Tuesday, March 19, 2024
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Tags U.S. Department of Labor

Tag: U.S. Department of Labor

How to end construction union racism: Start a Black union

It has been 45 years since my mentor, Dr. Arthur A. Fletcher, implemented the Philadelphia Plan. This was a federal program used to integrate unions. From the beginning, the construction trades resisted with violence and Jim Crow style segregation. Then why do most civil rights organizations and local Black elected officials support such instruments of racism? That is simple. They take donations from the very construction locals who discriminate against us.

Joe Debro on racism in construction, Part 15

A 1968 book-length report, titled “A Study of the Manpower Implications of Small Business Financing: A Survey of 149 Minority and 202 Anglo-Owned Small Businesses in Oakland, California,” was sent to the Bay View by its author, Joseph Debro, prior to his death in November 2013, and his family has kindly permitted the Bay View to publish it. The Bay View is publishing the report as a series. This is Part 15 of the report.

Joe Debro on racism in construction: A study of the manpower...

All the ingredients of human bondage and denigration which characterize Anglo treatment of minority peoples in the United States are also present in Oakland, California. A study of Oakland’s socio-economic situation demonstrates, as the Kerner Report and many other similar queries have done throughout the country, that the poor are cut off dramatically from the middle and upper classes.

Joe Debro on racism in construction: A study of the manpower...

“Our nation is moving toward two societies, one Black, and one white – separate and unequal.” And, unless immediate corrective action is taken, “large scale and continuing violence could result, followed by white retaliation, and, ultimately, the separation of the two communities into a garrison state.” These are words from the much publicized and relatively blunt report of the President’s Commission on Civil Disorders.

Joe Debro on racism in construction

In November 2010, Joe Debro sent the Bay View a 200-page “book” he wrote in 1968 on racism in construction. His family has generously agreed that it be published in the Bay View. To begin, here is the prolog he wrote in 2010 to update it. In 1968, three of us undertook a study of the manpower implications of small business financing. In 2010, 42 years later, not much has changed.

Putting our money on solar energy and green construction: Cypress Mandela,...

Creating jobs six times faster than the overall job market, the solar industry has become a robust engine of job growth, totaling over 119,000 new jobs as reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics. These numbers help to solidify the argument that the investment in solar energy has considerable long-term payoffs.

We CAN put Blacks back to work

Unemployment in the African-American community is double and in some places triple the national average. You know it doesn’t have to be that way.