Tomorrow Becomes Yesterday

Discussing Negro employment and discrimination in industry, San Francisco Human Rights Commission Chairman William Becker insists that "the hard struggle is still for entry. Promotions are tomorrow's problem."Perhaps -- but tomorrows have a way of dawning fast. In Boston last week, the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination agreed to hear complaints by eleven Negroes that General Motors had bypassed them and made junior white employees foremen in its Framingham, Mass., Fisher Body plant. In New York, 14 Negro employees accused the Chase Manhattan Bank of discriminating against their advancement to computer training.

To Illinois Fair Employment Practices Commission Director Walter Ducey, such complaints indicate that tomorrow may already be yesterday. In the past 18 months, says Ducey, "there's been a very clear trend toward an increase of complaints about refusal to promote or train because of color, and a proportionate drop in complaints about refusal to hire because of race."

Civil rights experts maintain that the Negro protests about promotions indicate a speedup in their desire for "upward mobility." Up to now, most well-positioned Negroes have been inclined to accept what they have without much complaint. Another reason that complaints have been slow in accumulating is that promotional discrimination is more difficult to spot than discrimination in hiring practices. "Supervisors can, in subtle ways, throw blocks at a Negro," says Raymond Scannell, a white member of the Chicago Human Rights Commission. One of the blocks, complain Negroes, is lily-white upgrading instead of the old lily-white hiring practices.

Negro leaders base much of their contention on a numbers game: the percentage of Negro employees in a company ought to equal the percentage of Negroes in the community, and the percentage of Negro executives should be in relation to both. In most parts of the U.S., they argue, the numbers are out of joint.

Next month the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission will hold hearings on job discrimination in New York, where Negroes represent 18.2% of the population but only hold 6.3% of white-collar jobs and are a meager 1.8% of the "managerial class." Even those in managerial jobs in most areas are usually lower-level executives. "If I let big business here poke me in the eye once for every Negro vice president it has," says a Los Angeles civil rights worker, "I'd never have to blink."

Bars to Promotion. Corporate executives, increasingly introspective about race relations, say that the crucial problem is the distressingly small number of Negroes with the competence--education, skill and drive--to hold executive positions. Even college graduates are more often trained in such professions as law or medicine than in science or business administration. Banks complain that they no sooner groom Negroes for higher-level jobs than higher-paying companies lure them away.

More and more companies have taken the initiative and are carrying on their own training programs. Lockheed Aircraft has started a VIP (for Vocational Improvement Program) training course at its Sunnyvale, Calif., space plant that combines job training with classroom work in mathematics, encourages class members to move up from starting jobs as factory helpers to skilled occupations.

Ford Motor Co. is reviewing old personnel records in hopes of discovering misplaced skills. Prudential Insurance Co. operates high school courses on company time using company facilities, while eight major steel companies in conjunction with the Federal Government have launched a program to upgrade 8,000 workers whose formal education ended at the eighth grade. To help other companies establish training courses, the National Association of Manufacturers' STEP (for Solutions to Employment Problems) Program offers case histories that explain what other companies with similar problems have done.

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