Appearances don’t mean everything.
Four workers-Larry, Melissa, Jennifer and Hugh-are seated at their desks in familiar poses, telephones glued to their ears.
They help each other, they work as a team and they get things done, just as others do every day in offices around the country.
But in this office their appearance is significant because they are black and white, male and female. They have upper-, middle- and low-income roots. As recently as 10 years ago, these very jobs would have been held by middle-class white men.
The Motorheads, otherwise known as the electrical machinery sales team at Inland Steel Industries Inc., are an example of how affirmative action-the jargon for opening the doors for everyone-can work.
They are a small sampling of a much broader effort at Inland to change the company’s makeup by race and gender, in the face of studies that show future job growth will be dominated by women and minorities.
Hundreds of workplace interviews conducted by Tribune reporters in the last three months show that firms like Inland have slowly but successfully begun to assemble the pieces to diversifying the work force.
There is no textbook to follow. The process at Inland and other companies has been slow and far from easy. And in such a hit-and-miss process, the miss often prevails. But Inland and others are examples of how it can be done.
They argue that it must be done. Companies-especially service-sector firms that have a front-line view of societal changes-realize they must create a workplace where women and minorities, who make up much of the marketplace, can advance.
“It’s an ongoing journey because there are so many pieces. It’s not like learning an algebraic equation or even a foreign language,” says Vivian Cosey, head of human resources at Inland’s Ryerson Coil Processing plant on Chicago’s Far Southeast Side.
Changing the work force is an arduous and complex task, not only for workers but for executives of companies directing the changes.
But at Inland, which started the process in 1989, they are learning what has to be done.
Rule 1: Without strong support from the top and a consistent message, affirmative-action efforts often founder.
Steve Bowsher is a large man, a high school three-letter athlete, freshman basketball player at the University of Illinois, National Honor Society member, oldest of four children, business major in college, frat rat, reared in Kankakee.
He is corporate America: gregarious, self-confident, focused, adept at problem-solving.
He is why Inland’s affirmative-action effort went anywhere.
In 1987, four black workers approached Bowsher, then general manager at Inland Steel Flat Products, saying they felt invisible, stuck in their careers and tired of racist jokes and behavior on the job.
“I didn’t have a clue,” Bowsher recalls. “They may as well have been talking Spanish. I missed a lot of reference points. I didn’t have them in my life. I can’t remember being discriminated against. Hey, I’m a tall white person. The world was set up perfect for me.”
Once he understood, he acted.
He set up classes for open talk about race and sex discrimination. He made sure minority and female workers’ pay was in line and started directing these workers toward promotions.
He also laid down some rules: no more nude calendars or crude jokes, no more company-paid trips to topless bars with customers, no more country-club memberships at clubs that discriminate. There would be no debate. And if you resisted, you would be fired-and several were, Bowsher acknowledged.
His explanation for his efforts is that in management, “you’ve been given responsibility . . . you have this sort of handed-down authority, whether you’re prepared for it or not.
“I’ve got to be the one to fix it,” he said, “because I have the power.”
When Inland officials trace their position on affirmative action, they note that the company alone refused to sign an industry consent decree with the government in 1971 over its employment practices, protesting that it hadn’t discriminated, and that it had supported civil rights issues in the 1960s.
But they add that by the 1980s, Inland resembled any steel giant: conservative, tradition-bound, run mostly by white men.
Today, Inland officials disavow the old ways, and reject criticism that they have gone too far in the other direction.
Inland recruits minorities for job openings. Jess Carr, 33, a recent hire at Ryerson Coil Processing, brought with him several years’ experience at two other steel companies.
“When I first walked in,” he said, “I was surprised by the numbers of Hispanics, blacks and women. It’s true that the majority of upper management is typical white male, but where I came from, you didn’t see anything like this.
“You come here and it’s almost refreshing. They’re making the effort and I’ve never been anywhere where they even did that.”
Robert Darnell, Inland’s CEO, says, “I think we have erred (in the past) on the side of not promoting competent, well-qualified minorities and females. And if there is a bias, all we are trying to do is strike a reasonable balance.”
Support from the top is critically important, said Nathaniel Lott, a district sales representative at Ryerson Coil Processing. “There has been tremendous progress (at Ryerson). The ball was not even on the court before Steve (Bowsher),” he said. “People are no longer denying differences but exploring differences. Diversity training has brought this organization light years ahead.”
– Rule 2: Affirmative-action programs must be monitored. Bosses must be made accountable. Pulses have to be taken.
From the beginning, he was counting.
Tyrone Banks, whose father was a millhand for U.S. Steel, couldn’t help it. He was the first black in Inland’s sales department in 1970, and most other blacks he saw handled the mail or answered telephones.
Then, within months, came the tokens. He saw them everywhere. One black here, one woman there. Always one, never two or three, in an office. And the blacks who moved up always seemed more fair-skinned than him.
He didn’t see himself in Inland’s mirror. He wasn’t white, preppy or conservative. He wore an Afro and spoke like people did in his South Side neighborhood.
“Regardless of the job I was doing, I didn’t fit the mold,” says Banks, now an account manager in marketing.
For a Roosevelt University business class in 1982, he wrote a 29-page study on blacks at Inland. It was his Bible as he spoke out in the late 1980s about Inland’s lack of hiring, promotion and retention of black workers.
The moral: Affirmative-action efforts need constant checking, and progress reports.
“It’s like everything else in business, if you don’t measure it, you don’t get it done,” says Jerry Choate, CEO of Allstate Corp. and a plain-talking supporter of affirmative action.
Although Allstate initiated affirmative action in the 1960s in response to government directives and civil rights efforts, it began only three years ago to measure what was taking place, and to reconsider the results.
Allstate had operated like most companies through the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. “We were struggling with the numbers. We were goal-focused,” Choate explains.
In Allstate’s case, the numbers alone show there has been progress. In 1975, all of its 118 top officers were white and there were only two females. Today, 11 percent are minorities and 19 percent are female out of 158 officers.
Just as Chicago-based advertising industry giant Leo Burnett has boosted its ranks of black and Latino workers to increase its advertising targeted at minority communities, Allstate has a business rationale for its efforts.
Already the nation’s leading insurer among blacks and Latinos, Allstate officials expect to gain an even stronger hold in both communities. One way to do that, company officials say, is to add minority sales representatives.
First Chicago Corp. also decided several years ago to examine its affirmative-action policy. Officials quickly realized that it was not enough to send out statements from the chairman’s office.
Policies varied across the company, they discovered. White males typically came out ahead in promotions because they knew how to play the system. And women and minorities were not part of the system.
The bank has set about making it clear in policy statements what it wants done as well as how to get there.
Still, like the vast majority of corporations, First Chicago’s top has yet to reflect what’s happening at the bottom. The bank’s top 12 positions are held by white men. Out of 140 senior vice presidents, there are 25 females, three black males and a Latino male.
When Don Richards joined Leo Burnett in 1966, he was the only black professional. The agency, which prides itself on its homegrown ways and houses nearly all of its 2,400 workers in one building on Wacker Drive, didn’t change its complexion very much over the years.
Then in the 1980s, it began to pay attention to the ranks of black and Latino and other minority consumers. About the same time, clients like United Airlines, McDonald’s and Kraft began asking Leo Burnett for more ads that reached minorities.
Richards had left the company in 1978, but when he rejoined it in 1990 as a senior vice president, his job, he explains, “was to diversify the ranks.”
No other major advertising agency in the nation has someone whose primary job is recruiting minority workers. Nor does any agency rival Burnett in providing jobs for minorities. About 18 percent of the firm’s employees are minorities. About 10 percent of its managers are minorities and 38 percent are women.
Industry surveys show that minorities account for no more than 3 percent of the employees at most large advertising agencies.
But the changes at Burnett have yet to reach the top. Only one woman sits on the firm’s 18-member board, and she was named in the last two years. Only one black belongs to its next highest rung of 25 executive vice presidents. Six women hold jobs at this rank.
– Rule 3: You have to reach out to women and minorities if you want to hire them. Then you have to train, advise and direct them upward toward the jobs they deserve-and you can’t abandon them.
Soft-spoken Cedric J. Oliver is a large man. When he enters his office at Inland’s 12-inch bar mill, he resembles a football player or wrestler.
Over the years, Inland officials saw something else in Oliver, whose father retired from Inland as a laborer, and who got a laborer’s job in the mill 19 years ago when he got married and had to quit college to support himself.
He rose through the mill’s white-collar ranks until one day in the late 1980s, Del Redigger, then bar company president, said he wanted Oliver to get a master’s degree in the executive program at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business.
“I was pleased and quite surprised,” says Oliver, who finished college by taking night classes and who once thought it impossible for blacks to rise up at Inland because he didn’t see any there.
With master’s degree in hand, four years ago he became the manager of the 300-worker bar mill, which was having serious production problems. He also became the only black manager out of about 15 at the East Chicago facility, a situation that has not changed.
“I was the wrong color and I didn’t have an engineering degree, so I have to have the favor of God and man,” says Oliver, who also operates a church in Gary with his wife.
Black workers hailed his arrival. But some white foremen didn’t. Nor did they help out with technical problems, knowing he lacked technical training. “I said I would prove them wrong, and the proof is in the pudding,” says Oliver.
The mill has set production and quality records the last two years. “Someday he (Oliver) could be an officer in the company,” says Darnell.
It seems logical companies would go through the same procedure as Inland did with Oliver, but, until recently, many did not.
Only several years ago Allstate, for example, began to identify qualified women and minorities for high-ranking jobs. The result, says Choate, is that when the top sales and top underwriting jobs opened up last year, they went to a black man and black women, respectively.
“A few years ago,” he says, “we wouldn’t have had any minorities in the pool.”
– Rule four: On the job, people must respect one another. They have to understand how they are alike and unlike.
When Inland sets up sales teams, it balances them by race and gender. The rationale: Diverse groups offer diverse skills.
That’s how Larry Banks from Chicago’s Southwest Side; Hugh Markey, 31, from the north suburbs; Jennifer Washington, 29, from the South Side; and Melissa Pray, 24, from a wealthy, mostly white Detroit suburb-Birmingham-came to the same cubicle.
None of them had ever been part of such a diverse group until winding up in the large 11th-floor sales room at Inland. They work together, and occasionally see each other on weekends, but they have their differences.
Sometimes, for example, when Larry’s friends are hanging around planning lunch, Melissa, who joined Inland over a year ago, wishes they would ask her along. When she thinks about it, she wonders if that is how blacks and Latinos feel among whites.
One day Hugh, whose desk is next to Larry’s, made a racial joke that bothered Larry for weeks. Finally he told Hugh that it was offensive to him and Hugh apologized. Hugh realized that he sometimes says insensitive things.
Coming from a firm that was all white men, Hugh has enjoyed the different racial mix at Inland. But he wonders whether the company’s commitment to affirmative action will hurt his future.
“The whole point is to put everybody on an even playing field,” he says. “And nobody should be excluded because (they) are white.”
Increasingly, the workers on the 11th floor are becoming friends-not just co-workers. They mix at weddings and picnics. A few play on the softball team in the Inland league, where women players are required on each team. Not long ago, the teams were just men-white men.
The workers also mix at the annual boat ride, which this year is on a warm summer night. A drizzle is ending as about 150 workers board a small cruise ship. They are quiet as the boat meanders into Lake Michigan, sitting according to office groups and friends.
Nile Gossett, 30, who rarely met whites as a child, growing up in an all-black South Side area, grumbles that most of his young black friends didn’t come on the boat ride.
Maybe they are afraid of getting closer to people at work, he says. He prizes them, because their arrival ended the isolation he felt when he was one of a few blacks on the 11th floor.
But after dinner, drinks from an open bar, and music at a deafening roar, they become a noisy, cheerful bunch. Managers dance with workers: the electric slide, polkas, the twist.
Bettye Moorer, one of the first years ago to speak out about the need for better jobs for women and minorities, dances on and on. So much has changed, she often says, adding that so much more needs to be done.
There are some ranchero tunes. A conga line slinks around the top deck.
In the front of the boat, Dan Corona, 45, leans on a railing. A mauve sunset backlights Grant Park and the silver and gray and blue Loop buildings.
He is a short, quiet man, a conservative dresser who is always working intensely at his desk. He is also a newcomer to downtown.
For more than 27 years, he worked at the East Chicago mills, most recently as a pipefitter. But he yearned to escape, and went to college off and on for 20 years, enduring fellow workers’ doubts and jokes.
When the offer for a downtown sales job came his way last January, he was elated. Nobody in authority said it, but he figured it may have helped to have a Latino name. He also figured it didn’t matter if he got a boost by being Latino.
What mattered, he felt, was that his three young children would know that their dad had gone to college and graduated, and had made something of himself. Finally.
He is eyeing Chicago as he slowly tells his story.
“You know,” he says, “sometimes when my wife and I drive downtown to go to work, I pinch myself. I can’t believe it.”
