Once again the unions have been caught with anti-black policies. At first they did not allow blacks to join. Now, they allow illegal aliens to have a union card, to displace black workers.
Maybe, based on this article, unions should pay reparations to any black who could have joined the union.
Or close down the historically racist unions. What do you think should be done?
BROKEN RUNG
The building trades first organized in Philadelphia. Black people never got a fair shot at their jobs.
STORY BY JULIANA FELICIANO REYES, Philadelphia Inquirer, 8/20/22 https://www.inquirer.com/news/inq2/more-perfect-union-trade-construction-racism-pennsylvania-20220830.html
CHERISE FARRIS HAD LANGUISHED at a dead-end job for years before she found out about union carpentry.
Farris, 30, had spent most of her 20s as a clerk at the ShopRite on Parkside Avenue. But she knew she couldn’t stay. She started at just above minimum wage; clerks topped out at $13 an hour. With four young kids, it just wasn’t enough.
Her children’s father, who was already a union carpenter, had told her about a program that could help her get into the Carpenters union. It would be a big shift from customer service – “like speaking a different language,” she described it – but Farris was up for the challenge.
When she finished the program and became an apprentice in 2018, her life changed. Apprentices start at $18.35 an hour. She started treating her family to Jamaican food more often, saying yes to her kids more.
The money felt like freedom.
“It’s heaven,” she said. “You can’t ask for anything more.”
Farris finished her apprenticeship last spring and now makes $40.60 an hour.
In many ways, Farris’ story is a common one. Legions of workers have turned to union construction to solidify their families’ status in the middle class. It’s one of the last remaining well-paying jobs available to people without a college degree. In 2022, construction workers in the United States made an average of $32 an hour, with union workers often making more. These are good jobs. If you can get them.
In that way, Farris’ experience is not the norm. She’s a Black woman who broke into a union full of white men – an industry whose workforce, both union and nonunion, was just 6% Black in 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And in big U.S. cities that are building trade union strongholds, such as Philadelphia and Boston, Black workers have long been locked out of these organizations.
Racism, couched as union solidarity, has always been a part of the trades – embedded in their founding stories, their mythology. Their very success, some historians argue, was built on the exclusion of Black workers. And as far back as 1791, when a group of Philadelphia carpenters organized the first recorded building trades’ strike in the country, the city has been a proving ground for class solidarity. But that solidarity did not transcend racial lines; while white workers demanded their rights, many Black people labored under a brutal system of chattel slavery.
This exclusion has flown in the face of a movement that from its very beginnings has claimed to fight for justice and equality. But the question of who gets to be included in the definition of union solidarity has long haunted the labor movement. And for high-wage, craft unions, such as the trades, solidarity is often much more exclusive, said historian Trevor Griffey.
That first strike of white carpenters for a 10-hour workday failed. But it laid the groundwork for Philadelphia to emerge as a center of building trades power.
In 1827, Philadelphia workers established the Mechanics Union of Trade Associations, the first centralized labor organization in American history, but Black artisans were not included in the burgeoning movement for workers’ rights.
The nation’s first general strike in 1835 won Philadelphia workers the right to a 10-hour day and inspired labor organizing across the country. But very few Black workers participated or benefited from the workers’ victories.
By 1967, the city’s building trades were so entrenched as a white power structure that President Lyndon B. Johnson piloted a federal affirmative-action program in the city, dubbing it the Philadelphia Plan.
Today, the city’s construction unions and their 38,000 members remain a dominant force, enjoying a monopoly on major city contracts and influencing local politics as deep-pocketed campaign donors – even after their leader John J. Dougherty was in 2021 convicted in a federal corruption case.
The local building trades have refused to share demographic data on the workers they represent. But the most recent available data from 2012 show that the industry’s union workforce was 99% male and 76% white in a city that is nearly 44% Black, and where other major labor unions are predominantly African American.
Data from the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission show that among 40 Pennsylvania unions that refer workers to contractors, 91% of their more than 39,000 members were white in 2018 and 5% were Black.
RACISM, COUCHED AS UNION SOLIDARITY, HAS ALWAYS BEEN A PART OF THE TRADES – EMBEDDED IN THEIR FOUNDING STORIES, THEIR MYTHOLOGY.
Nationally, white workers made up 75% of the 843 building trade unions that reported their demographics to the EEOC, while Black workers were 16%. North America’s Building Trades Unions, which represents more than 3 million trade union workers in the United States and Canada, did not respond to requests for demographic data.
These statistics echo a 1902 national survey of skilled trade unions analyzed in W.E.B. Du Bois’ “The Negro Artisan,” published in the American Journal of Sociology. Du Bois found that in the North, Black union tradesmen were a rarity: “There are … numbers of competent Negro painters, carpenters and masons — yet who has seen one at work in a Northern city?”
The centuries-long battle to integrate the building trades has had lasting, and damaging, effects on a city where poor people of color still struggle to find a ladder out of generational poverty. Here, 23% of Black people lived in poverty in 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That same year, the median income of a white family in Philadelphia was $32,000 more than that of a Black family. For so many, access to the trades has been that ladder. But for Black people, it’s long since been broken.
THE ODD ONE OUT
Through her years doing construction, Farris has learned some things.
For one, pick your battles. “If you’re arguing with a third-generation [union worker] and his dad is running the job, it will definitely not end well for you.”
Two, not everyone on the job site – a place with workers from all different trades – is going to be accepting. Racist graffiti in the porta potties is common, as are comments from male colleagues like, “I couldn’t find a job for two years because I’m not Black.”
And you’re often the odd one out. The workers will have known one another forever; their grandfathers grew up together.
That’s fine, she says, “I’m here now.” And when her kid joins the union, it’ll be the other workers who say, “Oh, you’re Cherise’s kid.”
RACIST GRAFFITI IS COMMON, AS ARE COMMENTS FROM MALE COLLEAGUES LIKE, “I COULDN’T FIND A JOB FOR TWO YEARS BECAUSE I’M NOT BLACK.”
But while racism courses through the history of the broader labor movement, Black people are more likely to be union members than any other ethnic or racial group in America.
For years, policymakers and community leaders have struggled to understand why the building trades have not diversified at the same rate as other unions. Philadelphia’s history offers clues.
The building trades movement began here with the Carpenters’ Company, an influential guild of master builders founded in 1724. Their Hall, which still stands off Fourth and Chestnut, served as the site of the First Continental Congress. It was the journeymen employed by members of the Company who organized the first building trades strike in 1791.
The Carpenters’ Company were all white men, most of them Quakers who would source apprentices from their community. That meant that Black men were largely excluded from these jobs, laying the groundwork for generations of inequity, explained Donna J. Rilling, a Stony Brook University professor who studied Philadelphia builders in the 18th and 19th century.
Racial exclusion was also written into the Carpenters’ Company articles of association, developed in 1763. Under the founding document, any carpenters who took on enslaved apprentices or hired them as journeymen had to pay steep fees to the company – the equivalent of $3,200 in today’s dollars per worker. About a decade later, the fees per enslaved apprentice nearly tripled. In Philadelphia, at the time a center of antislavery sentiment, the move could be read as an abolitionist stance because it discouraged the hiring of enslaved people. But it could also be seen as a strategy to keep carpentry white.
For these reasons, when Philadelphia carpenters executed the first building trades strike, it’s not likely Black workers participated.
FROM RACE RIOT TO GENERAL STRIKE
As building tradesmen laid the bricks of a growing city, racial anxiety simmered.
On a summer evening in August 1834, it exploded.
An angry mob of white people armed with brickbats and paving stones massed across from Pennsylvania Hospital and began terrorizing what was then an African American neighborhood. The planned three-day attack – what’s known as Philadelphia’s first race riot – may have been spurred by white anxiety over jobs, as Irish immigrants and rural-born whites blamed Black people for their struggles to get work “at the bottom of the occupational ladder,” wrote historian Bruce Laurie in his 1980 chronicle of the city’s antebellum working class.
It was in this violent racial climate that Philadelphia workers began to unite over their dire working conditions. White workers spoke of “white slavery” and said they were worse off than “galley slaves,” even as Black people remained enslaved in Philadelphia and across the region. These are not abolitionist notions, said historian David Roediger in his book The Wages of Whiteness, “but rather a call to arms to end the inappropriate oppression of whites.”
In May 1835, workers reached a breaking point. Coal heavers walked off the Schuylkill docks to demand a 10-hour day, and as they marched through the city, cordwainers – leather shoemakers — noticed them and dropped their awls to join the movement.
“We are all day laborers!” the cordwainers yelled. Soon after, more workers joined in – carpenters, plumbers, cigar-makers. They marched to fife and drum around Independence Hall and chanted, “From six to six!” – referring to a workday with two hours for meals.
It was the country’s first general strike – a stunning moment of solidarity for as many as 20,000 workers across class, ethnicity, and skill lines. But this solidarity did not extend to Black workers, who were scarcely seen during the weeks-long strike.
Black workers were also excluded from the General Trades Union of the City and County of Philadelphia, a labor organization remarkable for its acceptance of workers with different political views, ethnic backgrounds, and religions. It even sought to organize women. “Blacks, of course, were another matter entirely,” Laurie wrote. “There is no evidence of radicals endorsing the rights of Blacks, either as workers or as citizens”
By 1896, Black workers sought out jobs in a post-emancipation city. In December of that year, a Black carpenter from Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward tried to join the Carpenters union. The union’s secretary told the carpenter he needed to check with union officials first – the union had never had a Black member before.
MOST UNIONS DO NOT FLATLY DECLARE THEIR DISCRIMINATIONS.
W.E.B. DU BOIS
“He put it on the ground of my color, you see,” the carpenter said. The Seventh Ward man never heard back from the union despite his repeated inquiries — business as usual for the quietly racist unions, wrote Du Bois in his groundbreaking sociological study, The Philadelphia Negro.
“Most unions do not flatly declare their discriminations,” Du Bois wrote. Instead, they drag out the application process until the Black worker withdraws. Or they charge Black applicants initiation fees four times the amount for a white applicant. It’s a business decision, the sociologist wrote, “a chance to keep out of the market a vast number of workmen.”
For decades, that pattern of exclusion would continue — locking out generations of Black people from the American dream of upward mobility and contributing to the massive racial wealth gap that divides the nation today.
A STRAWBERRY MANSION PROTEST THAT GOT THE WHITE HOUSE TO ACT
By the 1960s, the trades’ discriminatory practices – and their lucrative government contracts – had become a civil rights target.
On the morning of May 27, 1963, protesters arrived at the construction site of a new junior high school in Strawberry Mansion. Led by NAACP leader Cecil B. Moore, the protesters blocked workers from entering the job site, determined to halt construction until the city and the school board hired Black workers for the project. Not one skilled worker on the site was Black, Moore told the protesters.
“This is a false democracy when qualified colored people can’t get a job building schools for their own kids,” a laborer told the Philadelphia Tribune.
The protest was part of a months-long campaign to pressure the city to give Black Philadelphians equal access to jobs and other opportunities.
Although more than 10% of Black men had construction experience at that time, it was generally in nonunion jobs, with the exception of unskilled unions like the laborers and hod carriers. When Black workers did make it into the skilled unions, they faced layoffs, lower pay, and aggression on the job site.
William Taylor, the only Black carpenter on a job site, said a superintendent had threatened him, saying, “You forced your way in here, I’ll get you out.”
This exclusion occurred just as it had a century before. The trades hired from their own communities. This was a “nearly insurmountable barrier” for Black workers, because of how segregated Philadelphia was, Thomas Sugrue, a historian who teaches at New York University, writes. In 1960, 26% of the city was Black.
The unions also once again levied fees to exclude Black workers. “’I face a $1,000 fine by my union if I teach them to lay one brick,” a Bricklayers union instructor told a member of the Philadelphia AFl-CIO’s Human Rights Committee in 1963, pointing at the only two Black students in his class at Dobbins Technical High School.
And the trades, still, insisted they were not racist.
Joseph F. Burke, president of Sheet Metal Workers Local 19, told the Philadelphia Bulletin he had “never discriminated personally or officially against a man because of the color of his skin.” But in response to affirmative-action programs being negotiated with protesters and the city, he said: “They are asking me to say to a working white man, ‘Get off the job because I want to put a Negro on.’ I can never say that.”
Whiteness and racism had become features of the union system, so entrenched that the suggestion of recruiting Black workers felt like an affront.
“White building trades workers had so long benefited from the exclusion of African Americans that they could not conceive of their position as one that reflected patterns of racial separation and privilege,” Sugrue wrote.
The construction site protests reflected tension brewing nationally as Black Americans stepped up their fight for civil rights. “The manner in which Philadelphia meets this challenge will determine in large part the way other Northern cities might confront the same problems,” Robert M. Gore, an official with the Congress of Racial Equity (CORE), told The Inquirer in 1963.
Civil rights leaders were right to pay attention. Over the next four years, activists staged similar protests in cities across the country. The protests led by Moore ultimately got the White House’s attention.
In 1967, President Johnson announced The Philadelphia Plan, a first-of-its-kind program that required city contractors to make a “good faith effort” to hire a specific percentage of Black workers on federally funded projects over $500,000.
At the time, federal contracts made up half of Philadelphia construction work, and just 1% of members of the seven highest-paid trade unions in Philadelphia were Black, according to a 1966 federal survey.
BLACK WORKERS BEATEN AS UNION LEADERS RESIST INTEGRATION
Opposition to Johnson’s plan to diversify the trades was fierce. A state official called it “illegal.”
Sen. Sam J. Ervin of North Carolina hosted two days of hearings questioning the validity of the plan. Building Trades leaders on the local and national level slammed it as “discrimination in reverse,” saying the plan scapegoated the trades.
George Meany, head of the national AFL-CIO and a former plumber, said the trades were being “singled out as being lily white” when other industries, such as newspapers and banks, were just as guilty. “I resent the action of government officials … who are trying to make a whipping boy out of the building trades,” he said.
WHITENESS AND RACISM HAD BECOME FEATURES OF THE UNION SYSTEM, SO ENTRENCHED THAT THE SUGGESTION OF RECRUITING BLACK WORKERS FELT LIKE AN AFFRONT.
Meanwhile, Black leaders defended the plan. When union leaders demanded a delay in the implementation of new rules in June 1969, Charles Bowser, head of the Urban Coalition, fired back: “This plan has been postponed for 300 years.”
Over the decade to come, the federal government would replicate the program nationally, as would more than 30 cities and towns. And the Department of Labor said in 1972 that five of the six building trade unions covered by the Philadelphia Plan had met its hiring goals. But the unions remained starkly white. Out of the Sheet Metal Workers’ 2,000 members, 43 were Black, Burke told The Inquirer in 1971.
Black workers who did make it into the unions were still not welcome. In 1972, three Black operating engineers were beaten by their fellow union members after testifying in a discrimination lawsuit brought by the city against the union. During one of the attacks, John Dent, a Black operating engineer, yelled to the business agent and other union officials, “Why don’t you help break it up?” But, Dent said, “they just stood and looked at me.”
A 1976 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights investigating the Philadelphia Plan and other similar programs concluded: “No federal affirmative-action program is currently making major changes in this situation.”
Years later, not much had changed. Ephraim Oakley, a 41-year-old welder from Chester, said he had invested $15,000 in welding equipment and “passed every damn welding test [he] ever took,” but still couldn’t break into the Steamfitters Local 420. “I’m being penalized for being a n—,” he told The Inquirer in 1980.
‘I’LL SEE YOU MONDAY’
In the quiet dark of a cold January morning last year, Cherise Farris sat in her navy blue SUV outside a freshly dug construction site on Drexel’s campus. She was mustering up the courage to ask for work. Solicitation, as it’s known, is part of being a carpenter. Farris, who was about to finish her apprenticeship, had done it before, but never this way – in person.
“You hear some people don’t want women out there, some people don’t like Black women, some people don’t like Black people, period,” she would later say. “It’s just like, I’m really ‘bout to go out here in front of all these white people? Because that’s what it is, majority white people.”
This was a “minority job,” where they had to hire people of color from the city, and maybe that would help. She fought back her nerves and marched into the field office, shook the white man’s hand real strong, the way her children’s father reminded her to do.
I’m ready to work, she said.
Put your name down in the book, he said.
She knew to expect this, that she had to be persistent. The next morning, she returned to the work site, braved the makeshift walkway overlike the massive hole dug in the ground, and introduced herself to the white foreman.
We’re not hiring yet, he said.
For three more days, she called the foreman every morning.
Finally, she heard it: “I’ll see you Monday.”
“It is imperative for Black people to have the knowledge about trades,” said Cherise Farris. After seven years working at ShopRite, she’s now a union carpenter.Jenna Miller
For the last few decades, politicians have taken up the mantle of the civil rights protesters, threatening to withhold public dollars on major developments – such as the 2002 stadium project and the 2008 Convention Center expansion – unless the trades agreed to diversity goals.
As Council warred with the trades over these goals, Black building trades workers spoke publicly about their experiences.
There was Paul Solomon, an operating engineer who was working on the Comcast tower when a white glazier shook a noose in his face and said he wanted to hang someone. After Solomon reported it, he stopped getting work. “It seems like I’ve been put on the bench,” he told Council in 2007. “All because I stood up and said something about this noose.”
There was Shenecqua Butt, one of four Black women who filed a discrimination lawsuit against the Carpenters in 2008 after consistently being denied work and laid off. When Butt was laid off after two days at a refinery, she said a white shop steward told her, “We have to take care of our own first.”
And Dent, the operating engineer who was beaten by his union brothers, told Council in 2008: “I don’t expect to see full integration in my lifetime.”
But Farris’ story signals progress. She came up through a pre-apprenticeship program at the Carpenters that’s only for people without any family members in the union. Similar programs exist and tend to serve people of color. This year, 28 of the 39 participants in the Carpenters’ pre-apprenticeship program were Black. Since the program’s launch in 2017, 110 have graduated and 63% have or will become apprentices.
THE TRADES’ FIRST BLACK LEADER
There is still a long way to go for the trades to reflect the diversity of the city and the industry, and that will also depend on bringing Latinx workers into unions. One in five Latino men work in construction, but they are much less likely than white workers to be unionized, according to an analysis by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research of 2021 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
The Building Trades elected its first ever Black top official last year. Ryan Boyer, head of the Laborers District Council, says the Building Trades want their unions to reflect the demographics of the city. His focus is on pre-apprenticeships: His union runs one out of their training center on North Broad Street and he’s working to get these programs inside the School District. He envisions creating a common apprenticeship test that applies to all the trades unions.
But he has no plans to collect demographic data. He doesn’t see the point, he said. And he says the Trades are doing better on diversity than other industries.
“It’s better than your newsroom. It’s definitely better than the lawyers. Definitely better than the city contracting,” he said in a July interview. “So can we improve? Yes. But I will not be here and let the building trades be a whipping boy for that issue.”
Lately, Farris has been thinking about moving her kids out of North Philly. She’s been thinking about their future, and hers. One day, she hopes to become a construction superintendent.
While she was working on the Drexel building, Farris would wear a neon green collared shirt on Fridays, instead of her trademark gray hoodie, because that’s what the superintendent wore. She wanted to show that she could look the part, too.
“Sometimes,” she said, “people don’t see you until you look like them.”
