Interchange: In This Issue

By Betty Norwood Chaney

Vol. 1, No. 9, 1979, pp. 2

This issue of Southern Changes is devoted primarily to the plight facing the workers of the South. We dedicate it to A. Phillip Randolph who died May 16 at the age of 90. Not only did he give 70 years of his life to the labor movement, he is also called the father of the civil rights revolution. Inhis birthday mesage to America on April 15, presented in “Soapbox,” he lauds the role of trade unions: “It is the trade union movment that has fought to preserve the minimum wage, to keep the CETA jobs programs in tact. And it is the trade union movement that has mounted a major effort to organize low-paid and exploited workers throughout the South.”

In this issue, we carry two in-depth articles about the struggles of workers trying to organize in the South and the obstacles they encounter.

Tony Dunbar in “The Old South Triumphs at Duke” relates the efforts of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)union to organize wage workers at Duke University. Duke, a cener of learning, erected upon the lofty principles “to develop a Christian love of freedom and truth” and “to promote a sincere spirit of tolerance,” responded by hiring an anti-union consulting firm. These “Chicago union busters” as AFSCME called them, launches the kind of campaign against AFSCME and Duke laborers that makes Dunbar conclude that the “New South so ably represented at Duke University is not really much different from the old.”

The second piece, Phil Wilayto, a member of the Center for United Labor Action, offers a vivid, heartrending account of the Steelworkers strike that brought silence to the yards of the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company for 11 weeks this past winter as workers fought to win recognition for their union. Although unsuccessful this tim in their attempt to establish a union, the attitude of the workers following the strike is “We aren’t broken. We’re regrouping, we’ll be back and we’ll get our union.”

Probably the most important affermative action case since Bakke is the United Steelworkers of America v. Brian F. Weber, known familiarly as Weber. It could affect all voluntary affirmative action for racial minorities in the nation’s work force. In our third piece onlabor concerns, Laughlin McDonald, Southern director of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, details for us the factors involved in the Weber case. He determines that ultimately it is voluntary compliance that will eliminate the need for state and federal enforcement agencies.

Our Action Patterns department this issue outlines “How to File Complaints and Civil Suits Against Job Discrimination,” and the SRC Publications section lists materials available from the Council that relate to affirmative action and the employment of Blacks and women.

In addition, this issue carries an assessment of the 1979 legilative session of the Georgia General Assembly. Look for more analyses of this nature in Southern Changes as we enter our second year of publishing in September.

In closing, along with A. Phillip Randolph, we encourage you to take an active interest in the struggles of the Southern workers. We look upon the plight of the low-paid and often exploited laborer in the South as being one of the most important issues facing us today. As Randolph implores in his parting remarks, “Please, join the good fight.”

Soapbox

By A. Philip Randolph

Vol. 1, No. 9, 1979, pp. 4, 23

Editor’s Note: Southern Changes dedicates this issue to A. Philip Randolph who died May 16, 1979, at the age of 90 after 70 years in the trade union movement. For many years he was head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and later president of the Negro American Labor Council. He was also the first Black vice-president of the AFL-CIO. The message carried here was delivered April 15 on the occasion of his 90th birthday and conveys his convictions and feelings concerning the trade union movement.

I am happy to have this opportunity to address my brothers and sisters as I celebrate another birthday, this one being my 90th.

For most people, birthdays offer an opportunity for careful personal reflection. They are a time for taking stock, a time for evaluating the course of events. Now, as I mark the beginning of my 91st year, I wish to make a few brief comments about the difficult challenges confronting Black people and all American workers.

In many important respects, today’s challenges bear a striking similarity to the problems we have grappled with for decades. Essentially, they are problems of economics and problems of politics. And, most important, they are problems which cannot be solved in isolation from the overall society.

Consider for a moment the plight of our Black youngsters. Throughout the nation, thousands upon thousands of Black teenagers and young adults have no opportunity of obtaining decent employment. They are forced to waste their talents, to waste their youthful enthusiasm, indeed, to waste their lives. To make matters worse, some political leaders dismiss this scandal as a necessity, a permanent feature of our economic system.

Consider also the condition of low-wage workers throughout the so-called Sunbelt, and throughout America’s great urban centers. Amid affluence and newfound wealth, thousands of workers Black as well as White – receive subsistence wages. And because so few have the protections of a union contract, they have no job security, no fringe benefits, and no rights in the workplace.

And consider the new political atmosphere in America, an atmosphere best characterized by crude conservatism and social defeatism. From every corner of the land, we hear demands for cuts in school budgets, social security payments, health care, and jobs for the unemployed. And we hear inflation blamed on the moderate wages of workers and the dismally low wages of those people forced to accept the minimum wage. Workers and poor people, the true victims of inflation, are everywhere scolded for their so-called excesses.

In my view, we have one reliable and steadfast ally – the trade union movement. And I make this statement based on 70 years of experience in the civil rights and labor movements.

Why the trade unions? The answer, I believe, is quite simple: The vast majority of Black people are workers, and the trade union movement, even with all its imperfections and failings, is the most effective, and most powerful defender of the interests of all American workers, Black as well as white.

At this very moment, for example, organized labor is spearheading the attack against the Administration’s so-called austerity budget. It is the trade union movement that has fought to preserve the minimum wage, and to keep the CETA jobs program intact. And it is the trade union movement that has mounted a major effort to organize low-paid and exploited workers throughout the South.

In the area of organizing, I hasten to call your attention to three crucially important campaigns, campaigns which hold special significance for Black workers. First, there is the ongoing strike by thousands of workers at the Newport News shipyard in Virginia. These workers, members of the Steelworkers, were forced to strike by a company which refuses to recognize their right to join a union and negotiate for better wages and working conditions. As the company cleverly evades the real issues by filing appeal after appeal with the courts, the workers at Newport News continue to suffer.

Similarly, J.P. Stevens & Co. and the Winn-Dixie supermarket chain continue to block their employees from freely organizing

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into unions. The injustices at these two companies are well known. Thus, I urge you to support the boycott of all J.P. Stevens products.

In addition to taking an active interest in the struggles of Black workers, we must also intensify our activity in the political arena. Last November, for instance, Black people in Missouri and Philadelphia dramatically demonstrated the power of the united Black vote. In Missouri, Black voters overwhelmingly opposed an anti-labor question on the ballot; and in Philadelphia, Blacks united together in opposing a proposed change in the city charter. Yet despite these two impressive examples, Black voters throughout the country seem to be withdrawing from politics.

We and our children, we and our grandchildren, cannot afford to abandon the fight. We must continue, indeed we must strengthen our political position by registering and voting in even greater numbers than ever before. Our participation in the upcoming political battles will, to a very large extent, determine the outcome of our long years of dedication and sacrifice. You, brothers and sisters, will make the difference between ultimate victory or bitter defeat. Please, join the good fight.

The Old South Triumphs at Duke

By Tony Dunbar

Vol. 1, No. 9, 1979, pp. 5-8

Somewhere in the annal’s of Duke University you will find these lofty words:

The aims of Duke University are to assert a faith in the eternal union of knowledge and religion as set forth in the teachings and character of Jesus Christ, the Son of God; to advance learning in all lines of truth: to defend scholarship against all false notions and ideals; to develop a Christian love of freedom and truth; to promote a sincere spirit of tolerance; to discourage all partisan and sectarian strife; and to render the largest permanent service to the individual, the state, the nation and the Church. Unto these ends shall the affairs of this university always be administered.

Not long ago the following comment was made:

My father worked at Duke. His mother worked at Duke, and now three members of my family work there, too. I guess it’s always been one of the best jobs you could find in Durham. But I’ll tell you, they don’t care anything about you here and I don’t think they ever will. I don’t count on it ever changing.

As amazing as it may seem, the “Duke” referred to in the second statement is the same institution referred to earlier in such laudable terms. It is difficult to believe that an institution erected upon such noble principles recently hired one of the most successful and expensive anti-union consulting firms in the country, Modern Management Methods of Chicago (“3M”), at $2,500 a day to block the path of a labor union. But, in addition to being a fountain of learning whose graduates people the walkways of Southern government and commerce and whose endowment would give comfort to many a small nation, it is also the largest employer in Durham, North Carolina. When the union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), set out to organize the 2,100 wage workers at Duke University Medical Center, Duke responded by putting up the best fight that money could buy. What ensued is one of the best examples of “Old South” justice a “New South” institution could provide.

Duke has had serious labor difficulties since the mid 1960s when the university service employees, most of them Black, began to agitate for a union. Their essential grievance then was the manner in which Duke had historically treated its Black workers. Janitors, until they simply refused to do so any longer, had been required to address White undergraduates as Mister and Miss, and the Black custodial staff had to take its meals in the kitchen rather than in the dining hall. Under the leadership of Oliver Harvey, a custodian who had participated in the Greensboro sit-ins, a Duke Employees Benevolent Association was formed which tried unsuccessfully for two years to win benefits from the university.

Then the assasination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in a Memphis sanitation workers strike turned the small question of Duke employees’ welfare into a major campus issue. Fifteen hundred students made a vigil at the home of Duke President Douglas Knight (which finally sent him to the hospital for a “rest”) demanding that wages for non-academic employees be raised to $1.60 an hour and that Knight speak out for open housing, denounce racism, and resign his membership in a segregated country club.

Dining hail and custodial workers called a strike, and Duke students boycotted classes and the campus eating spots for two weeks. The strike ended when the university Trustees promised to formulate a plan to resolve employee grievances. Once the workers were back on the job, however, the Trustees dragged their heels until most of the students had gone home for the summer and then agreed to recognize an Employees Council as an informal bargaining agent for its custodial and clerical personnel. Thereafter the university declined to make any significant concessions to its employees or to raise pay beyond the increases already planned.

In frustration the university service employees linked up with a national labor organization, AFSCME, chosen for its reputation as a democratic union keenly interested in organizing Black workers. An election was held in January 1972; the union won it by a vote of 491 to 10, and AFSCME Local 77 was established on campus.

During this same time there was also considerable dissatisfaction among the much larger workforce at Duke’s sprawling 900 bed medical complex. Dieticians, microbiology lab technicians, and computer terminal operators had all staged brief, unauthorized walkouts at various times, and with other hospital workers they tried to form an AFSCME local of their own in 1974.

The university succeeded in delaying an election on union recognition until November 1976 and in expanding the definition of those eligible to vote to include not just the cooks, clerks, orderlies, and secretaries, whom the union was counting on to vote “Yes,” but also a large number of highly skilled employees, such as Senior Laboratory Assistants, who often hold Masters’ Degrees and were thought to be less conscious of themselves as “workers.”

The university was aided by the disarray of the local union organizing committee torn by internal political disputes and the fact that the international union lent only minimal support to the campaign. As a result AFSCME lost the election by a scant 42 ballots out of 1616 cast.

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Even given the diversity of the employees in the hospital “bargaining unit” the union organizing committee felt confident that with a more concerted effort they could win an election the next time around. Most of the wage workers at the hospital, as even the administration admitted, shared the feeling that they were inadequately rewarded and respected by their superiors. In common s ith most hospitals, it was the Duke physicians, professors, fund raisers, research directors, and specialized technicians who won the awards, gave imperious commands, were amply compensated, and got quick attention sshenever they had a problem.

The cooks, operating room attendants, X-ray technicians, and lab assistants, on the other hand, were, and are, the hospital’s second class citizens, even though many of them share the professional’s pride in contributing to patient care and are often called upon to perform extra hours of drudgery in emergencies. In a major teaching hospital like Duke, which occupies 30 buildings, sees more than 390,000 patients a year, and is aswarm with more than 2,000 doctors and students in one or another field of health care, everyone’s work is vital. Differences between the treatment given professional and service personnel are, therefore, a constant source of friction.

As a second AFSCME campaign commenced at the hospital in the summer of 1978, the union hoped to capitalize on the fact that most of the wage workers felt unfairly harassed by their supervisors, and that Blacks, who made up about 60 percent of ths hospital work force, continued to feel that the administration discriminated against them. Many employees, too, worked at the minimum wage, and there was a maximum pay level for every job classification regardless of years of service. For example, Dorothy Harris, a lab assistant and head of the union organizing committee, could only take home S6,000 in 1978 though she had worked at Duke for 17 )ears. The grievance procedure was also said to be stacked in the administration’s favor, and all of this, the union argued, lowered employee morale and diminished the quality of patient care.

Assisted by Wil Duncan, a Black organizer sent in from AFSCME’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., the Duke Medical Center campaign got underway in June 1978 with a demonstration in front of the hospital of 75 employees demanding higher wages. All was cordial, and, in fact, pleasantness characterized the relations between the administration and the employees during the first six months of the campaign. The union mustered student support, created a Duke Friends of Labor, got professors and doctors to sign AFSCME petitions, and in November 1978 was able to present the National Labor Relations Board with “green cards” signed by more than 1,000 hospital employees requesting a new union election. The date selected was February 16, 1979.

It seemed certain that no matter which side won, the campaign would arouse none of the bitterness of the 1968 student and worker protests. The university was now in the hands of President Terry Sanford who, as the moderate governor of the state in the 1960s and campus peacemaker in the 1970s, had achieved a reputation for tolerance. His administration had done nothing out of the ordinary to resist previous union efforts on campus, and it stated that relations with Duke’s two existing unions, AFSCME Local 77 and a smaller local of Operating Engineers, had been “very good.”

But the university, it turned out, regarded the union drive at the hospital with greater trepidation than anyone imagined. An additional hospital wing, costing $92 million, was under construction, and many new employees would be required to staff it; it was no time to permit a union, which was bound to demand substantial wage increases, to become established at the Medical Center. At least two months before the union election, Duke quietly hired the Chicagobased anti-union consulting firm, Modern Management Methods, or “3M.” Each “3M” consultant is paid from $500 to $700 per day, and as many as five of these agents were believed to be on campus at one time during the climax of the campaign. It is impossible, however, to report exactly what the Chicago firm cost the university because Duke repeatedly refused to disclose this information during the campaign. (And after the campaign was over, no responsible official at Duke was willing to discuss the matter in any depth.)

Modern Management Methods exemplifies the new wave of American union-busting. Gone are the axehandles, the goons, and the blacklists – the agents of “3M” and kindred consulting firms wear three-piece suits, boast college degrees, and avoid ever being seen outside the personnel offices of whatever company, or university, has paid for their services.

They operate very much behind the scenes in the labor conflict, so it is impossible to render a detailed account of their performance at Duke. Their known activities, however, all seem to be impeccably legal and highly effective. Duke was attracted to the firm because “3M” specializes in fighting hospital unions, their methods are quite sophisticated, and because they shun the press like a farmer avoids fire ants. Almost every non-union corporation in the South employs some type of labor consultant, but few can afford “3M.”

The principal tactic of Modern Management Methods, the Duke union said, was to turn all department supervisors into full-blooded organizers against AFSCME by

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interviewing each supervisor, gauging his or her feelings about the union, and making it clear that management expected their full support for its anti-union program. These meetings were not threatening (a supervisor at Duke described her “3M” interviewer as “one of the tallest, most gorgeous Black men who ever walked the streets,” and a supervisor at a Boston hospital where “3M” was active said she felt as though she were “being seduced” throughout her interview) and were designed to ally the supervisors in a common cause with the upper echelons of management. Then came seminars where the supervisors learned what they might or might not do, under existing labor law, to influence their employees. In the latter stages of the campaign the supervisors became the eyes, ears and voice of management as far as the workers were concerned. The union claimed that the supervisors kept track of the wavering sentiments of each worker in their unit, vigorously espoused management’s line, and were made to feel personally responsible for how each of the workers in his or her department voted on election day.

Duke’s executives described the “3M” program differently. They were “communications experts,” said Richard Jackson, head of personnel at the Medical Center. “Their function was to educate our supervisors in the best ways to communicate to the employees the many good things that Duke was doing and to counter, by legal means, the arguments of the union.” Duke had hired these “outside experts,” he told me, in response to the fact that AFSCME had assigned outside organizers to the campaign.

The impact of the “3M” strategy was immediate. Before their arrival debates for and against AFSCME had been conducted fairly freely in the Medical Center corridors, but the hospital’s friendly climate quickly turned sour when the neutrality of the supervisors evaporated. Employees became fearful of discussing the union on the job and began to worry about how secure their jobs would be if they were identified as AFSCME supporters. Friends of years standing became distrustful of one another. A secretary who had worked 19 years at Duke and was known to favor AFSCME said, “During this union campaign people would not walk down the hall with me. We’d be walking and they would say, “I’d better go down this way so people won’t see us together. We’d be standing in the bathroom talking – not even union talk – and one of the girls would say, “Would you mind waiting just a few minutes, I don’t want to be seen walking out with you.” You know, there’s a strange kind of fear here. I can’t understand it, because I don’t have it, but I think it’s a fear that Duke has put there.”

AFSCME tried vainly to make a winning issue out of Duke’s employment of “3M.” “Is your pay raise being used to hire these Chicago union-busters?” the union asked. But it could never get any hard facts about what the consultants were up to or how much they were being paid. The “3M” agents stayed in the background as far as possible. When one of them inadvertently stumbled upon a TV news crew doing a story on the AFSCME campaign, he was filmed rushing down the hall trying to avoid the camera. The aura of secrecy surrounding “3M’s” mission on campus actually seems to have worked in the administration’s favor because it added to the anxiety of some employees that they were being watched.

So that everyone would know exactly where the administration stood, a daily barrage of letters and “3M”-designed leaflets poured out to the employees insisting that AFSCME was an alien force that would disrupt the previously congenial relations between the workers and Duke’s management. The personnel department repeatedly stressed the possibility that employees might even lose existing benefits and pay if they voted in the union. Much of this literature reached the employees through their hospital mailboxes, a channel of communication denied to AFSCME. Duke went so far as to assert, inaccurately, that if the hospital workers voted for AFSCME they would be forced to join the Blackdominated Local 77. It is unclear why the university pressed this point, but union sympathizers felt it was a play on the racial fears of White hospital workers.

Even President Sanford underwent a curious transformation. He had previously been considered a friend of labor for stands he had taken as governor, but now he wrote a lengthy letter to the faculty urging it to oppose AFSCME on the grounds that wage increases for the hospital workers might compete with faculty salaries and that a hospital union would inevitably result in a strike to the detriment of patient care.

The second charge went to the real heart of the matter because the union was contending that only the hospital workers, and not management, truly cared about the welfare of the patients, and that a better paid and happier work force, not the ever more expensive medical hardware in which the hospital preferred to invest, was the key to improved health care. AFSCME backers also maintained that strikes were unlikely, and that even if one did occur the hospital workers would not desert sick patients. Sanford’s letter had the effect, however, of chilling faculty debate about the union and serving notice that his administration was from top to bottom unalterably opposed to the notion that the hospital workers should organize.

Toward the end of the campaign the pressure began to build. “In the beginning the momentum was on our side,”

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one of the hospital employees said, “then people started getting nervous when 3M came in using a lot of scare tactics. They starting having meetings every single day with the supervisors, and, Oh Lord!, the rumors they were spreading around were unreal. Supervisors told the people that if they went with the union they might lose their job whenever someone with more seniority wanted it. They were told that the first thing the union will do is go on strike, and you’ll never get another job, and you won’t get unemployment, and you won’t get food stamps. A lot of employees bought that. I mean, who would want the kind of a union 3M was describing. We were trying to present the union as a progressive force in the workplace, but we simply couldn’t get out the word as effectively as 3M. People were scared to death, just scared to death. People would come up to me and say, l think this is a good thing, but I can’t talk to you.’ Or Don’t call me, don’t come by me.’ They inspired incredible amounts of tear.”

Duke’s tactics worked. On February 16 the hospital workers voted 995 to 761 to reject representation by AFSCME. Not even the administration claimed that the outcome could be interpreted as a vote of confidence in the university. Rather it may fairly be concluded that Duke’s employees, who dwell in a state where the major history of unionism is one of defeat, were easily persuaded that they risked losing their livelihood if they defied the university. Duke insists that it won the contest by appealing to the intellect of its employees, but a great portion of the university’s anti-union literature played on the natural insecurities of the loly and on the pessimism common to Southern workers which teaches that they shall never have the power to win a bigger share of the pie.

The Medical Center’s constant warning to its employees was that “in the give and take process of collective bargaining, no one can predict the outcome. It is a gamble; you could gain or you can lose wages and benefits you now have.” Such tactics and worse are, of course, the standard fare of many North Carolina corporations devoted to making profits, but they seem somehow less tolerable when put forth by a wealthy, charitable institution devoted to “the eternal union of knowledge and religion as set forth in the teachings and character of Jesus Christ.”

Perhaps the time is past when this distinction meant anything. One month after AFSCME’s defeat Terry Sanford re-emphasized the mercantile aspect of Duke’s institutional character when he told the press that “working as a citizen of Durham personally and as president of its major corporate citizen,” he would take an active role in seeking new industry for the city. One might speculate that he will seek hardest that industry which shares Duke’s labor philosophy. In light of the fact that Duke University is one of the shrines of the New South (some think the New South was actually invented there) it is only natural to wonder how much hope for laboring people is contained in the dawning of this new age.

Tony Dunbar is a free-lance writer living in Western North Carolina.

Chiquita Boycott

By Staff

Vol. 1, No. 9, 1979, pp. 8

The United Farm Workers Union (UFW)has called for a boycott of Chiquita bananas. Farmworkers in the southewestern U.S. are on strike agains a number of lettuce growers, including Sunharvest and Chiquita bananas. The bananas, with their familiar trade name, have been chosen as the boycott target. A boycott with national impact will help persuade Sunharvest/United Brands to negotiate in good faith with the union.

The main issue in the strike is wages. The employers insist on no more than a 7 percent wage increase, looking to Carter’s wage guidelines to support their position. The farmworkers point out, however, that the price for a crate of lettuce has gone up 110 percent in the last year, and that for employers to stick to 7 percent wage guidelines with these kinds of price increases is ludicrous. Also, wage guidelines do not apply to those who earn less than $4.00 an hour. Many farmworkers do earn less than $4.00 hourly. The current minimum wage in UFW lettuce contracts is $3.70; their proposed increase is to $5.25.

Local work is starting around the boycott. Potential future activities include the forming of delegations to approach grocery stores, inform them of the boycott, and ask that they not stock Chiquita bananas. Funds also need to be raised to send to the Imperial Valley in California. More than 3000 farmworkers are in the fourth month of their strike. Money raised will go to the strike fund that supports the workers and their families. Anyone interested in this work can contact Norma Chandler at 763-0183.

Reprinted from the Circuit Rider, Atlanta, Georgia.

Battle of Newport News

By Phil Wilayto

Vol. 1, No. 9, 1979, pp. 9-13, 23

The Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company stretches along the northern bank of the James River like a long, narrow industrial city. For over two miles, this largest workplace in Virginia occupies the shore with its docks and piers, warehouses and worksheds, cranes and trucks and roads and parking lots, dominating the landscape and the minds and bodies of its 22,000 employees. The noise is constant, the hustle and bustle never ceases, as military and commercial ships are designed, constructed, and repaired by the largest privately-owned shipyard in the world.

But for 11 weeks this past winter and early spring, the yard was silent. Not a crane moved, not a ship was being built, as some 14,000 members of the United Steelworkers of America fought to win recognition for their union.

“We need a union,” electrician Ronnie Webs, Jr., said during the first days of the strike. “There’s a lot of safety hazards in that yard. The scaffolding we work on is dangerous. There’s no ventilation in the paint areas. We need a grievance procedure.”

“We’re fighting for more benefits,” said Kay Hale, welder and one of the three to four hundred female bluecollar workers in the yard. “We need a decent pension and a retirement plan. I’m a coal miner’s daughter and I believe in unions.”

“The discrimination’s real bad,” said John Devane, a Black crane hook-up man who is classified as a clerk, a lower-paying job title. Close to 40 percent of the yard’s work force is Black. “All the Blacks in my department work outside and all the Whites work inside. The company made one Black guy train a White guy to be his supervisor. I think the Steelworkers will make a difference.”

“It’s time for people to stand up for justice on the job,” added Charles Hawkins, a rigger for eight years. “We need to stand up in Virginia and do what’s necessary to improve ourselves and our community.”

And the Newport News shipyard needs a great deal of improvement. Founded over 50 years ago as a local family concern, it has grown into a giant behemoth that has left all consideration of health and safety far behind. The stories on the picketline tell it all: the broken bones, burnt

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hands, welding flashes, the sometimes fatal falls from unsafe scaffolding – not to mention the company violations of safety procedures in handling asbestos, violations that have resulted in scores of law-suits demanding disability compensation.

For 40 years, workers at the yard had been “represented” by a classic company union called the Penninsula Shipbuilders Association, the PSA. Essentially a rehash of the old governmentsponsored Employee Representation Plan councils, the PSA held no membership meetings, no election of shop stewards, had no safety clause in its “contract” and offered no real representation at all. And yet, backed by the might of the company and the influence of local politicians, the PSA had been able three times to turn back organizing challenges by bona-fide unions.

The sixties brought a number of changes to the yard, some of them good, some not so good. On the plus side, in 1965 a group of Black workers filed a civil rights suit against the company charging discrimination in hiring, firing, promotions, work assignments, and on-the-job discipline. The suit, which was opposed by the White members of the PSA’s governing board, resulted in promotions for over 3,000 Black employees and openings in the apprenticeship training program.

While the immediate gains were important, probably the suit’s greatest significance was the basis it laid for racial unity in the yard, a unity that showed itself a short to years later when the yard’s only pre-1979 strike erupted.

But while the workers’ potential strength was growing, so was the company’s. In 1969 the yard was bought out by the Tenneco Corporation, a multi-national giant based in Houston, Texas. The 19th largest company in America,with holdings all over the world, including South Africa, Tenneco’s empire is based in chemicals, agriculture, and machinery.

As with other U.S. corporations, Tenneco’s profits have been soaring, with 1978 being the single most profitable year in the company’s history. Undaunted by the hatred it has earned from farmworkers in the Southwest or by its recent convictions on charges of widespread corporate bribery, the Tenneco executives, directors, and stockbrokers have looked to the Newport News shipyard with its many defense-industry-related contracts as a stable source of profits. The largest, single, unorganized work force in the country, located in a “right-towork” Southern state with a brazonly pro-big business governor, the shipyard has been seen as an investment in high profits, low wages, and human degradation.

Tenneco only miscalculated in one area: the desire of these Southern workers to be organized.

In late 1976, a small group of shipyard workers, led by some of the Black leaders of the 1965 civil rights suit, asked the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) to start an organizing campaign at the yard.

In many ways, the choice was a good one. With 1,400,000 members and a $127 million strike fund, the USWA is the largest single union in the AFL-CIO, securely concentrated in basic steel, aluminum, copper, containers, steel fabricating – and shipbuilding. Its history of militant struggle runs deep, going back to the days when volunteer organizers from John L. Lewis’ United Mine Workers first began organizing in the steel, auto, and rubber industries, organizing campaigns that grew to become the historic battles of the 30s and resulted in the establishment of true industrial unions.

But in the years since the last great strikes of the late 40s, practically the entire leadership of the U.S. labor movement has grown soft and conservative, and it’s only been in the last few years that an awakening rank-and-file militancy has been able to break through an encrusted bureaucracy, flexing its muscles in struggles like the 197778 miners strike, the ’78 postal workers strike, and the ’78 Norfolk and Western railroad strike.

In Newport News, Virginia, the same economic and social pressures bear down on shipyard workers as affect every other group of workers in the country – daily worsening inflation, the lack of any long-term financial security, unsafe working conditions racial and sexual discrimination, and, above all, the lack of a sense of simple human dignity. By the late 70s, the shipyard workers were ready for a change. Eventually, some 14,000 workers signed up with Local 8888, making it the largest local in the Steelworkers union.

In December of 1978, in the largest single union local meeting in the history of the U.S. Labor movement, the members of Local 8888 voted almost unanimously to authorize a strike. On January 31, a year to the day after the original election victory, Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Co. was shut down tight. Local 8888 was out on strike against Tenneco’s unfair labor practice of refusing to abide by the decision of the Labor Board.

The morning of January 31 was a cold, overcast day, the day of the winter’s first snowfall. As the hour of dawn approached outside the yard’s 50th St. gate on Washington Avenue, hundreds of picketing Steelworkers kept up a series of noisy, spirited chants:

“88 – Shut the Gate!”

“What time is it?”

STEELWORKER TIME!”

Across the street, an equal number of undecided workers massed on the sidewalk, lunch buckets in hand, sizing up the situation. Punch-in time was fast approaching and decision had to he made soon. All along

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the shipyard, outside the 17 gates of the yard, the scene was the same, as the legendary “individualistic Southern worker” weighed the alternatives – reliance on the cold paternalism of a corporate giant, or union solidarity.

And in between the two sides were the cops. Besides the company’s barbed wire, water cannons, and special SWAT-style guard team, the union was facing the armed might of the state: the shipyard area detachment of the Newport News police department had been beefed up: Virginia governor Dalton had promised to send in the State Police. The National Guard was on a six-hour alert. Everywhere you looked were riot helmets, the long four-foot batons, growling, snapping dogs, and police cars. And behind this physical power was the legal weight of the so-called “right-to-work” laws. Like 19 other states, most of them in the South, Virginia law forbids the closed union shop, allowing workers to receive the benefits of being represented by a union without having to join and support that union. Before the strike was to end, this “right-to-scab” law was to earn as much hatred as the state police, a group alternately known as the “Gestapo” and “Dalton’s Dogs”.

Outside the gates on that first morning of the strike, the two sides of workers squared off, the taunts and pleas were exchanged, and Tenneco held its breath until one side finally wavered, hesitated, and then broke altogether, as hundreds of cheering yard workers surged across Washington Street to join the picket lines.

The battle was on.

Those first days of the strike were glorious ones. The solidarity was complete, the pride in being a union member as-up-front and on display as the blue and white Steelworker caps all the strikers wore. Black and white, men and women, old and young, these sons and daughters of Virginian and Carolinian farming families were standing together against their own special giant.

“We are together,” a middle-aged Black man declared one evening outside the 50th St. gate. “The first time one of these state police touches one of our people, be they Black or White, that’s when you’re going to see trouble.”

“My parents could have prevented us having to go through this moment here today,” an older White man said quietly, “but they failed, as their parents failed before them, and so on back through the line. But today, for once, the White and the Black are out here together. It’s a new beginning, and it’s going to spread from Newport News down throughout the South. But first we have to win it here.”

“You see that yard down there?” a young Black worker asked. “You can’t hear nothing. Nothing’s moving. We did that. Now I know what power is – you can’t build ships with a pencil.”

The significance of the strike wasn’t lost on the High Priests of Big Business. From the local press to the national media like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the refrain was the same: “A test case for labor” “A challenge to Southern industry”: “a fight to unionize the South”.

And not only the mouth-pieces of the corporate empire-builders recognized this fact. From the shops and factories in the surrounding Tidewater area, right across the country and up into the lofty citadels of the labor bureaucracy, every union member in the country could see that this struggle was, as one of the local daily papers put it, “the biggest test of labor since World War II”. It was a challenge to open up the largely unorganized South, a challenge to the run-away shops from the North, a challenge to the “right-to-work” laws – and a challenge to the national offensive by Big Business against all of labor.

In the first weeks of the strike, the yard was 85 to 90 percent shut down, with most of the skilled trades departments solidly out. Although the local press had been predicting mass violence on the picket lines, the union’s leadership’s strategy was to avoid any open fighting with the scabs. However, this didn’t stop scores and eventually hundreds of individual, off-theline incidents of tire slashings, sugar-in-the-gas-tank, and anti-scab fisticuffs, as union members fought to protect their jobs and their union.

Nor did it stop the police from harassing the picket lines.

From the very first days of the strike, the arrests started piling up, most of them for alleged violations of the “right-to-work” laws. One striker was busted for pointing his finger at a scab. Another was taken in for throwing a cigarette near a scab’s car. Local 8888’s president Wayne Crosby was arrested for the simple act of walking past one of the gates with a picket sign.

The issue of police involvement in the strike was to become a major issue in the battle. The AFLCIO Central Labor Councils in the area passed resolutions demanding that local police departments forbid their members to moon-light as security guards for the yard. State AFLCIO president Julian Carper demanded that governor John Dalton pull his state police out of the area. And all along the picket lines, the strikers themselves got a concrete lesson in the role of the police in labor disputes.

“I grew up here in Newport News,” 8888 treasurer Kelly Coleman said, “I fought in Vietnam and had an uncle on the police force. I used to really respect the cops, but no more. After seeing the way they’ve been treating our people, I just don’t give a damn for them anymore.”

On February 24, the union made an attempt to broaden the base of support for the strike. The call went out to all Virginia labor unions to come to Newport News

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for a solidarity march.

And they came. They came from Tidewater, Richmond, Lynchburg, the Southside, Arlington, Roanoke, and Waynesboro. Plumbers, carpenters, mill workers, teachers, nurses, boilermakers, shipyard workers, factory hands, merchant marine sailors, telephone workers, retail store clerks, all came with signs identifying their unions and declaring their solidarity with the Newport News strikers. Some 5,000 trade unionists and their supporters stretched over 20 blocks along Washington Street, marching past the shipyard’s fortified gates, chanting, “88 – Shut the Gate!” Many of the marchers wore bright yellow buttons distributed by the Center for United Labor Action that read, “Stop Union-Busting in the South”. Walking along the line of march, the power of labor could he almost physically felt, as picketing Steelworkers reached out to shake hands with their comrades in the labor movement.

And then it was back to the picket lines. Slowly but inevitably the days and nights passed, in cold, in rain and snow, the occasional arrest, the taunts and jeers at the scabs. Standing around the fire barrels and Salamanders, holding cups of coffee and sandwiches brought by the union’s mobile canteen, the conversation moved easily between the banal and the sublime, the passing and the historic. Bull sessions about the company turned into debates on the value of keeping alive parasites like the Rockefellers and the Gettys. Comparisons, were made between the strike and the mass uprisings taking place in the streets of Iran. Consciousness of taking part in an historic strike led to talks of other strikes, of the 30s, of the great labor battles of 100 years ago. The strike became a social classroom and the strikers were wrenching their lessons directly from the concrete reality around them.

As the time for the Circuit Court decision on Tenneco’s legal objections approached, the union leadership made a new appeal for labor support. This time there was to he a National Day of Solidarity in which trade unionists from around the country would come to Newport News to declare their support for the Steelworker struggle. The date was set, Hampton Coliseum was rented, and the call went out.

But there were some problems. USWA president Lloyd McBride had just made a statement at a Miami press conference that the union might have made a “tactical blunder” in agreeing that the strike was part of a struggle to organize the South, that this might have helped galvanize Southern corporations against the Steelworkers and encouraged them to support Tenneco. The National Day of Solidarity came off, but it was held on a Friday afternoon, when most workers are still at work.

Half-way through the rally, the court decision came down. McBride announced the results from the coliseum stage: the trial judge had thrown out all but one of the company’s objections, all but the question of “chainvoting,” an obscure and antiquated means of rigging elections in which one person controls a succession of votes by having a single blank ballot snuck out of the voting booth, marking it, and passing it along to the next voter. That voter deposits the marked ballot in the booth and sneaks out another blank ballot to be marked by the leader, who passes it along to a third voter, and so on down the “chain”. It’s a throw-back to the days of illiterate Southern sharecroppers and foreign-language Northern immigrants, people who wouldn’t know how the ballots were being marked. In today’s literate work force, the scheme has no relevance, but this was the single issue that the courts sent back to the NLRB for review.

And so it went, as the days dragged on, as strike benefits ate into the union’s treasury, as the number of workers crossing the picket lines gradually increased 10 percent to IS percent; 20 percent to 25 percent. The skilled trades held solid, but the prospect of further court delays stretched out to the horizon like a lonesome, corporation-owned railroad track.

And Tenneco had help. Besides the la the cops and

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courts, the governor, and the media, the giant from Houston had other allies as well. The single largest customer of Newport News Shipyard is the U.S. Navy. Submarines, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, service vessels of every kind – new construction, rehaul jobs, in every way Newport News is essential to the Navy, and the Navy knows it.

Throughout the course of the strike, the Navy paid the shipyard a total of $302 million, in the form of cost overrun settlements, timing the payments to come at critical moments in the strike. And these outright grants to the company’s strike fund weren’t the only means of help. Navy officials sat down with the yard executives and drew up priority lists for military work, which contracts had to he taken care of right away and which could be put off for awhile. Then there were the continuing lease payments for yard property use, and the physical and psychological presence of Navy ships and personnel remaining in the yards during the course of the strike.

And yet nowhere was this federal support for Tenneco mentioned by the union. As the Navy, the Labor Board, and the weight of Carter’s “wage guidelines” decrees all lined up on the company’s side, the center of the company’s opposition shifted to Washington, but the center of the union’s resistance remained in Newport News.

The workers became restless, and the picketline strategies changed. With 30 to 40 percent of the yard’s work force now crossing the lines, Local 8888 began to beef up its presence at the gates. A Women’s Auxiliary was formed and wives, daughters, and friends of strikers began marching as a group. On April 2, some 300 Steelworkers gathered outside the North Yard’s 68th St. gate, standing five to six solid in rows on either side of the gate. As the procession of scabs approached, flying bottles joined the taunts and jeers that were thrown at the strikebreakers. The cops were obviously tense and apprehensive as the crowd turned its attention to them as well as to the scabs. But the day passed without serious incident.

Finally, the Steelworkers’ Pittsburgh headquarters made a decision: the strike would be “suspended” until the legal delays were over. Immediately, Tenneco made an announcement. Returning strikers would be made to sign a waiver of all their rights to their former jobs, to seniority, and to any possible claims for back pay from the company. They would also be made to report to the personnel office, sign in, and wait to be called back, an obvious attempt to weed out the most active union supporters.

The workers balked. On April 13, over 6,000 Steelworkers attended a mass meeting at the coliseum at which staff organizer Jack Hower attempted to explain the Pittsburgh decision, It didn’t go over.

“We couldn’t go back under the company’s conditions,” one rank-and-file activist said. “If we were going back, it had to be together, with our heads up high. There was a lot of dissension at the meeting until this one guy, a Black guy, got up and made a motion that the union send a telegram to Tenneco saying they had to drop the conditions or we wouldn’t go back. Everybody went for that idea and the motion passed unamimously.”

And so the telegram was sent. Half of Tenneco’s reply came the following Monday morning, April 16, when company officials announced there would be no change in policy. The other half of the answer came a few hours later.

About 10:00 a.m., over a hundred state and local police gathered on Washington Avenue, formed themselves into a phalanx block, and began sweeping down the street. They pushed and clubbed and beat picketers away from the gates, broke into restaurants and drove customers and owners alike into the streets, and chased individual strikers down alleys and across parking lots.

“It was incredible,” one man told this reporter. “It was like that show the Holocaust’, with the Gestapo

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rounding up the Jews. I never thought it could happen in America.”

The attack didn’t stop there. Twice the strikers tried to regroup and march back down to Washington Street, twice they were repulsed. Finally, the cops approached the union’s strike headquarters itself. Scores of strikers were milling around outside the building as the police came up, yelling at the Steelworkers to get off the street. Then, as the strikers were attempting to get inside their building, the cops attacked again.

Clubbing their way inside, the police broke one man’s arm, threw another through a window and then beat him as he lay in the broken glass, and beat up the 14-year-old daughter of a striker. After clearing out the downstairs lobby, the cops then tried to storm up the stairs to reach the union offices on the third floor, but they were met in the narrow staircase by a solid mass of Steelworkers. With chairs and fire extinguishers, the union members, Black and White, men and women, prevented the cops from taking their headquarters and eventually drove them from the building.

In all, over 60 Steelworkers were injured, some 40 of them requiring hospitalization, and over 70 were arrested, including organizer Jack Hower.

Even the news media could not ignore this one. The local papers carried bloody pictures of crowds of cops beating individual strikers. The TV crews filmed a young Black woman being taken out of strike headquarters on a stretcher. The NAACP announced it would handle court suits for the strikers charging police brutality. Local 8888 began a petition campaign demanding the removal of the Newport News Chief of Police.

Two days later, Tenneco backed down, saying that strikers would not have to sign a waiver of their rights in order to return to work. USWA District Director Bruce Thrasher refused to accept this reversal until it was communicated directly to the union, and a few days later the company reportedly contacted the local’s lawyers.

On April 22, a small crowd of strikers held a “last hurrah” at one of the shipyard gates, the picket lines were disbanded, and the historic strike of Local 8888 was “suspended.”

A few days later, the labor board judge made his decision: the company’s charge of chain-voting was “without merit,” the Steelworker election victory and certification were valid, and the labor board’s order to Tenneco to sit down and bargain was reaffirmed.

The company announced it would file “exceptions” to this finding to the full board in Washington. Meanwhile, the yard had already announced that it was suspending all strikers who had been arrested in connection with the strike, a total of close to 200 union members, including Local 8888’s president Wayne Crosby and treasurer Kelly Coleman. The union has since promised that it would fight all such suspensions and would continue to financially support the suspended workers.

Estimates for a full labor board decision on the company’s new “exceptions” vary from a few months on up, and union spokesperson Bill Edwards has said that a company decision to appeal the full Board’s decision to Richmond might well result in the strike being activated again.

Meanwhile, the union is continuing to function. A new lease has been signed for the strike headquarters, more volunteer organizers are being recruited, and steward training sessions are being organized.

“No, we didn’t win recognition for the union,” one rank-and-filer said as he prepared to head back to work,”and we didn’t win a contract. Not yet, anyway. But we showed the company that we would stand up for our rights, that we were ready to fight. We didn’t win what we went out for, but we aren’t broken, either. We’re regrouping, we’ll be back, and we’ll get our union.”

A union shop steward and newspaper reporter in the Tidewater, Virginia, area, Phil Wilayto is a member of the Center for United Labor Action which was active in building support for the Steelworker strike in Newport News. He is the author of the song “Organize the South,” used in the Steelworkers strike movie and played at the statewide and national solidarity rallies.

United Steelworkers vs. Weber: Affirmative Action on Trial

By Laughlin McDonald

Vol. 1, No. 9, 1979, pp. 14-17

United Steelworkers of America v. Brian F. Weber, known familiarly asWeber because of the enormous interest the case has generated, was argued in the Supreme Court on March 29, 1979, before a standing-room-only crowd of spectators. Weber will decide whether a quota for Blacks in on-the-job training for skilled craft jobs adopted by Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation and the United Steelworkers of America, AFL-CIO unlawfully discriminates against Whites. Both the district court in Louisiana and a majority of a panel of the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit have held that it does. If the Supreme Court agrees, the case could scuttle all voluntary affirmative action for racial minorities in the nation’s work force.

Weber involves Kaiser’s hiring practices in its plant at Gramercy, Louisiana, a small town of approximately 2,000 people, 25 miles up the Mississippi River from New Orleans. Kaiser opened the Gramercy plant in 1958. At that time racial discrimination in employment was commonplace in southern Louisiana, and indeed, throughout the country. Given the employment practices of the times, it is not surprising that for the first ten years of its operation, the Gramercy plant employed less than 10 percent of Blacks. Had race not been a factor in hiring, one would have expected to see nearly four times that many Blacks on the plant’s payroll, for St. James Parish, in which Gramercy is located, and the adjacent parish of St. John the Baptist, contain a labor force that is approximately 39 percent Black.

In 1969, yielding to pressure from the federal government, Kaiser adopted a policy of hiring “at the gate” on a one-to-one Black to White ratio. This new policy increased the number of Blacks on the payroll, but only to 14.8 percent, still substantially below the number of Blacks in the labor force of the surrounding community.

The employment of Blacks in skilled craft positions was even more disproportionately low. Prior to 1974, only five of approximately 290 skilled craftsmen at the Gramercy plant were Black. One of the reasons for this poor showing was because Kaiser hired only experienced craft workers from outside the plant, and required all applicants for its limited in-house crafts training program to have prior craft experience. Because of the history of exclusion of Blacks from craft positions and the lack of opportunity for unskilled workers to gain craft experience or training on the job the inevitable consequence of Kaiser’s hiring policy was to insure that its skilled craft work force was almost exclusively White.

In 1974 Kaiser and the United Steelworkers, whose function is to champion the rights of union members and influence management during labor negotiations, entered into a voluntary pact known as the 1974 Labor Agreement. The purpose of the agreement was to correct racial imbalance in the work force and insure that a proportionate number of Blacks entered skilled craft jobs in the Gramercy plant. The agreement not only specified wages, hours of work, employment conditions, etc., but contained a provision that “[a]s apprentice and craft jobs are to be filled … at a minimum, not less than one minority employee will enter for every non-minority employee entering until the goal [of 39 percent minority representation in each craft family] is reached unless at a particular time there are insufficient available qualified minority candidates.” The goal of 39 percent was established because it was the percent of Blacks in the surrounding labor force from which the great majority of Gramercy’s employees were hired.

Shortly after the 1974 Labor Agreement was implemented, Kaiser opened bids for on-the-job training in the craft families of instrument repairman, electrician and general repairman. The terms of the agreement were faithfully followed and for each craft family at least half of those chosen as trainees were Black. But inevitably, in

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each instance, White applicants who had more seniority than the Blacks selected were passed over. One of those who missed out was Brian Weber.

Weber, a White man in his early thirties, went to work at the Gramercy plant in 1969. His present job is that of an unskilled laboratory technician. Like many others at the Gramercy plant, Black and White, he would like to improve his job and income by participating in one of the company’s on-the-job training programs for skilled craftsmen. When his application was rejected, he and other excluded Whites filed a lawsuit against Kaiser and the Steelworkers. They contend that the 1974 Labor Agreement establishes an unlawful racial quota and discriminates against Whites.

Weber’s specific charge is that the minority quota contained in the 1974 agreement violates the nondiscrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VII of the Act prohibits in broad and general terms all employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin in industries affecting interstate commerce. More particularly, the Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race against any person in any apprentice or training program.

It shall be an unlawful employment practice for any employer, labor organization, or joint labor-management committee controlling apprenticeship or other training or retraining, including on-the-job training programs to discriminate against any individual because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in admission to, or employment in, any program established to provide apprenticeship or other training.

The company and the union argue that affirmative action is not unlawful discrimination and that federal laws, including Title VII and Executive Order No. 11246, either require or permit employers to take voluntary measures to insure that Blacks are adequately utilized in the work force. The 1974 Labor Agreement, they say, is nothing more than an attempt to live up to their obligations under the law.

Kaiser had every reason to believe it had not been living up to the law in the past. Its underemployment of Blacks as skilled workers – 5 of 290 – coupled with the fact that the total work force at Gramercy prior to 1974 was only 14.8 percent minority, was enough standing alone to establish a prima facie case of discrimination. In addition, the hiring procedure in effect at Gramercy with its prior experience requirement was the same one in effect at the company’s nearby plant at Chalmette. The Chalmette procedure was challenged by Blacks in 1966 and was eventually held by the Fifth Circuit to be racially discriminatory in effect. Under the circumstances, Kaiser was well aware that it was sitting on an employment discrimination suit just waiting to be brought.

Kaiser was also aware of how expensive an employment discrimination case could be, especially if it was lost. A third Kaiser plant in Baton Rouge was sued by minority workers in 1967. The suit was eventually settled by a consent decree, but it cost Kaiser more than a quarter of a million dollars in back pay to various class members.

Aside from suits from its own employees, Kaiser feared reprisals from the federal governinent, with whom it was doing business. Executive Order No. 11246 requires all applicants for federal contracts to refrain from employment discrimination and to “take affirmative action to insure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex or national origin.” The order empowers the Office of Federal Contract Compliance (OFCC) to cancel or suspend all of a non-conforming company’s government contracts, and to require all federal agencies to refrain from entering into future contracts with any company found to be “nonresponsible.”

Termination of federal contracts was not a vague, unfounded fear of Kaiser’s. In 1971 OFCC undertook a full scale review of the company and made general findings of discrimination in the hiring of craft workers at the Gramercy plant. OFCC at that time recommended that Kaiser establish a training program in which half of the trainees would be minority workers. These findings were confirmed two years later in a subsequent report by OFCC in which it found that Kaiser had engaged in discrimination by waiving its prior craft experience requirement for Whites, but not for minorities.

Kaiser knew too that the federal government was investigating claims of racial discrimination by nine major steel producers in the United States. Following intensive negotiations, the government eventually filed suit against the Steelworkers union and the producers. At the same

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time, two consent decrees were filed which provided for one-to-one hiring basically similar to the plan adopted at the Gramercy plant. The consent decrees did not come cheaply. The price tag to the nine steel companies was a back fund for minority employees of more than $30 million. From Kaiser’s perspective, doing everything it could to head off employment discrimination charges and the loss of lucrative government contracts was more than good business. It was economic survival.

The lower federal courts ruled against Kaiser and the Steelworkers because they found, incredibly enough, that no discrimination had been practiced at the Gramercy plant. As a consequence, the “racial quota,” said the Court of Appeals, “loses its character as an equitable remedy and must be banned as an unlawful racial preference prohibited by Title VII.- The Court also found it beyond the power of the company and the union to use affirmative action to correct discrimination practiced by society at large. “it is appropriate to draw the line for application of restorative justice at the Gramercy plant, rather than at the larger universe of all Kaiser operations or indeed about society at large.”

How could the courts have found no discrimination by Kaiser at the Gramercy plant in view of the OFCC investigations and reports, the statistical disparities between Kaiser’s work force and the community labor pool, and the adverse impact of the company’s procedures for hiring skilled craftsmen? Quite simply, because most of that evidence was based on the testimony of two of Kaiser’s own personnel officers. They said the company did not discriminate.

One of the ironies of Weber, given its potential impact upon racial minorities, is that it is essentially a collusive suit between Whites. The suit is collusive, not because it was fraudulently brought, but because none of the parties to it adequately represented minority interests.

Weber, of course, has never wanted to prove discrimination by Kaiser, since to do so would. undercut his very argument that the preferential hiring system is arbitrary and unnecessary. The company, in view of its liability under Title VII and its concern over loss of federal contracts, had no reason at all to admit that it discriminated on the basis of race at the Gramercy plant.

The union, which has the duty of representing all workers, including of course minority workers, had no interest in proving racial discrimination for fear of exposing itself to liability for breach of its duty of fair representation.

Thus, each of the parties to the lawsuit had good reasons not only not to prove racial discrimination, but to deny that it ever existed at all. Predictably, the courts found “no discrimination” and no justification for the affirmative action plan.

The kind of non-adversary fact finding on the question of racial discrimination that took place in Weber, regardless of the motives of the parties in that case, is an open invitation to manipulation of anti-discrimination laws. Employers facing employment discrimination difficulties might be tempted to promulgate voluntary plans with the hope that they would be challenged by White workers. In such a challenge, since no party would be motivated to offer proof of discrimination which occurred, the court would, as happened in Weber, enter a finding of “no discrimination.” It would be difficult, if not impossible, for any minority worker thereafter successfully to challenge the employer’s discriminatory policies. To allow employers, unions, and White workers thus to adjudicate the interests of Blacks totally in the tatter’s absence raises serious questions about the integrity and reliability of the judicial process.

If the Supreme Court nonetheless affirms in Weber, and concludes that affirmative action depends upon an express finding of past discrimination, as opposed to the reasonable apprehension of an emplover that it is vulnerable to charges of discrimination, then it will have dealt a crippling blow to voluntary compliance with employment discrimination laws. If the remedial plan is less than it should be, employers will still be liable to minorities in private lawsuits and to the federal government in pattern and practice suits and enforcement proceedings brought by OFCC. If, however, the remedy provides too much, then the employer will be liable in Weber-type suits to White employees who contend that the remedial action is in reality an unlawful preference. Unless the employer hits precisely upon a plan which would be approved by a federal court, it proceeds with affirmative action at its peril. Under the circumstances, most employers will do nothing but sit back and wait to be sued. The result will be less, much less, elimination of discrimination in employment.

The Supreme Court has never ruled directly on the lawfulness of racial quotas in employment, but it has generally approved of color conscious relief, either taken voluntarily or pursuant to a judicial finding of discrimination. It has routinely used Black-White student “ratios” in formulating remedies for school segregation; has allowed states and their political subdivisions voluntarily to take race into account in drawing district voting lines to insure minority participation in politics and to remedy the continuing effect of past discrimination; and in 1976, ruled that granting fictional seniority to minority victims of employment discrimination did not discriminate against White workers.

In the latter case, the court held that even though the economic expectations of arguably innocent Whites might be diminished by the grant of seniority, to allow that fact to defeat relief would undermine the central purposes of employment discrimination legislation to

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eliminate the continuing effects of discrimination. As for the lower federal courts, they have widely approved quota remedies for employment discrimination, including those voluntarily adopted pursuant to Executive Order No. 11246.

The most recent case from the Supreme Court involving racially conscious remedial action is that of Allan Bakke, a White male whose application to the medical school of the University of California at Davis had been rejected. Bakke claimed that the medical school’s voluntary, special admissions program, which set aside 16 of 100 entering seats for “disadvantaged,” non-White students was reverse discrimination against him on the basis of race and was unconstitutional and in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The Court announced its opinion on June 28, 1978, the last day of the term. The decision was both complex and narrow, and left unanswered as much as it decided. A major problem in interpreting Bakke is that there were six separate opinions.

The justices fell generally into two camps. Brennan, Marshall, White and Blackmun voted to uphold the special admissions program under both the Constitution and Title VI on the grounds that race may be taken into account, not to demean or insult a racial group, but to remedy disadvantages caused by past racial prejudice.

Four other justices – Burger, Stewart, Rehnquist, and Stephens – voted to strike down the California plan. They believed that race could never be the basis of excluding anyone from participating in a federally funded program under Title VI, but refused to consider whether or not the Constitution ever permitted affirmative action.

The deadlock on the Court was broken by Justice Powell. He agreed with the Brennan wing that race could properly be taken into account under the Constitution and Title VI in remedying past discrimination. But he also agreed with the Burger wing that the California plan was unlawful because it imposed a rigid quota system that excluded applicants solely because of race. As a consequence of the various opinions, the special admissions program was invalidated, Bakke was ordered admitted to medical school and the University of California was allowed to devise a new admissions program “properly … involving the competitive consideration of race and ethnic origin.”

How Bakke will affect Weber remains to be seen. One thing, however, is clear. Weber will not be decided by the full Court. Only seven of the nine justices participated in oral argument and based upon the practice of the Court, only that seven will participate in the decision making.Justice Powell, the balance of of power in Bakke, was recovering from surgery. Justice Stevens, who voted with the Burger wing, absented himself because he had represented Kaiser when he was in private practice. Regardless of the outcome in Weber, because it will be a decision of only seven members of the Court, its value as precedent for future cases will be open to serious challenge.

Judge John Minor Wisdom, the author of many seminal civil rights opinions of the Fifth Circuit and one of that court’s most highly respected members, dissented in Weber. His dissent may well become the basis for the Supreme Court’s decision.

Judge Wisdom argued that the 1974 Labor Agreement should be analyzed, not on the basis of a judicial or other “finding” of actual discrimination, but whether it was a reasonable response of the company and the union to their employment problems. Applying that test, the affirmative action plan would surely be lawful. It was negotiated through the union, which has the obligation in good faith to represent the interests of all workers. Thus, Whites and Blacks were both considered in the bargaining process. As importantly, the agreement had a minimum adverse impact upon Whites. It did not deprive any White worker of a job. Instead, it created entirely new job opportunities for minorities as well as White incumbents. As Judge Wisdom concluded:

[T]he 1974 Agreement was a reasonable response to the situation. The defendants were faced with arguable violations of Title VII, federal government pressure, and the impending steel industry settlement. They created an affirmative action plan which aided all Kaiser employees while particularly assisting minority group members. We should not upset their efforts.

Voluntary compliance is essential to removing discrimination on the job. Neither the government nor private parties have the resources to cure the problem. The court which approved the settlement between the Steelworkers Union and the nine major steel companies, involving some 250 individual plants, estimated that it would have required ten years alone simply to try the liability issue in that case, and that resolution of the remedial issues would have involved over 28 years of trial time.

The Supreme Court has often said that voluntary compliance is the preferred means for achieving nondiscrimination in employment. And indeed it is. Voluntary compliance will eliminate the need for everexpanding state and federal enforcement agencies and reduce demands on the limited resources of the judiciary. It will allow employers and unions to examine and evaluate their own employment practices and take responsible, timely action to correct what remains one of the worst vestiges of our racial past.

Laughlin McDonald is the Southern director of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation.

Legislative Roundup of 1979 Georgia General Assembly

By John Taylor

Vol. 1, No. 9, 1979, pp. 18-20

The 1979 session of the Georgia General Assembly produced the largest increase in welfare benefits and the first public use of racial epithets in recent memory. As an anomaly, the Georgia legislature did not stop there.

A $113 million surplus was replaced by the end of the session with cries of tight money. Local school boards were handed $78 million of the surplus, ostensibly for tax relief. At the same time, the state’s revenue estimate was humped $25 million higher to meet the salary demands of Georgia teachers, university professors and state employees.

The lawmakers handed a $64 million chunk of the state’s general fund in perpetuity to the highway department by assigning it the sales tax on motor fuels.

But they reversed the human resources department’s effort to pay benefits to eligible welfare recipients retroactive to the date they applied, rather than the date their eligibility was determined. The cost of that program: $880,000.

Stricter reporting requirements for lobbyists ere rejected, but higher interest rates on loans were approved.

Old laws were revised to make women the legal equal of men in matters of child support and alimony, but the Equal Rights Amendment stayed in committee and the law that makes the man the head of the household in Georgia was retained.

Four-fifths of the public information program in the Department of Natural Resources was lopped off, including the popular but expensive Outdoors in Georgia magazine. But the Agriculture department’s equally popular Market Bulletin, distributed free, was kept and efforts to charge $1 a year for subscriptions were rejected.

It was the longest session in recent memory, as legislators postponed time and again continuation of the 40-day ordeal in order to consider the state budget. The postponements were necessary because the House had pigeonholed the budget, trying to force favorable Senate consideration of the House version of tax relief. The postponements also required an increase in the legislature’s budget.

House Speaker Tom Murphy said later he regretted holding up the process thusly, and that he would not do it again. He also was quoted as saying that the lengthy session was neither the worst, nor the best session he had seen.

Consensus found it, if not the worst, at least one of the worst sessions anyone could recall. If nothing else, as one columnist pointed out, it was a public relations disaster.

If there were bright spots, they were in education. Teachers, under the tutelage of the Georgia Association of Educators (GAE), successfully lobbied for 9 1/2 percent pay raises. The raises were granted in two steps to comply with the voluntary federal wage guidelines, but nobody was fooled.

Everyone agreed that the raises were an economic necessity; Georgia teachers are among the nation’s lowest paid, and the educational achievements of Georgia school children reflect that. But it was the lobbying power of the GAL that made the raises a political necessity as well.

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Gov. George Busbee, capitulating on the raises, was left with a reduced pupil-teacher ratio in only the first and second grades. The governor had wanted to put enough new teachers in the first three grades to lower the ratio of pupils to teachers from 25-to-one to 20-to-one.

And the governor managed to complete his statewide expansion of the kindergarten program. In two previous years, Busbee had won funding for kindergartens for a fourth, then half of Georgia five-year-olds. The 1979 General Assembly approved the governor’s request for funds to make kindergartens available to all the state’s 72,000 kindergarten age youngsters.

The new funds for education meant a state budget increase for the Department of Education of between 10 and 11 percent. The only state agencies with bigger increases were Medical Assistance and Offender Rehabilitation.

Medical Assistance, which saw its budget jump by about 15 percent in state funds alone, administers Medicaid, the state-federal program of health care for the poor. Its budget reflects the skyrocketing costs of health care in this country.

The Department of Offender Rehabilitation’s problems – and need for funds – has been in the headlines in the form of riots and deaths at Reidsville’s Georgia State Prison, where prisoners were segregated by federal court order. Offender Rehab’s 11 percent increase shows the state’s need to build more prisons to reduce overcrowding at Reidsville.

The loser among the biggest state departments was Human Resources, whose programs serve the people the legislature likes the least – poor, and Black.

Despite the legislature’s approval of increases in welfare benefits totaling $22 a month for a family of four (from $148 to $170), the increase was half what the department requested. Welfare advocates wanted even more.

The increase brought benefits to welfare families up to 75 percent of the so-called “standard of need,” a minimum cost-of-living figure that was established in 1971 and has not been updated since.

For a fifth year in a row, lawmakers refused any substantial funding for the Uniform Alcoholism Treatment Act, which decriminalizes public drunkenness and requires treatment instead of the drunk tank.

The state’s network of community mental health centers, established when Jimmy Carter was governor, slipped further toward oblivion as declining federal funds were not replaced with state dollars.

DHR’s funding from the legislature for FY80 ended up some $2 million less than in FY79.

The Department of Natural Resources barely broke even, with a slight budget increase that still left the need to charge fees at some state parks.

The Department of Agriculture used public sentiment to hang on to the Market Bulletinbut still wound up with five percent fewer dollars than last year. Also cut were the Departments of Public Safety and Administrative Services.

Departmental budget infighting was only a sideshow to the remainder of the legislative session. The squabbling started with Busbee’s campaign pledge to devote $75 million of the surplus to some kind of tax relief. Having thus heated the potato, Busbee promptly tossed it to a commission he had appointed to come up with a revision of state tax laws. The Tax Reform Commission was no more imaginative than the governor: unable to decide how to give away $75 million and unable to get on with tax revision, the commission punted the hot spud to the General Assembly. There, the question was how to get the money to property tax payers without most of it going to utilities and large landowners.

When the only legal answer seemed to be distribution to local school systems, many of them viewed the measure as a windfall to ease their own budget pangs. Wording designed to see that the money was passed along to relieve local property taxpayers was shrugged off or compromised in many school districts, which had money problems of their own.

As if tax relief hadn’t created enough indecision, the Georgia Supreme Court added to the confusion in midsession by throwing out the state’s local option sales tax law. Wily rural lawmakers saw that as an opportunity to add a penny to Georgia’s 3-cent sales tax and to use the new income for what else but property tax relief.

Urban lawmakers were successful in blocking this proposal, which would benefit small counties (and large property owners) at the expense of counties with large populations, big shopping centers, and poor people paying the sales tax.

In the end, the local option sales tax was repaired, apparently to the Supreme Court’s satisfaction.

On another sales tax front, fares on MARTA – the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority will continue to be subsidized by a one-cent sales tax that the legislature extended until 1997.

The lawmakers shied away from any substantive ethics legislation, refusing to require that lobbyists reveal how much they spend in attempting to influence legislation. In fact, the General Assembly passed a law permitting utilities to form political action committees (PAC’s). The governor, however, vetoed the bill, which would have given utilities the legal vehicle to support candidates for office.

Legislators did pass a measure requiring disclosure of who puts up the money to push constitutional amend

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ments. Some of the money for teacher and state employees undoubtedly came from the Georgia Criminal Justice Defense Council, where Busbee wanted to put $1 million in defense funds for people unable to afford lawyers. The $1 million request was shaved to $250,000.

Reacting to inflationary pressure, the Assembly approved a floating ceiling on mortgage rates hovering in the 11 percent range. A plan to permit savings and loan institutions to pay higher interest on small savings accounts also was approved.

Health Maintenance Organizations, pre-paid health plans that are touted as reducing the costs of medical care, were approved for Georgia, although federal legislation already allowed them.

Public initiative legislation, the same thing that spawned Propositoin 13 in California, was submitted but failed. Requirements for getting a measure on the ballot were so stiff they probably would never have been used, anyway. A restrictive but uniform system for the recall of public officials passed.

Legislators declined – again to act on the Equal Rights Amendment or on a state holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Confederate Memorial Day and Jefferson Davis’ birthday were retained as state holidays, however.

In a session that was short on time and long on spending, the General Assembly managed to entertain the usual run of dignitaries and entertainers. President Jimmy Carter returned to his home state for the unveiling of a portrait of himself; Sen. Herman Talmadge signaled his return from alcoholism with a visit to the legislative chambers. Actress Marlo Thomas came to support the ERA, and singer Ray Charles performed his version of “Georgia On My Mind,” the new state song.

But in the end, the entertainment didn’t take enough attention away from the delays and infighting to prevent the flare-ups and bitterness of the session’s last days.

One rural senator had his legislation blocked by Jewish members of a House committee when he explained it as an effort to “keep those Jews on the West coast from taking our money.”

That seemed to be the signal for submerged and muted feelings to slip into public expression.

On the session’s last day, Rep. Henry Bostick of Tifton quoted “friends” as warning him against voting for “nigger bills.” The term, and others derogatory to Blacks, Jews and women, among others, are not uncommon in the private conversations of some legislators. Rarely, however, are they used in public, and Speaker Tom Murphy declared the comment out of order.

Despite Bostick’s protests that he was using the term as a quote, Black members of the House demanded an apology. Bostick refused, saying he was only repeating what a constituent had told him. Civil rights activist Joe Boone was ejected from the House gallery for loudly demanding action against Bostick. Black caucus members said they might ask that Bostick be censured at the 1980 session.

It was in this vein that embarrassed lawmakers dropped the curtain on the 1979 Georgia General Assembly.

John Taylor is an Atlanta freelance writer.

Action Patterns: Third Party Complaints

By Staff

Vol. 1, No. 9, 1979, pp. 21

When she and her friend made up their minds to challenge their South Georgia employer’s separate seniority lines, the first thing they did was to ask their union shop steward for help. They were told to go complain to the OEO in Savannah. But they were not fooled. They filled a proper job discrimination complaint with the EEOC. That was eight years ago, and it was only beginning.

In the ensuing years they faced obstacle after obstacle; misadvice; inaction by the EEOC; irresponsible action by unscrupulous attourneys; a long search for a responsible attorney who was willing to accept a job discrimination case; the astronomical cost of litigation; resistance from others all the way.

But hardest to take was the hostility and harrassment on the job, from their employer, their coworkers, and their fellow union members alinke. She took it for five years, then quit, unable to endure. Her friend is still working for the same company. “It was unreal,” said the friend. “You can’t afford to say anything that will give them an excuse to fire you, so I just smiled and kept on going. For eight years it was just like I was in a bad dream.”

This year, their litigation finally brought results: a financial settlement and an end to the dual seniority lines. Such happy endings may or may not result when Blacks and women exercize their lawful right to seek redress of race and sex discrmination. But the obstacles aren’t uncommon, and the hostility and harassment the two women faced on the job are inevitable, the side effects of entering a job discrimination complaint. Knowing this, many victims of discrimination forego their rights under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and other equal employment opportunity laws.

There is, however, a complaint mechanism that community organizations can use to lessen the burden on job discrimination victims: the “Third Party” complaint. By law, organizations, persons, or agencies can file a complaint or take action “on behalf” of individuals or classes who have suffered job discrimination because of their race or sex. When Third Party Complaints are entered, the name of the true victim of job discrimination need not be revealed. Protection is thus provided for individuals who are unwilling to come forward publicly because of a fear that a public charge would result in the loss of their job, on-job harrassment, or some other form of reprisal.

Both Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and Executive Order 11246 permit race and sex discrimination complaints to be brought by Third Parties. And when such a complaint has been filed but satisfactory action by the federal enforcement agency is not forthcoming within a reasonable time, Third Parties– just as aggrieved parties– may take legal action. They may enter a civil suit against the employer, employment agency, or union that is charged with illegal discrimination.

Third Party Complaints and court suits may be filed on behalf of individuals or they may be class actions. There is one exception: when the federal government is the employer, neither Third Party Complaints nor Third Party suits may be brought as class actions.

When community organizations, agencies, or individuals enter such surrogate complaiints, the procedures are almost identical to procedures that must be followed by aggrieved parties. A complaint must first be filed. If it is resolved by the enforcement agency in the way that is unsatisfactory to the complaint, or left unresolved by the enfocement agency durin a prescribed period of time, a court suit can then be filed by the complaint.

A community group, agency, or individual needs only the permission of a victim of employment discrimination in order to file a Third Party complaint. The name of the invdividual on whose behalf it has been filed does not have to be invluded in the complaint; however, the aggrieved person’s name must be given, along with their address and telephone number, to the enforcement agency. During its investigation the enforcement agency will verifythat the named individual did in fact request that a charge be filed on his or her behalf. It should be clearly indicated that the complaint is a Third Party Complaint. If confidentiality for the aggrieved party is desired, it should be requested, in writing, in the complaint. A request for confidentiality will be honored by the enforcement agency. From the time the complaint has been filed until the time of its resolution, it is the responsibility of the aggrieved party to keep this enforcement agency aprised of his or her current address. A Third Party may not withdraw a charge that has been filed with the EEOC; only the aggrieved party may do so.

Several private civil rights organizations inthe Southern region routinely accepted and filed Third Party complaints during recent years. The NAACP is a notable example. In addition, when financial resources have permitted, that organization has brought Third Party court actions if they were appropriate. The role of community organizations in handling surrogate actions is important to the fight for equal job opportunity for Blacks and women, for, as in the South Georgia example above, the economic and psychological burden on aggrieved individuals who challenge job discrimination is almost unbearable. Activist organizations can make important contributions to the fight against job discrimination by soliciting complaints and bringing them to resolution, as Third Parties.