Laboured Protest by Oliver Ayers

Author:Oliver Ayers [Ayers, Oliver]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Political Science, Civil Rights, Security (National & International)
ISBN: 9780429673191
Google: e2N8DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-12-07T02:58:11+00:00

The Enduring Problem of Discrimination by Management

The exclusionary practices of company managers and officials, among firms large and small, remained the most serious and best documented problem facing black workers trying to access work in the USA’s burgeoning war economy. In 1941, the year of the nation’s belated entry into the Second World War, a national poll conducted by the United States Employment Service (USES)—the chief organization charged with placing workers in war industries—found that 51% of requests for 282,245 job openings barred black workers outright.21 That same year, however, saw the establishment of the FEPC as a result of Roosevelt’s famous Executive Order 8802, which, in turn, was the product of the threat of mass action by the March on Washington Movement (MOWM). This latter story will be addressed in its own right, but it is worth noting one obvious effect on management hiring practices: company officials soon realized that overt, blatantly discriminatory job adverts or hiring requests would likely cause unwanted scrutiny.

The combination of executive decrees, a national labour shortage, patriotic wartime discourse and agencies like the FEPC meant it was less acceptable to explicitly and publicly discriminate against minority workers. Most examples of overt racism in the files of the FEPC, therefore, were made in private contexts. In New York in the summer of 1943, for example, an FEPC investigator called Samuel Risk looked into complaints made against the E. W. Bliss Company in Brooklyn. The firm was located at 53rd Street and Second Avenue and made machine tools and torpedoes during the war; its shortage of workers was demonstrated by advertisements placed in local newspapers for machine operators as well as packers, box makers and men to sell milk throughout the plant.22

Black workers found the labour shortage did not, however, open the doors to them. Risk visited the company where he met the secretary treasurer and personnel manager who did not try to hide their racist views. Comments were reportedly made, including ‘Negroes have one track minds; they do well on jobs where you show them what to do’ and ‘How do I know Negroes aren’t good in machine industries? Observation, my boy, observation’. Risk also reported anti-Semitic attitudes too, with one commenting that Jews ‘always want to make trouble’. Risk made a note to issue a non-discrimination directive to Bliss by way of follow-up, in one of the easiest cases to prove discriminatory behaviour he came across.23

There were also some cases where managers made it easy for investigators by letting the mask of non-discrimination slip. Over in Detroit, one complaint in 1942 against Continental Motors, which specialized in making tank engines during the war, reported the personnel manager, a Mr. Hargrove, had demanded the USES not to refer black workers. The effects of discrimination were clear enough: only twenty-three of the company’s 7,000 workers were black. Upon investigation, however, Hargrove expressed ‘great surprise’ about this accusation, claiming black workers just did not ‘measure up’ on skilled jobs. Hargrove seemed to know a more legitimate defence

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