Slowly Building Diversity In Construction Labor Force

Central Americans fleeing civil wars offered a ready supply of construction workers. In less than a decade, Miller & Long's workforce changed from about 80 percent black and 20 percent white to 71 percent Latino, 17 percent white and 12 percent black.

The shift is an industry-wide trend, and officials at much smaller local concrete companies, such as Oncore Construction and Southland Concrete, said they, too, are attending job-training courses in an attempt to diversify.

Brown's recruits from the Goodwill class seemed eager to get started. None had made it beyond high school, and although Brown's offer of $13 an hour was well below the median wage, it was more than the $9 an hour some had made as warehouse stock clerks. Plus they'd get health benefits. If they became carpenters or rod workers, they could make $18 to $19 an hour, about the starting wage for a postal clerk.

Before sending them to the work sites, Brown had a few words of advice.

"The foreman y'all are going to work for is one of the coolest white brothers you'll ever meet," he said. "He knows you're new. . . . He's going to train you. Just do what he asks you to do. It's simple. All you got to do is show up on time and be ready to work."

A broad-shouldered man in a neatly pressed button-down shirt nodded solemnly. Cory Arrington had been trying to land a job since February, when he was released from 10 years in prison on a drug-related assault conviction.

Raised by a single mother, Arrington had been in and out of trouble since he was 13 and had dropped out of high school when he was 16. At 30, he was about to start his first job.

He said that he had initially felt "overwhelmed" but that the Goodwill program had boosted his confidence.

Two days later, Arrington quit halfway through his shift as a laborer's assistant.

"The Hispanics, they worked so fast," he said over the phone. "My forearm was getting tight. I tried to tell them that I've never done manual labor like that, that I wasn't used to that constant pace, that I needed to take a break. But they didn't respect my opinion. So, I just figured, this kind of work is not for me."

* * *

It was just after 11 on a recent morning, and the sun shone brightly as Brown stepped onto a sprawling construction site in Falls Church. His laid-back gait belied a twinge of nervousness. The night before, a longtime black laborer named Mike Smith had called Brown to complain that his Salvadoran foreman had ordered him to break down debris in pouring rain while the Latinos on his crew remained under shelter.