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Slowly Building Diversity In Construction Labor Force
Firms Are Starting to Hire More Black Workers in a Majority-Hispanic Field
By N.C. Aizenman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 15, 2008; B01
Kyle Brown strode into the job-training class at Goodwill of Greater Washington and smiled at the black men and women he was about to hire as part of his construction company's effort to diversify its mostly Latino workforce.
In 1984, when Brown started at Miller & Long Concrete Construction, most workers were black. But by the mid-1990s, they had been replaced by Latinos. And Brown, 48, a tall man with dreadlocks, vividly recalls his initial loneliness as "the outsider."
Now, he has been sent on a mission to alter the trend. Officials at the Bethesda-based company say they are partly motivated by a desire to give something back to the majority-black District neighborhoods where they do some of their construction. In addition, many city contracts require that a percentage of workers be District residents.
With federal immigration authorities stepping up workplace raids across the country, Miller & Long's management is getting nervous about relying heavily on non-citizen workers. Although the business uses a voluntary federal database to check applicants' identities, other companies using the system still have been raided, said Myles Gladstone, vice president of human resources.
So this spring, Gladstone pulled Brown from his job as a carpenter foreman to lead the campaign. At least once a week, Brown makes the rounds of job-training classes sponsored by church groups, government ex-offender programs or such nonprofit groups as Goodwill. Almost every day, he visits or calls a current black employee to offer encouragement and mediate conflicts.
Company officials say his efforts are bearing fruit: Until recently, black hires tended to quit within days or weeks. But only six of the 45 black workers recruited in the past two months have left.
Yet to follow Brown is also to glimpse why black residents remain underrepresented in construction regionally and nationally even as nearly one out of every 10 black men in the District and nationally is unemployed -- about twice the rate for whites. Black high school graduates with solid work histories often assume construction is a dead-end job when they pass work sites filled with immigrants, Brown said. So his recruiting pool is largely made up of ex-offenders struggling to readjust to working life -- and many don't succeed. Even the company's longtime black workers often chafe at the isolation on construction sites where few people speak English, and tensions between them and their Latino bosses can run high.
* * *
"All right," Brown asked the Goodwill introduction-to-construction class. "Who's ready for this?"
"I'm ready!" several people called back. During the past eight weeks, the free training program had arranged field trips to work sites of various companies and introduced them to representatives such as Brown. Now the class of 25 had graduated, and Brown was about to grant four of the trainees a full-time job.
The effort would have been unnecessary in the company's early days. The first employee, B.H. Blassingame, was the son of black farmworkers from South Carolina. He was hired off a District street corner in 1947 by the company's two white founders. As Miller & Long grew, Blassingame became a superintendent and the company continued to draw on black farmworkers who had migrated north in search of better-paying jobs -- much like Central American workers have today.
But by the 1980s, as Miller & Long was becoming an industry giant of 2,500 employees, those early black workers began retiring. And the next generation was not eager to take their place. With the decline in wages for unskilled work, blue-collar jobs offered less assurance of a middle-class life. The civil rights movement had also expanded black Americans' access to college and career fields.
Central Americans fleeing civil wars offered a ready supply of construction workers. In less than a decade, Miller & Long's workforce changed from about 80 percent black and 20 percent white to 71 percent Latino, 17 percent white and 12 percent black.
The shift is an industry-wide trend, and officials at much smaller local concrete companies, such as Oncore Construction and Southland Concrete, said they, too, are attending job-training courses in an attempt to diversify.
Brown's recruits from the Goodwill class seemed eager to get started. None had made it beyond high school, and although Brown's offer of $13 an hour was well below the median wage, it was more than the $9 an hour some had made as warehouse stock clerks. Plus they'd get health benefits. If they became carpenters or rod workers, they could make $18 to $19 an hour, about the starting wage for a postal clerk.
Before sending them to the work sites, Brown had a few words of advice.
"The foreman y'all are going to work for is one of the coolest white brothers you'll ever meet," he said. "He knows you're new. . . . He's going to train you. Just do what he asks you to do. It's simple. All you got to do is show up on time and be ready to work."
A broad-shouldered man in a neatly pressed button-down shirt nodded solemnly. Cory Arrington had been trying to land a job since February, when he was released from 10 years in prison on a drug-related assault conviction.
Raised by a single mother, Arrington had been in and out of trouble since he was 13 and had dropped out of high school when he was 16. At 30, he was about to start his first job.
He said that he had initially felt "overwhelmed" but that the Goodwill program had boosted his confidence.
Two days later, Arrington quit halfway through his shift as a laborer's assistant.
"The Hispanics, they worked so fast," he said over the phone. "My forearm was getting tight. I tried to tell them that I've never done manual labor like that, that I wasn't used to that constant pace, that I needed to take a break. But they didn't respect my opinion. So, I just figured, this kind of work is not for me."
* * *
It was just after 11 on a recent morning, and the sun shone brightly as Brown stepped onto a sprawling construction site in Falls Church. His laid-back gait belied a twinge of nervousness. The night before, a longtime black laborer named Mike Smith had called Brown to complain that his Salvadoran foreman had ordered him to break down debris in pouring rain while the Latinos on his crew remained under shelter.
Smoothing over such situations is the bread and butter of Brown's job.
Gladstone said he has told all supervisors that "if any one of these [black] gentlemen is not measuring up to Miller & Long standards, they are not to be terminated until Kyle intervenes to find out if there is some other issue behind it that we're not aware of. . . . We want to make sure we give these guys every possible opportunity." But Brown said he must also take pains not to alienate the company's Latino workers.
Brown found Smith's crew on lunch break. The foreman and the rest of the men were chatting and joking in a circle. Smith sat alone.
"¡Hola, primos!" -- Hello, cousins! -- boomed Brown to the Latino workers before walking over to Smith and asking what the trouble was.
Smith's voice nearly choked: The rain incident was the last straw. Whenever he tried to talk to one of the handful of black workers employed on other areas of the site, Cristobal Parada, the foreman, would scold him for slacking off. And the men on his otherwise all-Latino crew didn't lend him a hand.
"I'm getting so tired of it," he said. "I'm the only black brother down here."
Brown nodded sympathetically. But when he called over Parada, he was irritated to learn that Parada had ordered Smith only to carry the debris to the dumpster -- not to stay in the rain and break it down.
"Why would you keep working in the rain like that?" Brown asked Smith. "And Mike, if you ever need help, ask the man for help!"
But Brown had tough words for Parada, too. "Listen, please," he said, holding up his hand as Parada started to complain about Smith's work ethic. "I'm trying to teach you how a man feels. There's nothing worse than being the only one. You've never experienced that. You've always got your Latino brothers working with you. . . . This is why you've got to reach out and be more patient."
"Ask anyone how hard I work," said Parada, a burly man of 39. "I do what my bosses tell me to do. I got a lot of pressure."
"I understand that," Brown said. "But you're in a position where you've got to handle the pressure. . . . Mike is a good dude. He knows how to work. I'm not saying you got to kiss his [expletive]. All you got to do is treat him like a man."
Then Brown addressed both men: "Look, we've got to be a family. These are hard times. When hard times happen, a family needs to come together."
He asked them to shake. They did, grudgingly.
"And don't sit yourself by yourself at lunch," Brown told Smith.
"I don't understand what they're saying," Smith muttered.
"Well, when they start speaking in Spanish, you just tell them, 'I'm here now; you got to speak a little English.' Don't separate yourself."
Then Brown turned to Parada. "And don't let a man be alone. Go bring him some Spanish food to taste," he said, punching Parada amiably in the shoulder. "You know, some of them beans or something."
Parada chuckled. Smith gave a half smile.