Bill Fletcher on Black Power at Work

Book Review republished from Industrial and Labor Relations Review, vol. 15 July 2011

Black Power at Work: Community Control, Affirmative
Action, and the Construction Industry.
Edited by David Goldberg and Trevor Griffey.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010,
265 pp. ISBN 978-0-8014-7431-6, $24.95
(paper).

I did not actually meet and speak with Leo Fletcher (no relation) until the 1980s, but in the fall of 1972 as a freshman at Harvard, and as a student radical, I quickly discovered who he was. Leo was the chief leader of an organization known as the United Community Construction Workers (UCCW). This group of Black and Latino workers was on the frontline in the struggle to desegregate the racist building trades industry of Boston. Leo and his colleagues were at one and the same time worker-leaders at the tail-end of the Black Power phase of the Black Freedom Movement while also serving as champions of a radical vision of labor unionism.

The UCCW was not an isolated initiative. It was part of a national phenomenon that has been largely ignored by both labor historians and historians of the Black Freedom Movement. Black worker organizing, whether from the early 1950s and the National Negro Labor Council or much later in the 1960s/early 1970s with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, has been marginalized by historians as almost being an enigma. The reality is that such efforts, along with many others—including the famous 1968 Memphis, TN sanitation workers organizing and strike where Dr. Martin Luther King was murdered—were essential components of the Black Freedom movement as well as attempts to construct a different vision of labor unionism in the United States.

In this light, David Goldberg and Trevor Griffey’s edited volume Black Power at Work: Community Control, Affirmative Action, and the Construction Industry is an invaluable resource. Through the articles assembled by the two editors, the reader is introduced to an entirely different side of both the Black Freedom Movement and organized labor. The insights offered are quite significant. One of the most fundamental is offered in Brian Purnell’s article ‘“Revolution Has Come to Brooklyn’: Construction Trades Protests and the Negro Revolt of 1963.” Purnell emphasizes that the notion that the Black Freedom struggle could be divided along the lines of a political struggle—which took place first—followed by an economic struggle, is patently and historically incorrect. The struggle for economic justice took place at the same time as the struggles for political rights (including voting rights) and against Jim Crow segregation. Though this point should be fairly obvious, the mythologizing of the Black Freedom struggle, and particularly its Civil Rights phase, has brought with it a caricaturization of the movement and its objectives. The reasons for this caricaturization are not discussed in his article, but one can conclude that they result from the need by the ruling elites to sanitize the history of the movement and remove from it any sense of the complexity of its economic objectives, which in many cases challenged the free market ideology.
Equally important for several of the authors in this volume is the repudiation of the notion that there was some sort of “Chinese Wall” separating the Civil Rights and Black Power phases of the Black Freedom Movement. In fact, the seeds of the Black Power phase could be found in struggles that unfolded throughout the Civil Rights phase. The development of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) is a case in point. This organization, a key component of the Civil Rights coalition, engaged in increasingly militant tactics, thereby attracting to it left-leaning and nationalist African Americans who were looking for an alternative politics. In time, CORE , which was instrumental in the early struggle for construction jobs, became a major proponent of Black Power, though as time went on their interpretation of Black Power drifted more and more toward the political Right.

The particular focus of Black Power at Work is on the multi-decade struggle of Black workers (and on the East Coast, Puerto Ricans) for jobs and justice in the construction industry. In many respects, the struggle to desegregate the building trades highlighted the larger problem of moving the objectives of the Black Freedom Movement out of the South and into the supposedly more “liberal” North, Midwest, and West Coast. Immediately, the demands of Blacks and Latinos for jobs collided with the manner in which the building trades industry, including both the contractors and the unions, operated. Each chapter in this volume gives the reader a sense of the closed loop that Black workers found themselves experiencing. For example, they would go to the contractor seeking work only to be told that they needed to go to the union. They would go to the union only to be told that a contractor needed to offer them a job. They would go to the government only to be served a plate of further confusion and double-talk.

It was in response to this situation that there arose organizations of Black workers (and sometimes both Black and Latino workers) to lead the fight for jobs. With names such as the Harlem Fightback, United Community Construction Workers, Black Economic Survival, and United Construction Workers Association (to mention just a few), these organizations conducted a militant, grassroots fight against de facto segregation in the building trades. Most did not survive the 1970s, but they all made a significant impact, in some cases helping to make a major breakthrough in employment practices. In other cases, these organizations served as training grounds for a generation of activists who would go on to play a myriad of roles in both the Black Freedom Movement and organized labor.

Black Power at Work situates the reader in the context of the changing urban environment. As the authors note, the fight for construction employment was a battle in the midst of the transformation of northern cities. The slow decline of manufacturing employment due to technological change and industrial relocation often made the fight for construction jobs a struggle for survival. Specifically, this was a struggle for jobs that could ensure a decent living standard at a point when many other options were vanishing.

In this context, then, the volume is a powerful examination of a social movement that has often been overlooked due to a class bias on the part of many commentators. The leaders and members of these militant organizations were, by and large, not from the middle stratum; they were not doctors, lawyers and ministers, but instead rank and file worker activists. Some came to this fight from other struggles, but their names have largely been forgotten over time.

It is unfortunate that this otherwise exceptional book fails to analyze two very significant formations: New York’s Harlem Fightback and Boston’s United Community Construction Workers. I do not fault the editors for this, but the lack of attention to these two groups is most regrettable. Harlem Fightback became in many respects the flagship of the struggle around construction jobs. It was an organization that, much like Seattle’s United Construction Workers Association (UCWA), edged itself into the broader social justice movement. Boston’s UCCW, also along the lines of Harlem Fightback and UCWA, became a center for many Black leftist activists who would go on to play important roles over the years. In both cases it would have been invaluable to understand what froze these organizations—that is, what stopped or limited their growth. UCCW declined and then essentially evolved into a formation called the Third World Workers Association, which itself declined and was eclipsed by its social service component, the Third World Jobs Clearinghouse. The existence of a worker’s organization in construction among workers of color in Boston vanished.
This book helps us understand the Black Freedom Movement, particularly in the North, as being something far more than an effort at integration and formal equality. Instead it reminds us that it was a movement against a system of racist oppression. This oppression was a matter not only of a lack of constitutional and statutory rights, but also of structures that had been put into place by ruling elites yet were constantly reinforced and supported by those who believed that they benefited from them, regardless of the truth of the matter. The crisis facing U.S. workers, and organized labor specifically, can be unpacked by looking at precisely this paradoxical situation.

Bill Fletcher, Jr.
Labor Organizer and Policy Analyst
Visiting Scholar, CUNY Graduate Center