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Signs of the rising new militancy are apparent in many places. In Los Angeles last month, 500 unionized nurses struck a Kaiser Permanente hospital in a contract squabble with the big health maintenance organization. In Denver, municipal nurses are now suing the city, charging sex discrimination in salary scales.* Nurses in Denver make less than, say, a trainee traffic-signal repairman. An even greater disparity exists with doctors, whose median income is now more than $65,000 a year...
That issue was left for the case of the "blue-collar Bakke": Brian Weber, 32, now a $20,000-a-year, white, laboratory analyst at a chemical plant in Gramercy, La. He had sued both his employer, the Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical Corp., and the Steelworkers Union in 1974, charging that he had been illegally excluded from a training program for higher paying skilled jobs, such as electrician and repairman, in which half the places were reserved for minorities. Though Weber won in two lower courts, he lost in the high court. By a 5-to-2 vote, the justices ruled...
...Kaiser and the Steelworkers Union agreed to set up affirmative-action training programs at 15 of the company's plants in the U.S. five years ago. At that time, blacks accounted for less than 2% of the 273 skilled craftsmen at the Kaiser plant where Weber was employed, even though blacks made up 39% of the local work force. To close that gap, the company and the union decided to accept whites and blacks into the program at that plant on a 1-to-1 basis. When the program rejected Weber, he filed suit. Federal courts upheld his claim...
...affirmative-action program would have to avoid excluding whites altogether, deal with job categories that have traditionally been segregated, and avoid firing whites to make room for blacks. It also must be "temporary." Justice Brennan noted with approval that when the percentage of black skilled workers at the Kaiser plant approximates the percentage of blacks in the local labor force, the program will...
...decision will have "a negative effect on people all over the country toward blacks." Perhaps. But the ruling will also bring hope. "I've done better than my parents ever dreamed," says James Nailor, a black electrician who was one of the first to be accepted into the Kaiser training program from which Weber was barred. "The decision means my children will have a chance to do better than I will. That's the American dream...