Word: laborer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Organized labor and the black community are on a collision course...
...Herbert Hill, national labor director...
...Pittsburgh building trades over the next two years. After last week's march, the second in a month, contractors and unions offered 200 jobs but demanded a survey of the black community to see who wanted them. Incensed at such tactics, black leaders broke off negotiations. U.S. Labor Secretary George Shultz, responding to an appeal from Mayor Joseph Barr "to resolve the explosive situation," rushed a three-man mediating team to the tense city...
...Pittsburgh protests and similar outbursts in Chicago reflect the increasing determination of embittered blacks to force organized labor to drop its color lines. Negroes have picked the nation's 17 construction unions as the prime target because most of them still practice flagrant racial discrimination. The protesters' ultimate aim is to rouse enough public and political pressure to compel all unions to give blacks equal access to skilled, well-paid jobs. In Buffalo and Chicago, the N.A.A.C.P. this month filed the first of a threatened series of federal lawsuits to block publicly financed construction until unions, contractors...
...Labor promises reform, but so far has delivered only tokenism. As long ago as 1962, the heads of 119 A.F.L.-C.I.O. unions signed an anti-bias pledge at the White House. Yet today, Negroes account for only 1½% of the 15,000 members of building unions in Boston. In Chicago, there are three "minority" journeymen among 900 boilermakers, two among 625 elevator constructors, and only one among 400 glaziers. Industrial unions sometimes have separate lines of promotion and seniority based on race. Nepotism, though on the wane today, has long been the principal way to gain admission to scores...