After losing his home when his union’s job referrals stopped, after union members hurled racial slurs at him at union meetings and threatened to hang him and other blacks, Frank Daniels still did not back down.
He figured he had nothing else to lose. His marriage had broken up. He was working as a handyman. He was alone.
Daniels, a hefty, 6-foot-tall former Marine, was dead set on fighting for his rights.
“I spent two years in Vietnam almost getting blown up, and I saved too many white guys over there to put up with racism,” he angrily recalled.
And in the end he won his fight, a battle he felt he had waged also for whites, Asians and Hispanics out of favor with the local’s leadership.
But it wasn’t easy. His union, Pipefitters Local 597 in Chicago, came under attack before a federal commission in 1942 for excluding blacks since at least 1912, and it has been periodically embroiled in discrimination complaints ever since.
A jury awarded Daniels $331,000 in damages against Local 597 in 1988 and, five years later, after the union still blocked him from finding work, a federal judge ordered a special monitor to run the local’s job-placement efforts.
“That there is an anti-black mindset in Local 597, both at the administrative and member level, is clear from the evidence,” Frank J. McGarr, a former U.S. District judge named by the court to make sure the local’s racial discrimination ended, wrote last June.
It is not clear how many others have suffered the same fate as Frank Daniels and how many Chicago-area building trade unions share Local 597’s court-documented legacy of hostility towards minorities.
That’s partly because most of the large building trades unions refuse to disclose their membership figures or even to discuss the status of their minority members.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which collects figures on unions’ racial composition, does not release its data. EEOC officials in Washington said such a step might inhibit unions and companies from filing with the government.
But court and union records show how some unions have yet to overcome their traditions as all-white enclaves protective of their high-paying jobs and closed to outsiders.
Three years ago, for example, dissident members of Local 134 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers exposed an effort by the local’s leaders to evade a 1984 federal court order to raise the union’s minority ranks, according to charges filed in court.
Dealing in secret, the union’s former leaders allegedly gave membership cards to more than 1,000 workers, nearly all of whom were white. Of the union’s 8,000 members in construction work today, only 8 percent are black, one union member said.
Union officials would not discuss the issue.
Among the Carpenters Union’s 5,500 members in Chicago, only 420 are black, about 7 percent. Altogether it has 1,200 minority members in Chicago. But the union defends its record on minorities.
“There is nobody trying to exclude anybody in the Carpenters Union,” said Earl Oliver, president of the carpenters 10-county district council.
At least 20 percent of the union’s members are retirees, union officials say, actually giving blacks a slightly higher percentage of the union’s working ranks.
Although the union moved its apprentice training program out of Chicago in 1987, officials note they kept their pre-apprentice efforts in the city.
Ultimately, the hiring decision is up to the company, not the union, Oliver said.
Yet the picture is not totally discouraging. It is brightened by exceptions and by some unions’ belated attempts to diversify.
While blacks last June accounted for only 11 percent of the apprentices with the carpenters, the union with the most trainees, 20 percent of the apprentices with the plumbers and electricians were black, according to the federal goverment.
So, too, the laborers union does not have to struggle to integrate its ranks. Minorities already make up nearly two-thirds of the union’s membership in the Chicago area, say union officials.
But the laborers are unlike the other building trades unions. They do not train their apprentices. They do not operate a hiring hall. And they earn less because they are considered less skilled than those in the other building trades.
“The laborers are always on the bottom rung of the ladder,” said Ernie Kumerow, president of the Laborers’ District Council.
Then there is the case of the electricians, who appear to be making some halting progress.
The union’s new leaders, who took office more than two years ago, are praised by labor activists for renewing efforts to increase their female and minority ranks.
Tom Geoghegan, an attorney for IBEW Local 134, cautions that its current leaders do not want to raise hopes too soon.
“This is not something where you go in and you set up goals and decrees and say it is all done,” he said. “They are just getting to the bat on this thing.”
Women’s and minority groups say it is not enough for the unions to recruit new members and open apprentice programs to them. But some union officials say their organizations have made the right steps.
“The building trades have made great strides in the last five years as far as minorities are concerned,” declared Mike Breslan, head of the 25,000-member Chicago and Cook County Building and Construction Trades Council.
His view is not shared by community activist Eddie Read, who has staged demonstrations at Chicago construction sites for two years, demanding that contractors hire more blacks immediately.
One protestor who joined Read was Excell Howard, 34, a carpenter, who last held a full-time construction job in 1992 and has just barely gotten by ever since.
When the work ran out, Howard stopped paying his carpenters union dues. Without a union card, he has no access to most high-paying construction jobs. He blames his dilemma mostly on his union, saying it should have helped him find more jobs.
The trade unions, however, don’t think they should be singled out by women’s, civil rights or minority groups. It is time, they say, for other occupations to share the spotlight.
But there are good reasons for the attention on them.
For millions of Americans without college degrees, a building trade union membership has been the key to the middle class. Factory work used to open the same doors, but thousands of factory jobs have disappeared. And many factory workers’ wages have also slipped downward or been frozen in recent years.
Then, too, there has been the history of exclusion that the government targeted in the 1970s when it set up programs in the big cities, requiring building trades unions to boost minority ranks on federal jobs.
The programs eventually collapsed, say federal officials, due to unions’ resistance and the reluctance of Republican administrations to enforce minority hiring goals.
If there are few minority construction workers today, union officials add, it is partly the fault of contractors who won’t hire them.
But the road to most high-paying construction jobs goes through a union hall. That is especially so in the Chicago area where as much as 85 percent of the new construction work is done by the unions, say local building industry officials.
Most contractors find their help at the union hall. That has been the case with the 8,700-member Pipefitters Local 597, where according to the federal court’s finding, an informal word-of-mouth job referral system discriminated against blacks.
Without jobs, the union’s black members were plunged into “chronic unemployment,” the federal court report showed. Those who could not afford to keep up their dues were expelled from the union.
And those who remained had such little work they rarely qualified for pension or medical benefits, the court said.
The union signed a court consent order in 1973 to raise its black membership, but the number kept declining, so that by 1990 blacks made up only 3.9 percent of its members, federal court records show.
Even with a court monitor on union premises, and the court’s emphasis on boosting the hiring of black pipefitters, builders’ old customs do not die quickly.
When employers called the union hall in July, seeking workers by name, blacks accounted for 2 percent of those they sought.
Pressed to explain their low numbers of minority workers, some unions blame the situation on these workers’ failure to get through their apprentice programs. But not every union agrees.
Several unions have begun more intense or remedial programs for apprentices, said Breslan of the Building Trades Council.
Two years ago Plumbers Union Local 130, which operates a very modern center just west of the Loop, added special math classes for their apprentices.
Along with special classes and attention for students’ needs, the program has been able to maintain its minority ranks at more than 25 percent, said Richard O’Connor, who runs its training program.
The union has also been nudged along by a 1986 court order that recently expired, union officials added.
Although blacks’ places in the union’s apprentice program have increased, their numbers have only grown from 5 percent of membership in 1977 to 8 percent as of 1993, court documents provided to the Tribune show.
Late one day at the plumbers’ training center after most students had left, Dennis Cooks was still plugging away on a computer. Cooks, 41, who put aside 17 years as a meat cutter last year to become a plumber, wanted to review some work.
He was just tired of working in a meat factory and hoped plumbing would mean a new and better-paying career.
Initially, he doubted if someone his age could keep up with the schooling, especially the math. At one point, he was ready to drop out, but instructors urged him to stay and have helped him since.
It didn’t matter to them that he is black, he noticed. “I haven’t seen any signs that say `white only’, ” he said.
Frank Daniels would not say the same about his union, whose offices are near the plumbers’ training center.
Despite his court victory over the union, he said his troubles linger. “They give me one-, two-, three-day jobs and far away,” he said. White union members still taunt and threaten him, he added.
Local 597 officials would not discuss the issue, saying it is a court matter.
“There is still a lot of reluctance to change,” Daniels said. “They hold a lot of animosity toward me.”
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Tuesday: Rigorously enforced affirmative action programs are the key to helping blacks get more construction jobs.
