that are set by the US Department of Labor and match that with the current capacity of the applicable construction unions. In essence, if a major project is going up in Chicago or Detroit, we must see what the standard is for Black employment (laborer, journeyman, foreman, management, etc) in that market. If the construction unions do not have those numbers in their ranks, then we should file a complaint and stop the “set up” for discrimination. We have no other option.
Let’s remember how the City of Detroit had less than a 10 percent Black workforce on their new baseball and football stadiums (the city is 83 percent Black!) because of a stupid PLA.
Sooner or later the discriminating union halls are going to get the message and start recruiting Blacks within the ranks once and for all.
When the Indiana Pacers needed their new stadium built, the construction unions demanded a PLA. The Indianapolis Republican Mayor Steve Goldsmith saw that he needed to do this to get funding from the democratically controlled state legislature.
The Honorable William Crawford, Black State Representative and Chair of the Budget Committee, showed the Wisdom of Solomon. Here was his deal: The state will put up the money, but there will be a PLA providing that the Department of Labor standards are met.
The unions got their way, the mayor got his money and Black employment and contracting wouldn’t suffer. However, it was indeed creative how the unions met those numbers.
Anywhere a PLA pops up, the chamber will be there to scrutinize, challenge and call out any discrimination. Eventually our leaders and the unions will realize that it is 2009, and doing the right thing is the only thing they can do.
Never again will we close our eyes, turn our backs or simply ignore institutional racism. We will fight and kill it. Yes we can!
Harry Alford is the co-founder, President/CEO, of the National Black Chamber of Commerce Inc.
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