Posted on 07/01/2023 9:53:45 AM PDT by KC Burke
The dirty secret that the media kept quite about is that from the Nixon administration on there was a Democrat / Union fix to keep black membership in unions low.
During the Nixon era that administration started to mandate minority worker reporting which would have forced unions, in union areas, to admit blacks whom they had excluded from the Jim Crowe era onward. To prevent being forced to admit blacks they came up with the contrivance that blacks would be more likely to advance in a skilled craft if the owner was black also and therefore the "correct" thing that government should mandate was black owned businesses.
They could use political insiders to create black-owned businesses in many cases and still hire union (mostly white) craftsmen. They could thus stop the pressure to admit minorities.
This was all strong union Democrat racial bigotry. It was used as an excuse to avoid non-college educated work path as only good money could be made is skilled trades if you were union.
Whatever the reason, in my experience it’s extremely difficult to get good contractors, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, etc. The level of the work has been atrocious, and I am not very fussy. The ones that are good are impossible to book.
“From being called racist names to being administered tests designed to ensure their failure...”
Such as tests that required knowing the answers?
No more like English tests that poor scores could be an excuse to exclude minorities from getting in apprenticeship programs and hence into the union. Blacks could get into the Laborers union in certain numbers, but skilled trades kept them out.
My point is that union — democrat collusion had racist goals for the last 130 years as unions made good inroads into good income.
Exactly! I’m fed up with race baiting left wing communist trash like the Stanford social innovation review!
For residential and light commercial renovation that is a real problem. Big commercial, not so much as I would say our craftsmen equal and exceed what I saw in central Mexico and in the UK.
A friend of my dad’s ran the training program for one of the heavy equipment operators union many years ago. When this EEO crap started, they wanted him to lower the admission standards. He refused because he didn’t want unqualified people running heavy construction equipment. They pushed it and he resigned.
Guys, I am not saying that minority applicants equaled white applicants in suitability. I am saying that crafts like painters, carpenters, plumbers were 2% minority in areas where minorities were 30% of the population that could take such jobs and the reason was leftist racism and led to college path glut and student loan misuse.
There should be trades programs in every inner city high school (and really in every high school).
Kids who have no interest in advanced algebra could be learning carpentry, plumbing, etc. instead.
And as a side note, we once had such classes in the high schools. Bush II’s foolish “No Child Left Behind” program ruined all that. NCLB tested for math and English, but not for the trades. So to boost those scores, most schools dropped their trades classes and shoved those kids into advanced math and English classes.
Insanity.
Even 50 years ago small construction jobs that liked to hire some locals for labor jobs, ditch digging, and site clean-up and such were complaining that in black neighborhoods the young guys would not come on-site looking for work.
Compare Black to Hispanic construction workers and firms. Back when Chicago’s (and Minnesoas) Tom Roeser was setting policy in the Nixon administration there was a vibrant debate in both the Black and Hispanic communities that ignored Tom Roeser’s policies.
Most Blacks chose to work through the Democrat party in an effort to FORCE their agenda on others.
Hispanics were split into the Latino (now Latinx) side and the Hispanic side. The Latino side allied themselves with Blacks who favored Government FORCE.
Hispanics favored ignoring the government. The Democrats didn’t want them to work. The Republicans seemed to not want them (with a rare exception). Hispanics took jobs hanging drywall, roofing, siding, cement work. That led to carpentry, plumbing, electrical...more so to residential than commercial construction.
The Hispanic path led to Hispanics starting their own businesses .. and hiring other Hispanics who were eager to work. That led to successful Hispanics financing their sister-in-law in a taco stand or full blown formal place.
The majority of successful Hispanics (and the minority of Blacks) who followed this route, who ignored the government and focused on the business is one path... a path that worked for them.
Many Blacks followed the government involvement route. That route has benefitted the poverty pimps...but not many in the private sector.
The debates of the 60s and 70s are not well remembered; They are not in the history books written by those who believe the government is the solution, not the problem.
I’m to the point that I could not care less about blacks. Let them sink or swim on their own.
Read the original congressional testimony for the Davis-Bacon act. It’s not subtly racist - it’s absolutely racist. The goal was to prevent southern black Americans from moving north and undercutting the labor rates that whites were getting.
I’m with you on that one.
good addition
I agree.
Why work when you can get free stuff. Even Nasty Pelosi’s daughter did a documentary about it. Perfectly healthy fit black men standing around welfare offices freely admitted they go to get their government check and don’t work and have zero interest in working.
https://youtu.be/8fEW8RmPrhc
In my areas of construction we called that “hiring off the bank” meaning applicants standing on the bank of earth piled up along a ditch line.
Again there is wide variance in how this worked in fully non-union construction, mixed open shop and full union areas. I built in all those conditions. I had a mixed open shop job in a predominantly union city that had twenty unions band together in an illegal picket and blockage action to try and shut us down that had strong NLRB court response when I showed them the videos we took from the roof across the street.
My overall point is in connection with this expensive college enrichment scheme we have in place now. Universities get rich. Professors get very well paid compared with a generation ago. Administrators get rich. Bankers get protected and subsidized. The Department of Education gets loaded with bureaucrats. The result is kids from modest incomes, both minority and majority, get suckered into NON-DISCHARGABLE loans that they base their early life on and then get ate up by the cost.
These loans are predatory.
Trades and non-college jobs that pay well are being neglected we say and HERE is part of the reason — LONG TERM INSTITUTIONAL LEFTIST RACISM.
I agree that is true but it is poisonous to our nation and I want to see it end.
I remember all of that growing up, I grew up in southern Arizona. I saw numerous Hispanic people start very successful businesses and telling the RAT welfare state to go pound sand. Most of these people started out with nothing and built very profitable businesses in a few years.
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