The structure of the U.S. construction industry in 1960 could be compared to a stone-walled bastion. Union locals had ironclad control over their recruitment process, which was steeped in nepotism and cronyism. Contractors, dependent on unions for their labor supply, were afraid to press them to open their ranks to Black workers. Of the 18 construction crafts, only four lower-paying trades—laborers, roofers, plasterers and bricklayers—had proportional numbers of Black members, and most were nonunion.

A 1960 report by the NAACP was especially damning, citing an “almost total exclusion” of Black workers from apprenticeship programs, the principal gateway to the skilled trades. It found that less than 1% of construction apprentices were Black—just 90 of 11,010 plumbing apprentices, 60 of 9,930 carpentry apprentices and 60 of 9,360 electrician apprentices.

Federal edicts and court rulings had almost no effect in breaching these barriers. President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1953 executive order against discrimination in government contracts had created the President’s Committee on Government Contracts to police the order. It was chaired by Vice President Richard Nixon and included Secretary of Labor James P. Mitchell and labor leaders Walter Reuther and George Meany. The committee studied the problem and collected reports of violations but never took action against the contractors. Despite two federal court rulings in 1959 in cases brought by the National Labor Relations Board that aimed to breach the unions’ closed-shop structure and resulted in the Mountain Pacific doctrine and the Brown-Olds punitive remedy, little changed.

Finger-pointing by different parties contributed mightily to delayed action. AFL-CIO President Meany criticized Nixon in 1960 for failing to enforce the ban on racial discrimination on a federal construction project in Washington, D.C., by sanctioning the contractor. Meany offered to recruit nonunion Black electrical workers for the project if the electrical contractor was forced to obey the law. A committee spokesman said he found no record of Meany’s offer.

Image from ENR archives

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Hiring Bias Crackdown

In 1961, the AFL-CIO executive council said that unions “do not control the basic hiring practices of management” and that “it is the employer who must be persuaded—and when necessary, required—to drop discrimination policies.”

Pivoting off this action just weeks after taking office, President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order abolishing the ineffective former committee and created the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, chaired by Vice President Lyndon Johnson, with Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg as vice chair.

The order required federal contractors and their subcontractors to submit compliance reports and disclose racial employment statistics.

The order was to be administered and policed by the U.S. Labor Dept. But its enforcement was rather permissive in practice, and punishments such as contract cancellation and blacklisting could be imposed only after “conference, conciliation, mediation and persuasion” had failed. The new committee stated that the administration was willing to go slow if unions and contractors showed good faith in attempts to end employment bias. Its executive director emphasized compliance would be sought through voluntary negotiations with contractors.

The Kennedy administration appeared to win a diplomatic victory in 1962, when leaders of all 18 building trades unions participated in a White House ceremony signing a pledge to end discrimination in union membership and apprenticeship programs. At the same time, contractor groups agreed on a new procedure for filing compliance reports. But the pledge was merely a voluntary statement of policy. An ENR article was careful to point out that the AFL-CIO had previously stated it is “a voluntary federation of autonomous national and international unions. We do not and cannot control their internal operations.”

In May 1963, an all-night sit-in at the office of Philadelphia Mayor James Tate by black protestors led him to halt work on a project. Separate violent demonstrations in the city over three days resulted in four Black workers—a plumber, steamfitter, and two electricians—being put to work on a school construction job. Weeks later, picketers shut down a project at Harlem Hospital in New York City, and two projects in New Jersey were the scenes of violence and mass arrests, resulting in inconclusive negotiations.

NAACP Labor Secretary Herbert Hill condemned both the unions and contractors. “Trade union racial practices are the decisive factor in the building trades. However, employers share equal blame as a result of collusion by contractors and organized labor to exclude Negro workers from craft occupations,” he said. “By agreeing to use the union-controlled hiring hall, contractors have permitted the building trades to perform certain managerial functions in putting together the industry work force. The net result is a joint evasion of the Taft-Hartley Act ban on the closed shop.”

‘20th Century Medieval Guild’

In a follow-up interview with ENR, Hill said, “building trades unions are a 20th century version of the medieval guild and we will not and do not recognize the validity of a father and son clause. The agreements reached in Philadelphia ... represent an opening wedge to build on.” At Kennedy’s direction that summer, Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz organized a 50-person task force to perform onsite inspections of federally financed construction projects to identify instances of racial discrimination.

At the same time, pressure was building in New York City. A survey of 25 projects that employed a total of 2,574 workers found that 249, about 10%, were Black, 86 of whom were laborers and 50 were from out-of-town union locals—meaning that only 113, or 4%, were local union craft members. New York City’s population at that time was 15% Black.

The national plumbers union said it would ignore the federal government’s new regulations against bias in apprenticeship programs, contending it did not discriminate, that its apprentices were selected on the basis of merit and that it “will accept no dictation from any government agency.”

ENR in September 1963 explained why no public agency had ever cancelled a construction contract due to racial bias. “If Negroes are excluded from unions and from jobs, the exclusion is more apt to stem from routine and historical union policies, such as father-son clauses, limited membership, closed shop practices, referral procedures and seniority, than from racial discrimination,” ENR said. “If racial discrimination has occurred, it is difficult to prove.”

The NAACP and Congress of Racial Equality in April 1964 staged demonstrations inside and outside the New York World’s Fair to highlight what they called “the civil disobedience of Mayor [Robert F.] Wagner and Gov. [Nelson] Rockefeller in not enforcing laws against discrimination in construction.” This followed the findings of federal, state and city civil rights panels that discrimination existed in city building unions, and recommended sanctions, which the mayor and governor were balking at.

Attempting to forestall a “long hot summer” of demonstrations, the presidential committee formed a 40-person task force to be sent across the country to approach contractor associations, individual contractors and union officials in an attempt to persuade them to comply with anti-bias regulations.

During the summer of 1965 sit-ins, demonstrations and mass arrests took place in Cincinnati. “It is an undisputed fact that there are few or no Negroes in most skilled craft unions,” said its Human Rights Commission. In January 1966, while under the pressure of being investigated by the Ohio Civil Rights Commission, Cincinnati building trades unions said they would give open exams for journeymen and put black workers who qualified into a labor pool.

Management Responsibilities

An August 1966 ENR editorial exposed the misdirection of a statement by the plumbers union president that it did not discriminate, pointing out “that control over union membership, when coupled with effective control over the hiring process, is a negation of equal employment opportunity.” The editorial went on to say “that hiring and determination of a worker’s qualifications are management responsibilities, and that neither union membership nor the meeting of union membership qualifications can legally be imposed, directly or indirectly, as conditions of employment.”

Court rulings to implement anti-discrimination measures were slow in coming. But in May 1967, a U.S. District Court judge in Columbus, Ohio, blocked construction of a building at Ohio State University, because winning contractors could not ensure equal job opportunities since they “will hire only through unions, and a majority of the craft unions will not have Negro members and will not refer non-member Negroes in a majority of the crafts needed ... on this project,” the judge said. He insisted that contracts specify the minimum number of Black workers to be employed and barred use of the closed shop. The ruling set a national precedent in citing equal protection and due process guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

One of the first court rulings against a union under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was handed down in 1967, when a U.S. District Court found the New Orleans-Baton Rouge asbestos workers union local guilty of bias and ordered it to scrap its membership and referral practices.

In 1967 the Bureau of Public Roads, now part of the Federal Highway Administration, began requiring contractors to state in advance how many Black workers would be on each project and their job type. The bureau compared a contractor’s reply with local workforce records, and if necessary, withheld the contract.

The Model Cities program, an urban rebuilding initiative worth billions of dollars, became another battleground. The AFL-CIO in 1967 endorsed the concept of accepting Black inner city residents as journeymen, but Meany truculently insisted that Black workers should not be enrolled unless they “pass an examination as a journeyman,” which NLRB had already ruled was illegal.

AFL-CIO convention delegates then protested that the Associated Builders and Contractors used Model Cities to employ tens of thousands of nonunion workers, weakening craft jurisdictions, apprentice programs and prevailing wages. U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Robert Weaver told delegates that work standards would be preserved and unions must allow in minorities.

A damning indictment of Detroit unions was issued in 1968 by the New Detroit Committee, a coalition of labor, business, civic and religious leaders formed after riots the year before. It found in 1962 only 10 of 1,314 apprentices were Black, and by 1968 only 90 of 2,696 apprentices were Black: no real change. A study in Buffalo, N.Y., found 6.9% of union members were Black, heavily clustered as laborers. ENR in 1968 outlined 12 lawsuits the U.S. Justice Dept. filed against union locals for “patterns of discrimination,” with most still active at the time.

A long-running feud over plans to implement tough federal anti-bias regulations for apprenticeships ended in February 1968. Building trades unions conceded that some form of affirmative action was necessary, if only as lip service, and Labor Secretary Wirtz ended the federal effort. One anonymous activist ENR quoted attributed Wirtz’s surrender to presidential politics: “Johnson is probably desperate for votes,” the source contended.