Blacks Losing Good Jobs Because of The U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964

By Atty. J. Edward Pawlick
May 2003 Print Edition

Because many blacks are new to the labor market, they have been damaged severely by the loss of manufacturing jobs, where they were earning good wages.

The tragic irony is that a main reason for the loss of those jobs has been the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The manufacturing industries began to leave this country shortly after the Civil Rights Act became effective in 1965. Only two years later, we peaked relative to the rest of the world when our industrial production was more than 34% of the world total. Was that timing only coincidental?

Our output would be $150 billion higher each year if our businesses were still free to use tests and select on merit. Tests were not forbidden by the Act but the courts have held that they are.

Does this imply that blacks are inferior to others? Of course not. What it does mean is that the Act was interpreted by the courts to mean that businesses were no longer able to test anyone or select anyone on merit, whether black or white.

(The irony is that testing had been started many years earlier so that employees could be chosen on merit, not on favoritism.)

But the race to flee the country became a deluge in the 1970s after the head of the federal agency which supervises the enforcement of the Act, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), declared war against American business. He assumed the post in January, 1974, and did not hide the fact that he, John H. Powell, Jr., was brazen:
"Once we get the big boys, the others will soon fall in line," he said.

They even made an enemies list, i.e., a list of the big companies that it would attack. The top three were:
General Motors
General Electric
International Paper

The others were:
American Cast Iron Pipe
Lockheed Aircraft
North American Rockwell
McDonnell Douglas
Coca-Cola
Firestone Tire and Rubber
Sears, Roebuck
Libbey-Owens-Ford
Hughes Aircraft
Lone Star Steel
United Air Lines
Ingalls Shipbuilding
FMC Corp.
Ford Motor
Bethlehem Steel
Sperry Rand

The next level was:
American Tobacco
International Harvester
Western Air Lines
Kaiser Aluminum
Dan River
Rexall Drug
Santa Fe Railroad
General Electric (this company was listed twice by the EEOC)
Westinghouse
St. Regis Paper
Southern Railway
Liggett & Myers
Avondale Shipyards
Yellow Freight System

A chief attorney on the Attorney General's staff wrote in 1976 to a Deputy Attorney General that under the EEOC's new rules it could attack any business in the country that it wanted to get:
"[F]ew employers are able to show the validity of any of their selection procedures . . . [This gives] great discretion to enforcement personnel [i.e., the EEOC] to determine who should be prosecuted . . ."

The EEOC no longer needed any approval to sue. So it filed suit against most of the largest companies in American industry; in less than two years it filed some 300 suits.

Is it any wonder that many companies decided to give up all testing? Or to move a lot of their manufacturing overseas to foreign countries?

And so the EEOC began its grand march. In order to make it clear to all businessmen that it was serious, the EEOC took on the largest, most visible ones. AT&T fell in 1973 by "agreeing" to pay $83 million in compensatory payments to women and blacks. It even "agreed" to put 750 people in its equal employment opportunity office.

This meant that AT&T now had its own EEOC right inside the company, watching every movement and every word that anyone ever uttered. Now you can understand why every big business in America is always in "strong support" of the Civil Rights Act; they are being watched very carefully. They have no choice.

General Electric "agreed" to pay more than $32 million; Chase Manhattan Bank paid $1.8 million. General Motors settled for $42.5 million, even though it had 17% black and 15% female employees.

The head of the EEOC, Mr. Powell, said, "There are going to be quite a few trials during my term of office."

The EEOC attacked the entire steel industry which settled to avoid the endless litigation and bad publicity that would follow, agreeing to pay $31 million in back pay to workers who were said to have suffered discrimination. In addition, it agreed to do the following:
50% of the openings in trade and craft jobs would go to minorities and women.
20% of all openings in maintenance jobs would go to women and 15% of all clerical jobs to blacks during the first year.
25% of management-training and supervisory jobs would be filled by either women or blacks.

The head of the EEOC said further: "It is our judgment whether these companies are in compliance. Companies had better come to the realization that compliance is in their own self-interest. Louis XVI and the Czar of Russia resisted change, and what happened to them is history."

It did not matter whether they intended to discriminate. "We need this power," said the head of the EEOC, "to prod those many companies who honestly do not believe that they discriminate. A lot of this discrimination, I must admit, is not overt on the part of management."

The irony is that most of these companies usually had the best civil rights records of anyone in the country.

One of the five Commissioners on the EEOC disagreed with the chairman, but his was a lonely voice.

"The Commission is harassing Sears and GM," said Commissioner Colston Lewis, a black civil rights lawyer from Richmond, "because this is the way the chairman can get headlines. Besides, Sears has the best damn affirmative action program of any company in the country."

Lewis was concerned about the hiring of unqualified people. He thought it best to get them qualified.

"It is wrong to force companies to hire unqualified applicants just because they are minority people. In the end, such practices will only serve to hurt the minorities. We must eliminate the barriers which impede the ability of minorities to aspire to and achieve their economic objectives. Once these barriers are eliminated, minorities will soon be competing on an equal footing."

Meanwhile, the liberals laughed at anyone who said there would be serious consequences as a result of all this, and the U.S. Supreme Court watched.

While this was going on, the U. S. Supreme Court, which has the power to review any case that it wishes, refused to hear the major ones on this subject for another eight years.

America's highest court sat idle, refusing to accept any appeals, watching the chaos as different courts said different things about what the word "discriminate" meant.

When President Reagan was elected in 1980, there were high hopes among some people that the "great communicator" would be able to change all of this.

But there were a few things going against him.

First. By 1981 the big companies of America were already used to quotas and really didn't care anymore. They all had big "Affirmative Action" staffs that were watching all of the employees very carefully, and the companies were afraid to stop for fear they would be called "racist" or "sexist". Once any big organization has vice presidents in charge of something, it can't stop it easily. And so the time had passed for the big companies to really care anymore. Their sense of outrage was gone. So the word went out that American business was not enthusiastic about a change. They could see what had happened to the companies which had resisted.

Therefore, big business did not support Reagan in his efforts. As one commentator noted:
"[I]n the struggle that developed in the early months of the Reagan administration between Congressional opponents of quotas and liberals and the civil rights lobby, most businessmen remained on the sidelines. Some of them supported quotas as morally justifiable; others opposed quotas but were reluctant to say so for fear of appearing unsympathetic to civil rights."

They had learned to live with quotas, and to pass on the costs or move out of the country, according to the commentator, who continued:

"Most businessmen, having no inclination to test the agencies' interpretation of antidiscrimination in court nor any desire to appear unsympathetic to civil rights, tried in their pragmatic way to make the best of a bad situation. They were told — and they told themselves — that 'equal employment opportunity' was good business, ignoring the fact that affirmative action was not equal opportunity... In this spirit, companies appointed EEO officers, built affirmative action compliance into the corporate structure, and tried to absorb the costs. By the end of the decade, businessmen were still generally critical of affirmative action, but their idea of reforming it was to cut down on the paperwork rather than to get rid of racial quotas."

Second. How could one man, even a President, change a big bureaucracy like the EEOC where there were over 3000 employees and where almost all of them were protected by civil service? The employees of a department such as this are never "neutral;" they are zealots who are fighting for a cause. And how does a President change the direction of an organization when all of the employees in it are saying, "He'll change this over my dead body!"