Black Battleground

Crowds of angry blacks marched through parts of Pittsburgh last week, exchanging volleys of stories, bricks and bottles with white workers at the sites of unfinished buildings. Determined to get a fair chance at construction work, the demonstrators tied up traffic as they converged on a new 65-story U.S. Steel skyscraper and scuffled with club-wielding police, who arrested more than 200 of them. The skirmishes introduced an ominous novelty into urban racial disturbances: demonstrators and police squirted each other with disabling Chemical Mace. Forty-one people were injured, eleven seriously enough to require hospital treatment.

Earlier in the summer, black leaders organized six weeks of similar demonstrations that intermittently halted work on $100 million worth of new buildings in Chicago, and they plan to take the same sort of action in other cities in coming weeks. They also will seek court injunctions to halt work on federally subsidized building projects in some areas, until more Negro construction workers are hired.

Talk, Talk, Talk. The intensity of the new flare-ups demonstrates all too clearly that well-publicized government and union pledges to open more building jobs to blacks have amounted mostly to talk. Blacks are still barred from building jobs by unions that control hiring and pass along memberships from father to son. The continuing discrimination is crippling one of the nation's best hopes for easing the plight of the ghettos, since construction work represents by far the most promising opportunity for poorly educated blacks to earn high wages. Employment of more Negroes would also ease the needless labor shortage that has sent building costs soaring.

Under government pressure, the 18 major AFL-CIO construction unions agreed last year to take "affirmative action" to find and admit more qualified Negroes to membership. In practice, this has usually meant that more blacks have been accepted in apprenticeship programs, which generally take four years to complete. ,In some cases it has meant even less. This spring, for example, the 900-member plumbers' union in Alameda County, Calif., sent buses to ghetto high schools to bring interested young blacks to an apprenticeship test. The test, however, measured IQ and mathematical ability rather than plumbing aptitude. Two Negroes passed, but even they did not become apprentices. The one who did best placed 18th among all those who took the test, and the union is admitting only ten apprentices this year.

The real problem is not apprenticeship programs, black leaders contend, but employment opportunities for Negro journeymen. Their qualifications are judged by unions--and that, says Herbert Hill, labor director of the N.A.A.C.P., "is like letting George Wallace decide who is qualified to vote in Alabama." Black leaders cite the experience of Anderson L. Dobbins, a Negro who failed for four years to get into a Cincinnati local of the electricians' union. Eventually, a federal judge found him better qualified to practice his trade than most of the union's white members.

Nationally, Negroes hold only 2% of the 800,000 best-paying construction jobs and only 7.2% of all 2,900,000 building-crafts jobs. The disparity is greater in some areas, including Pittsburgh. A recent study by the mayor's Commission on Human Relations found that blacks made up 49% of the city laborers' union, but that Negro membership in most of the 25 other Pittsburgh building unions was under 2%. The unions representing electricians, ironworkers, asbestos workers and elevator-construction men are 100% white.

Hope in Age. Whether the blacks' pressure tactics will bring quick change remains to be seen. In Pittsburgh, work has been halted on eight major projects, including the U.S. Steel building, pending the outcome of negotiations between the demonstrators and the unions. Chicago unions broke off what had seemed to be promising talks with the militants late last week after a group of blacks invaded the state A.F.L.-C.I.O. convention and pushed the 82-year-old state federation president, Reuben Soderstrom, away from a microphone. For the long run, the Negroes' best hope may lie in the advancing average age of building-union craftsmen. Sooner or later, overwhelming shortages of building labor could compel reluctant locals to lower their color bars.

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