New Bridges Between Blacks and Business

By Marshall Loeb

America's business people have a unique opportunity to form new alliances with a large, yearning and vocal group of Americans who were long thought to be hostile, or at best neutral, to business: the nation's 26 million blacks.

They are not, of course, about to split on all issues from their traditional allies among liberals and labor. But Benjamin Hooks, chief of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, likes to quote the remark of Ossie Davis, actor and activist: "We have no permanent friends, we have no permanent enemies, we have only permanent interests."

More and more black leaders say that their interests coincide with those of business on energy legislation, Government regulation, environmental controls and numerous other issues. The nation should not necessarily alter its policies just because members of these two groups call for change, but the jointly held views of blacks and businessmen make sense on many matters.

No white businessmen are more forceful foes of the minimum wage than such black economists as U.C.L.A.'s Thom as Sowell and Temple University's Walter E. Williams. Sowell has concluded that the rise and spread of minimum-wage coverage is a catastrophe for young and unskilled blacks.. According to his studies, it is by far the major reason that the unemployment rate for 16-and 17-year-old black males is five times higher today than in 1952, when it actually was lower (8%) than comparable white teen-age unemployment. He finds it distressing that "people who are perfectly capable of doing a job have been made unemployable because they have been priced out of the market."

Sowell also believes that the rise of poor blacks has been blocked by environmental rules and other Government regulations, a view held by other black intellectuals. His argument: "Regulatory rules have impeded people who are climbing rather than people who are already at the top. There is a fundamental conflict between the affluent people, who can afford to engage in environ mental struggles, and the poor people, who need space and access to recreation. If you're talking about keeping the coastline pure enough for the standards of the Sierra Club, you're talking about keeping the people living in Watts down in Watts. You don't see many black faces in the Sierra Club."

The same idea is echoed forcefully by Bayard Rustin, the civil rights veteran, who condemns the "self-righteous, elitist neo-Malthusians who call for slow growth or no growth. The policies of these elitists would condemn the black underclass, the slum proletariat and rural blacks, to permanent poverty." Rustin contends that the curtailment of construction projects, factory expansions and farm ventures for environmental reasons already has cost many potential jobs for blacks. The only way that unemployed blacks can join the work force in a significant way, he argues, is for the economy to grow vigorously.

The N.A.A.C.P.'s Ben Hooks also speaks out against "the more radical fringes" of the environmental and regulatory lobbies. "We are not antienvironmental," he stresses, "but we are saying that there ought to be social-economic impact statements for environmental regulations." Hooks condemns many niggling health, safety and zoning regulations that he says are "really killing our neighborhoods." The costly rules can prevent modestly financed blacks from starting Mom and Pop businesses or from buying ghetto enterprises from previous owners who were protected by grandfather :' clauses and did not have to meet the costly new regulations.

Hooks once bought a doughnut shop in Memphis from a man who had owned it for 25 years. "In those 25 years, they had passed all kinds of laws," he recalls. "You had to have separate rest rooms for men and women, you had to have ratproof walls and everything on God's earth. We were hit with all those regulations, and they cost us $30,000. We had to close the shop."

"It's obvious now," Hooks goes on, "that nobody, but nobody, is buying into a decaying black ghetto except blacks themselves. So the effect of some regulations is almost 100% to exclude blacks. This causes a lot of resentment." If a black veteran invests his nest egg in a doughnut shop and then is forced to close it, warns Hooks, he is absolutely convinced that "they" -- the white-controlled Government -- do not want him to succeed.

Hooks and a rising chorus of blacks argue that poor and unemployed minorities can succeed in the long run only if more private--not Government--jobs are opened in a free, growing economy. To that end, says Hooks, "at the national level, and in every local Chamber of Commerce and Better Business Bureau, black leaders and business leaders should be sitting down to deal on the points on which we agree."

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