Hiring the Hard Core

I been trying to get a job here and there. Nobody take me. I got this jail record. I knows how they feel. No experience. Eighth grade in school. Hiring me is a gamble. I shy away from working just like everybody else. I like to run at nights. But I like this job. Man, I'm looking good. I get up in the mornin' and I see this face and there's a smile on it now.

The speaker is a muscular Detroit Negro ("I was one of those zoot-suit boys") whose scarred forearms bear witness to a misspent life of violence. In all his 44 years, he has worked a total of eleven months, spent 26 years in prison for armed robbery. Yet last week he was performing proudly at a full-time $134.80-a-week job: tightening bolts on the front suspension of Chevrolet trucks for General Motors, the world's largest manufacturer.

Though scarcely typical, the case of the ex-convict is no freak. Of the 16,627 people General Motors has hired for its 23 Detroit-area plants since last summer's riots, 39% are Negroes; and hundreds of the newcomers would hitherto have been classified as unemployable. Even before last week's presidential riot commission report (see THE NATION) called on private industry to create at least 1,000,000 new jobs for ghetto dwellers, a rising number of businessmen were striving toward that end.

Beyond Tokenism. The motive is part altruism, part profit. In many cities, poor and unskilled nonwhites now constitute almost the only untapped or underused reservoir of labor. Moreover, businessmen recognize that the economic health of cities is vital to the health of their own companies. The recent push by U.S. business to employ "hardcore jobless" has moved beyond tokenism to a substantial commitment to help quiet the smoldering volcano of urban unrest.

Two weeks ago President Johnson announced that 60 top executives in manufacturing, banking, retailing, transport, utilities and other fields have agreed to try to find permanent work for 500,000 jobless from big-city ghettos by 1971. On top of that, the National Alliance of Businessmen will seek 200,000 jobs for ghetto youth this summer. Says Alliance Chairman Henry Ford II, chairman of Ford Motor Co.: "Nothing can be plainer than the fact that these people must be given the chance to earn decent lives for themselves. And bringing them into the mainstream of the economy is a goal that can only be accomplished if business grabs the heavy end of the load."

For the Government's part, the President has asked Congress for $350 million to subsidize the extra cost of training the first 100,000 of hard-core unemployed. Still, the load on private enterprise looks hefty enough. Business must not only provide the jobs but devise motivations and teaching methods that can succeed where all the planners and dreamers, schools and churches, labor, and even Government have largely failed.

After Backsliders. In their efforts to train misfits and dropouts to become useful employees, many companies have already discovered both pitfalls and promising recipes. In Chicago, Borg-Warner was able to retain only two of the first 14 Negro school dropouts it hired through the widely touted "Jobs Now." That Y.M.C.A.-run federally financed project recruits hard-core jobless for 207 private firms, gives them two weeks of education so basic that it even covers the need to flush toilets after use and to bathe before a job interview. To keep newcomers, many companies now assign "coaches" or "buddies" who can talk ghetto lingo. The coaches battle absenteeism and tardiness by stratagems that range from digging backsliders out of saloons to lending them bus fare to get to work. "It doesn't do any good to send a social worker around to these people," says William Wilson Jr., employment director of Detroit's Urban League. "You've got to be one of them. I tell them I used to be a messenger for a whorehouse."

In one of the most successful ventures, Aerojet-General Corp. 18 months ago gambled $1,200,000 of its own cash to establish Watts Manufacturing Co. in the Los Angeles ghetto. Aerojet Chairman Dan A. Kimball, a former Navy Secretary, astutely picked a local Negro contractor, James M. Woods, as president of the firm and let him throw away the book on procedures. More than 10% of the 500 workers are illiterate, and the average employee has a record of three arrests and one felony conviction. For a while, absenteeism ran as high as 35% on Mondays. It took the original crew nearly three weeks to stitch together the first of an order for 5,000 Army tents. Then Woods concocted an incentive attendance scheme, located trained Negro supervisors, started a two-week sewing class for new employees. Now production is up to 25 tents a day, and the plant is moving into the black two years ahead of Aerojet's expectations.

There is even some home-grown help for Negro businessmen, many of whom find their profits greatly diminished by inadequate training in such elementals as bookkeeping, which whites take for granted. Led by Lawyer Robert P. Sangster, 29, the Los Angeles Junior Chamber of Commerce signed up 26 Negro businessmen at $5 apiece to attend 13 one-night-a-week seminars on everything from small-business financing to taxes. Says Jack Everage, 26, who runs a supermarket with his three brothers in Watts: "We've learned a lot, and it's really helping our business--things we just didn't know, like advertising and stock control and insurance."

Doubled Ante. In the battle against slums, companies such as U.S. Gypsum in Harlem, Armstrong Cork in Philadelphia and Warner, Swasey in Cleveland, have undertaken small urban-renewal projects. In Pittsburgh, 32 corporations have put up $2,000,000 to form a nonprofit company for converting up to 1,000 slum homes and apartments a year into modern accommodations. Last week the nation's life insurance industry, which has largely made good its September pledge to invest $1 billion in the slums, was urged by front-ranking Prudential Insurance Co. to double the ante. The first billion--6% of the industry's annual investment kitty--"doesn't nearly meet the need" for low-income housing, said Pru President Orville E. Seal.

Involvement with city ills has already fired considerable debate among businessmen--and the riot report seems certain to sharpen the argument. Chairman George Champion of Chase Manhattan Bank decries "mass do-gooding at the expense of stockholders." Says Chairman Birny Mason Jr. of Union Carbide: "I'm afraid we're going through another phase of promises that will lead to disillusionment." Still, such analysts of the urban crisis as Director Pat Moynihan of the Harvard-M.I.T. Joint Center for Urban Studies (TIME cover, July 28) give corporations high marks for their active concern. "Business has reacted more openly and sensibly to the situation than any single segment of the community," says Moynihan. "Business has no commitments to fulfill, no hang-ups, no previous directions or declarations to defend." Some experts are concerned that the nation may expect the Corporate Establishment to provide panaceas for problems beyond its grasp. "Businessmen cannot do it all by themselves," warns Time Inc. Chairman Andrew Heiskell, co-chairman of the Urban Coalition, a combine of leaders in business, labor, civil rights, churches and city governments set up to attack the urban mess on a city-by-city basis. "We've got to advance on all fronts, from fair housing laws to model cities to better schools."

By whatever formula the inexorable attack on long-neglected urban problems comes, the cost will be staggering. Alcoa Chairman Frederick J. Close last week ventured a price tag of $100 billion to clean U.S. skies and rivers, rebuild cities, unsnarl traffic, educate the young and re-educate the old. Vice Chairman Simon Ramo of TRW Inc. puts the cost ten times higher, or $1 trillion by 1977.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.