Slowly Building Diversity In Construction Labor Force

Firms Are Starting to Hire More Black Workers in a Majority-Hispanic Field

Kyle Brown strode into the job-training class at Goodwill of Greater Washington and smiled at the black men and women he was about to hire as part of his construction company's effort to diversify its mostly Latino workforce.

In 1984, when Brown started at Miller & Long Concrete Construction, most workers were black. But by the mid-1990s, they had been replaced by Latinos. And Brown, 48, a tall man with dreadlocks, vividly recalls his initial loneliness as "the outsider."

Now, he has been sent on a mission to alter the trend. Officials at the Bethesda-based company say they are partly motivated by a desire to give something back to the majority-black District neighborhoods where they do some of their construction. In addition, many city contracts require that a percentage of workers be District residents.

With federal immigration authorities stepping up workplace raids across the country, Miller & Long's management is getting nervous about relying heavily on non-citizen workers. Although the business uses a voluntary federal database to check applicants' identities, other companies using the system still have been raided, said Myles Gladstone, vice president of human resources.

So this spring, Gladstone pulled Brown from his job as a carpenter foreman to lead the campaign. At least once a week, Brown makes the rounds of job-training classes sponsored by church groups, government ex-offender programs or such nonprofit groups as Goodwill. Almost every day, he visits or calls a current black employee to offer encouragement and mediate conflicts.

Company officials say his efforts are bearing fruit: Until recently, black hires tended to quit within days or weeks. But only six of the 45 black workers recruited in the past two months have left.

Yet to follow Brown is also to glimpse why black residents remain underrepresented in construction regionally and nationally even as nearly one out of every 10 black men in the District and nationally is unemployed -- about twice the rate for whites. Black high school graduates with solid work histories often assume construction is a dead-end job when they pass work sites filled with immigrants, Brown said. So his recruiting pool is largely made up of ex-offenders struggling to readjust to working life -- and many don't succeed. Even the company's longtime black workers often chafe at the isolation on construction sites where few people speak English, and tensions between them and their Latino bosses can run high.

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"All right," Brown asked the Goodwill introduction-to-construction class. "Who's ready for this?"

"I'm ready!" several people called back. During the past eight weeks, the free training program had arranged field trips to work sites of various companies and introduced them to representatives such as Brown. Now the class of 25 had graduated, and Brown was about to grant four of the trainees a full-time job.

The effort would have been unnecessary in the company's early days. The first employee, B.H. Blassingame, was the son of black farmworkers from South Carolina. He was hired off a District street corner in 1947 by the company's two white founders. As Miller & Long grew, Blassingame became a superintendent and the company continued to draw on black farmworkers who had migrated north in search of better-paying jobs -- much like Central American workers have today.

But by the 1980s, as Miller & Long was becoming an industry giant of 2,500 employees, those early black workers began retiring. And the next generation was not eager to take their place. With the decline in wages for unskilled work, blue-collar jobs offered less assurance of a middle-class life. The civil rights movement had also expanded black Americans' access to college and career fields.