Mayoral study: Boost construction diversity

Nearly a third of all construction workers on large city projects should be male minority members, a new mayoral report concludes. That would be up from about a fifth.

To make that happen, project owners, contractors, and unions in Philadelphia must work together to promote worker diversity and the city must take a more aggressive stance in oversight, the report said.

The long-awaited report on diversity in the construction trades will be released Tuesday. It comes as the construction sector has taken a beating during the ongoing recession.

In Philadelphia alone, 1,100 construction jobs were lost from January 2008 to January 2009, according to the most recent U.S. Labor Department figures. Adding in the Pennsylvania suburbs, a total of 9,100 jobs are gone.

"The economy has changed dramatically since we began our commission in March 2008," said attorney Carl Singley, chairman of the Mayor's Advisory Commission on Construction Industry Diversity, which produced the report.

"We have made an effort to take that into consideration in our recommendations," said Singley, a vice chairman of the Pennsylvania Convention Center Authority board. "It is clear that some of our recommendations can't be implemented immediately because of the economy."

The report also comes as communities await federal stimulus money directed to infrastructure construction.

"Surely the stimulus money is going to help us a great deal," said commission member Samuel Staten Jr., president of Laborers' International Union Local 332, which has a majority of African American members.

"The biggest barrier is economics," he said. "You can put 2,000 people in the union, but at the end of the day, if you don't have work for them, it's a waste."

As a long-term target, the report suggests that male minorities should rise to 32 percent of the workforce on large-scale construction projects in Philadelphia.

That goal was based on the percentage of male minority members most likely to seek construction work - those under 35 and without four-year college degrees.

Between 2005 and 2007, minority males were 20 percent of the workforce on large city projects, according to a study by the Greater Philadelphia Urban Affairs Coalition.

"When considering long-run employment goals, focus should be on . . . benchmarks for a world with no discrimination, where there would be plenty of role models and no chilling effects," the report said. "There is no data for such a world because it does not exist."

The report said women should be 6.9 percent of construction workers.

It also describes difficulties faced by minority contractors and suggests that the city help by breaking down big projects into smaller chunks that can be handled by smaller businesses while helping them market themselves.

"A key understanding from this process is that the responsibility for diversity does not begin and end with unions," said Sharon Dietrich, a commission member and Community Legal Services lawyer who represents workers.

"The other partners who share responsibility are the contractors and the project owners," she said. "The project owners in particular have the responsibility to demand diversity because they are the customer, after all."

That was not the thinking a year ago.

When the controversy over minorities in the construction trades erupted in City Council late in 2007 and early in 2008, it turned into a faceoff - unions vs. minorities.

Accusing unions of racism for not including more minorities in their memberships, City Council vowed to hold up construction on the $800 million expansion of the Convention Center and end union exclusivity on public projects unless unions increased minority participation.

Although tempers grew hot, the boiling was reduced to a simmer by the promise of a study and new oversight, in this case through the newly formed city Office of Economic Opportunity.

In the meantime, City Council established "aspirational" goals for minority participation on the Convention Center project, even though City Council has no direct authority over the state-funded project.

Early this week, African American workers protested at the job site, saying they were not getting enough work.

"Our project is diverse," responded Convention Center Authority project manager Joseph Resta. He said that while there were no precise numeric minority participation goals, the authority makes an effort to "seek out any and all opportunities for minorities."

For its report, the commission drew on diversity statistics submitted by a dozen building trade unions.

Missing from the report are diversity statistics from the region's two largest building trade unions, Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Metropolitan Regional Council of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners.

The report includes a detailed object lesson based on the court-ordered diversity efforts of the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 542.

Despite court supervision and increased membership in the Philadelphia union, minority members never experienced the same levels of employment as their white counterparts, partly because of discrimination, partly because of lackluster effort, and partly because downturns in the economy derailed positive momentum, the report said.

The 100-plus page report includes a history of the African American labor force in Philadelphia and another section offering business tips such as the importance of developing a short marketing speech.

As the recession took hold in the last

year, the number of construction jobs

in the region fell.

City of Philadelphia:

1,100 construction jobs lost, or 9.4 percent, from January 2008 to January 2009

City and suburbs*:

9,100 jobs lost, 11.8 percent

South Jersey**:

1,200 jobs lost, 5.1 percent

*Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery Counties

**Burlington, Camden and Gloucester Counties

SOURCE: U.S. Bureau of Labor StatisticsEndText