*This is part two of a two-part series. Read part one here.

In the summer of 1969, protesters shut down over a dozen projects in Chicago, resulting in the Builders Association of Chicago and the unions holding a closed, five-hour negotiating session. Weeks later, white construction workers there went on a rampage, breaking up a Labor Dept. hearing on the dispute. When negotiations between contractors and activists in Pittsburgh fell through, protesters shut down a stadium project, followed by mass arrests at other demonstrations. Black protesters in Seattle shut down over 30 projects, and 2,000 white construction workers marched on city hall.

One of the more effective avenues for breaking the integration logjam was the Philadelphia Plan, which required low bidders to agree before a contract award to employ a representative number of minority workers in each trade. It was created in response to the demands of local business leaders, who wanted a uniform approach to the equal opportunity problem. It was initiated by the Philadelphia Federal Executive Board, an interagency group, and covered five counties. A revised plan in 1969 called for increasing minority membership in six trades from its 1969 figure of under 2% to between 19% and 26% by 1973.

The Philadelphia Plan came under attack when U.S. Comptroller General Elmer Staats, egged on by Congress members and the industry, ruled the plan illegal, arguing it forced contractors to discriminate against white workers. Labor Secretary George Shultz rejected Staats’ view as noncontrolling and stood firm. Despite a strong effort in Congress to kill the plan, President Nixon backed it and it survived.

Efforts to get 18 other cities to craft their own plans were bogged down in the face of resistance from unions and local officials. A 1970 ENR editorial stated, “it’s clear that the President, the governors and the mayors lack the guts to enforce the law…. Until there is enough labor law reform to make collective bargaining less of a sham, minority groups are justified in using every nonlethal weapon at their command to shame and pressure the establishment.”

The Philadelphia Plan was intended as a prototype. The Labor Dept. targeted 73 cities in 1970 for intensive assistance in crafting their own “hometown plans,” and deployed 30 additional Office of Federal Contract Compliance staffers. Progress was slow. By September 1972, 56 cities had adopted hometown plans, and the Labor Dept. had imposed mandatory plans on five cities. A year later, an OFCC audit of 31 plans found that less than one-third of the union locals had met the minimum plan standards.

Images from ENR Archives

A Turning Tide

Probably the first Black contractor on the cover of ENR was Fred Eversley. In 1969, his two firms had a total contract volume of $25 million and a portfolio that included churches, banks, an IBM plant and Model Cities jobs. He told ENR how accepting a Small Business Administration loan would signal to the industry that he had no liquid assets, and bonding companies would consider him unbondable. “Bonding requirements are the single largest constraint to growth, especially for minority or small contractors,” he said.

A 1974 study, “Labor Union Control of Job Training,” conducted by Herbert Hill, national labor director of the NAACP, found that the government had substituted voluntarism and good-faith efforts in place of enforcing apprenticeship outreach programs and hometown plans. It described the apprenticeship system as protracted, inefficient, union-controlled, exclusionary, rigged against minorities, and still circumvented by a majority of white craftsmen. Nonetheless, statistics released by the Labor Dept. found that between 1970 and 1975, the percentage of minority apprentices in all apprenticeable trades grew to 17.5% from 9.1%, to 44,000 from 18,000.

A 1976 article stated, “No resolution is in sight in the long-running dispute over how to improve compliance with affirmative action hiring rules. … The original enforcement plans were based on a joint effort involving contractors and the building trades unions. But the growth of open shop work leaves an increasingly important segment of the industry outside this scheme.”

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 1976 upheld imposition of a racial quota on the membership of a nearly all-white sheet metal workers union, NYC Local 28, stating: “When dealing with recalcitrant unions which have defied gentler means of enforcement a mathematical membership goal may be the only effective means to eradicate discriminatory practices and to remediate the effects of past discrimination.”

In 1976, Transportation Secretary William Coleman Jr. announced minority contractors would be awarded 15% of the work on the $1.75-billion Northeast Corridor rail rehabilitation project, the largest commitment by the federal government to minority contractors up to that time. A Federal Highway Administration study of highway construction labor the same year found minorities expanded to 21% of that workforce by 1973, from 19% in 1969, despite minorities accounting for only 11.6% of the entire civilian workforce in 1973.

A $4-billion public works bill in 1977 had a 10% minority business enterprise requirement. The Commerce Dept.’s Economic Development Administration was responsible for the grants. ENR editorials supported it at the time. Contracts funded by the bill were all awarded by the end of 1977, with nearly 15% of the funds going to MBEs. The Associated General Contractors waged a wide-ranging legal fight against the requirement, with AGC chapters filing suits against it in 10 of the 11 federal judicial circuits. In 1980, the Supreme Court would rule in one of these cases, Fullilove v. Kreps, that MBE set-asides were legal.

The National Association of Minority Contractors threatened to shut down projects with protests if the AGC lawsuits were successful. According to Paul King, chairman of NAMC’s EDA oversight committee, the $400-million set-aside represented less than 1% of the $50 billion public construction market. “For the AGC to claim that less than 1% of the public construction dollars should not go to a disadvantaged group is bordering on immoral.”

A Bureau of Labor Statistics report found that the proportion of Black workers in eight construction trades rose between 1972 and 1980. The share of plumbers increased to 8.5% from 5.1% , electricians to 4.1% from 2.8%, masons to 14.6% from 13.6%, and machinery operators to 6.2% from 4.9%.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1979 that private companies were free to give special help to Black workers in getting jobs and promotions, despite the ban in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act on using race as a criterion in employment decisions. Carter administration officials hailed the ruling as a sweeping affirmation of government equal employment efforts. The business community welcomed it as a definitive guide to avoid reverse discrimination suits.

The NAMC stated in 1979 that it believed “a continuing and systematic form of racial discrimination” by sureties existed. A related editorial in ENR said: “While bonding and financing are usually cited as minority contractors’ biggest obstacles, the basic problem behind these, as well as many others, seems to lie in subtle factors that are producing lack of trust and respect. There is a prevalent feeling that each is playing games with the other. To many minorities, this translates into discrimination, hypocrisy and unconcern, producing the feeling, as one minority contractor explained, of having to ‘softshoe’ into a banker’s or surety’s office and request a loan or a bond as if he were doing you a favor.”

By the 1980s, opposition to affirmative action requirements began to soften. The OFCC stated in 1982 that hometown plans were “a viable mechanism” for helping contractors meet affirmative action goals, and therefore the agency need not review individual contractors to check compliance. The plans built support for integrating the industry by involving contractors, unions, minorities and local governments. “They are one way to finesse the fact that OFCC does not have jurisdiction over the unions,” an unnamed source told ENR.

In the Reagan administration, USDOT issued a rule in 1983 for a 10% MBE set-aside goal. State governments confounded the industry by promising USDOT they would meet or exceed the formerly controversial goal. The logjam was breaking up.