Talk of barriers in trades at diversity hearing

Diversity-inclusion programs that only pretend to bring minorities into building-trades jobs angered early witnesses at a public hearing yesterday.

"What do you want us to do? Pay our union dues with a [welfare] Access card?" said Shenecqua Butt, an African American union carpenter who said she had had to turn to welfare because she had been able to get only a handful of day jobs in the last year and a half.

Butt was one of six union members to testify at the first public hearing of the Mayor's Advisory Commission on Construction Industry Diversity held yesterday at City Hall.

Also scheduled to testify were city officials and contractors, including minority contractors.

Five of the six union members were minority members who talked about the barriers encountered by African Americans, Latinos and women in the trades.

Several lambasted monitoring programs that were supposed to enforce minority participation but did not.

"The Caucasians who are supposed to be monitoring . . . aren't doing the job," testified Kevin Lumpkin, an African American member of Iron Workers Local 401 and the owner of his own construction company, Umoja Erectors L.L.C.

The commission, formed earlier this year, began looking into the status of minorities in trade unions and among contractors after a December standoff between Council and the building trades over the $700 million expansion of the Convention Center.

Members of the commission, which hopes to make a report with recommendations by September, listened attentively and sympathetically to speakers. Commission members include union officials, contractors, and others familiar with construction in the region.

Commission chairman Carl Singley, a lawyer who is on the Convention Center board, said he was confident that the group and city and state politicians were determined to make real change.

Butt testified that she came into Local 1073 of the Metropolitan Regional Council of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters through a Philadelphia Housing Authority program designed to build minority participation.

She said she worked steadily through four years of the union's apprenticeship program, but once she became a journeyman carpenter, employment trickled to next to nothing, while white male carpenters got work.

She was not even able to work on Housing Authority projects, she said.

"I face all types of discrimination," she said, as other female union carpenters in the audience nodded in agreement. "It's crazy."

Even when she did get work, things were tough on the job site. At the Symphony House, a high-rise condominium in Center City, a male construction elevator operator would pass her as she stood waiting to carry tools and supplies to a higher floor. But if there was a male with her, the elevator would stop.

Another African American carpenter who testified, Tanya Mitchell, said a fellow construction worker threw a length of pipe at her face.

Both said they complained to Edward Coryell Sr., but the complaints went unanswered. Coryell could not be reached for comment yesterday.

The men on the job sites "should be ashamed of themselves," Lumpkin said.

He said his union includes 120 minority members, who were, for the first time, able to elect a minority to the union's executive board. He said minority members needed to work harder to bring others along.

John Dent, a retired African American heavy-equipment operator and member of Local 542 of the Operating Engineers, said that even 37 years of court supervision had not materially increased minority participation in his union.

Former City Councilman Juan Ramos, speaking as president of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, said the commission should look into ways to test experienced nonunion minority plumbers, carpenters, painters and other tradespeople and get them certified as union journeymen, without using the apprenticeship process.

Ramos, a member of Local 332 of Laborers International Union of North America, said such a program would help counter what he says is a shortage of skilled tradespeople.

"What we are doing with this minority inclusion is rescuing this industry," Ramos said.