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HENRY BAKER, a black laborer in an Arkansas Power and Light plant, is now in the middle of a lawsuit against AP&L, charging that the utility discriminates against blacks in its hiring and promotion policy. Baker has worked in AP&L's Cecil Lynch plant for 25 years without a promotion. He is trying to get back pay for all the years he worked in AP&L's lowest job category while white people with less experience got moved up to higher-paying jobs...
Forced to defend themselves, AP&L officials have under cross-examination come out with some astonishing statistics. In the Cecil Lynch Plant, no blacks were hired between 1959 and 1970. In 1970, when Baker first filed his suit, blacks at the Lynch plant worked only as laborers or janitors, the plant's lowest job categories; and the average salary of AP&L employees was $8000 for whites and $4000 for blacks...
...this evidence is fairly conclusive proof that AP&L--and probably Middle South in general--was discriminatory in 1970. However, AP&L's line of defense has been that it has changed all that in the last three years. AP&L's employment manager testified that 30 per cent of the utility's new employees since 1970 have been black and have filled positions "pretty much up and down the line" in job classifications...
...EEOC figures make these claims seem a little exaggerated. For instance. AP&L says it hired 80 blacks in 1971, but the total increase in black employees for AP&L and two other Middle South subsidiaries from 1970 to 1972 was 81. If AP&L's claims are true, then, Louisiana and Mississippi Power and Light Companies must have fewer blacks now than they...
Information presented in the lawsuit also sheds light on why Middle South has no blacks in managerial positions. AP&L has a "summer cadet" program in which it hires engineering students during summers--an ideal way to recruit and train future high-level employees. All of the summer cadets hired so far have been white, while unskilled jobs as summer laborers have gone to both blacks and whites. Middle South obviously can't just wait for black executives to come to them, and they obviously aren't doing much recruiting at black colleges, where there would no doubt be plenty...