ANTIDISCRIMINATION IN EMPLOYMENT

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 18, 1947

UNITED STATES SENATE,

COMMITTEE ON LABOR AND PUBLIC WELFARE, SUBCOMMITTEE ON ANTIDISCRIMINATION, Washington, D. C. The subcommittee met, pursuant to adjournment, at 9:30 a. m., in the committee room, Capitol Building, Senator Forrest C. Donnell presiding.

Present: Senators Donnell (presiding), Smith, Ives, Murray, and Ellender.

Senator DONNELL. The committee will be in order and we will proceed with the hearing. Our first witness this morning is Mr. Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers. Mr. Reuther, for our record, will you please state your name, address, and business, and something of your previous experience?

STATEMENT OF WALTER P. REUTHER, PRESIDENT, UNITED AUTOMOBILE, AIRCRAFT, AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENT WORKERS OF AMERICA (UAW-CIO)

Mr. REUTHER. Mr. Chairman, my name is Walter P. Reuther. I am president of the United Auto, Aircraft, and Agricultural Implement Workers Union of the CIO. I am also vice president of the national CIO, and I am the director of the UAW-CIO fair practice and antidiscrimination department.

I was born in Wheeling, W. Va., in 1907. I have been working in the automobile industry for the past 20 years. I have been an official of the UAW-CIO for the last 11 years.

I am appearing here today in the capacity of president of the UAWCIO and as a personal representative of Mr. Philip Murray, president of the national CIO. I have prepared a brief which I would like to enter in the record as part of my testimony. The committee has copies of the prepared statement.

Senator DONNELL. It will be incorporated in the record, Mr. Reuther, at the conclusion of your testimony.

Mr. REUTHER. I am appearing in support of S. 984, which has been approved specifically by the executive board of the UAW-CIO and the principles of which have been approved by convention of the national CIO. I appear in support of this bill because I believe that to deny any person employment or economic opportunity because of race, creed, or color is undemocratic, antisocial, un-American, economically stupid, and morally indefensible.

We fought a war against racial intolerance and I think we have got to carry through that fight against intolerance in America if we maintain our democracy. America certainly cannot assume leadership for the rest of the world and instill confidence in the people with respect to the democratic principles for which we fought the war unless we are prepared to destroy intolerance and discrimination in respect to employment opportunities in America. We in our organization believe that unless everyone is given opportunity to find employment, limited only by their individual ability without regard to race, creed, or color-unless this is done, we cannot really claim that we are free in America. We believe that freedom, like peace, is indivisible: that unless everyone has freedom no one's freedom will be secure.

We think that the passage of the bill before your committee, S. 984, is not only a matter of social justice to the individual but we think it is a matter of grave economic concern to the whole Nation, because if we deprive millions of people of the opportunity to make their maximum productive contribution, it means we are robbing the American economy of the tremendous wealth that that energy and that capacity could produce.

So we believe that this is not only a matter of justice, but also a matter of grave economic concern at a time when we are trying to achieve maximum production and trying to mobilize our productive resources to meet the challenge of peace.

Racial intolerance does not create wealth. Right now the job America has to solve is how are we going to mobilize our economy to take care of the problems on the home front, to give to the American people a higher standard of living and still have enough left over to be able to help in the job of rehabilitating the economies of the rest of the world. That is the most important job that America has, and our economy is the greatest single asset that freemen have in the world, and if we deny millions of people, because of race or creed or color, an opportunity to make their maximum contribution in our economy, we are denying to the economy the benefit of their energies and their skills and their efforts, and we are therefore penalizing the whole Nation and the whole world by not taking advantage of that tremendous reservoir of creative and productive effort that could be applied to our economy.

We believe that the right to work and the right to earn a living for one's family is a fundamental and basic human right which must be protected by law. The statute books of our Nation are filled with laws that protect the property rights of great corporations, and we believe that the right to a job on the part of the wage earner is a most valuable property right, and therefore ought to be protected by law.

If S. 984 is passed, we believe that it will be a fresh and new and clear-cut declaration of the principles of Americanism which will make it clear that we believe that every American in 1947 is entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, without discrimination. You cannot pursue happiness unless you can get a job, and if you are blocked from equal job opportunity because of race, creed, or color, you are being denied the fundamental principles of Americanism.

We believe that second-class economic citizenship is as undemocratic and un-American as second-class political citizenship, yet we know that millions of Americans prior to the war were denied equal

job opportunities, because of race, creed, or color, and it was not until the war came along, until the pressure of the manpower situation developed, that we were able to get certain minority groups into these industries. We believe that these people have proven that they can make a great contribution to the total welfare of our country. They have proved that in forging the weapons of war, and we believe they should have the same opportunity to help to forge the democratic tools of peace, and yet they are being denied that opportunity.

In our union, the CIO, we have done a great deal toward fighting against discrimination, and we have made great progress, but we have been very conscious of the fact that our ability to solve this problem is very limited, and that we cannot do the job unless we are supported by governmental action, and the problem is much broader and much more difficult than a union can solve within itself. Our efforts must be supplemented by comparable efforts on the part of government through legislation. In our union we take in all workers, regardless of race, creed, or color. They all have the same membership status, and there is no second-class membership in our organization. I think a good example of the work that we have done with respect to fighting against discrimination is the things that developed during the race riots in Detroit in 1943. As your committee knows, we had a very bad situation in Detroit, and despite the fact that in the streets of Detroit the Detroit citizens were rioting, inflicting bodily harm on one another, inside of the factory where our union was organized the same people were working side by side and there was no trouble. The Attorney General at that time, Mr. Biddle, was asked to check into that, and he said this in his report to the President :

It is extremely interesting that there was no disorder within the plants where colored and white workers work side by side, on account of the efficient union discipline.

We have been carrying on the work of fighting discrimination in respect to job opportunity inside the plant. In 1944 the UAW-CIO, by the action of its international executive board, created a fair practice committee, a permanent committee of our executive board, which set up machinery by which we would fight against discrimination with respect to job opportunities inside the factory. We dealt with the question of upgrading Negroes and other minority groups to higherpaid and more-skilled jobs. We ran into a lot of resistance, both on the part of the employer and on the part of the employee. A large number of our members and of employees in the automobile industry came from the deep South, and, of course, in many cases, they brought their prejudices with them. When we fought to upgrade Negroes and give other minority groups equal opportunity on the more-skilled and higher-paid jobs, we met with this resistance, but we found that where you take a firm position and follow through these matters can be solved; that you can sweat it out, you can talk it out, and you can conciliate the thing.

But the basic problem arises at the hiring gate. Inside of our union we have done what we think is a very fine job-not perfect; we hope to improve it--but we have done a fairly good job in giving people inside the factories, once they are employed, an opportunity to move up to those jobs based upon their individual qualifications, not based upon their race, creed, or color. We have done that very well, but we have

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been having a great deal of difficulty in getting the companies to agree to apply the principle of nondiscrimination at the hiring gate. The union has no control over hiring procedure. Only after an employee is hired by the company does he come under our jurisdiction, and do we then have anything to say about his status in the plant. At that stage of the game we can do a fairly good job through our seniority agreements, our upgrading agreements, and that sort of thing, but the real discrimination occurs at the hiring gate, and that is the evil which the bill before your committee attempts to deal with. We believe that if this bill was passed, S. 984, you then would have machinery by which we could begin to deal effectively and fairly with discrimination at the factory hiring gate.

During the war, when President Roosevelt came out with Executive Order 8802, that was a great help in breaking down discrimination at the hiring gate. We worked very closely with the FEPC at that time and we made great progress. Progress was made because of Executive Order 8802, plus the fact that we had developing in key and basic war industries a very critical and acute manpower shortage. So you had a combination of two factors: You had the Executive order, which carried the weight and the pressure of governmental direction, plus the pressure of manpower, and in that period we made considerable progress.

I would like to just cite some figures with respect to the over-all improvement that the minority groups achieved in that period.

The wartime labor shortage, plus FEPC and union policies, enabled Negroes to gain more employment in the skilled and semiskilled categories during the war. According to the Census Bureau, Negro men employed as craftsmen and foremen in the skilled jobs increased from 4.4 percent of the total employed in April 1940 to 7.3 percent in April 1944. Negro men employed in the semiskilled category of operatives increased from 12.6 percent of the total employed in April 1940 to 22.4 percent in April 1944. These are United States census figures. So that we made considerable progress in that period, and what we have got to do now is to try to sustain that progress.

The pressure for manpower has been removed. Executive Order 8802 no longer operates. Therefore we think the Government ought to take action at this time to create machinery such as this bill provides, to see that people are given an opportunity for employment without discrimination. Our experience has been that where you have machinery such as this bill proposes to establish, and if you get governmental action and action on the part of the union working together with the employer, you can break this problem down. We found that even in situations where there was great tension and considerable resistance, if there was a will to work the problem out on the part of the people in positions of responsibility, and if there was an honest effort made, even the most difficult problems could be solved. I went into local unions during the war all over the country-in the deep South, in the North, in the East, and the West-where this problem came up, and with rare exceptions we were able to work the problem out without any difficulty, merely by going in and not laying down a mandate, but by getting together all the people involved and talking this thing through. Of course, we had all of our persuasion, all of our appeal to fairness and democratic principles backed up and supported by

the Executive order, which carried the weight of the Government with it. They were supported also, of course, by the urgency of the wartime need, and in practically every case we were able to work this problem out without any difficulty, based upon the fact that we approached it with this firmness, with governmental support.

We believe that if this bill becomes law it will provide the practical machinery for doing in these situations the sort of job that we did during the war. The bill is not an arbitrary thing. It creates machinery for conciliation, and machinery to exhaust the processes of persuasion and democratic exchange of points of view; but persuasion, that democratic process, is supported and backed up by the force of law, and we believe that if you have that kind of a set-up it will be possible to break this thing down and eliminate discrimination from employment.

In March of 1946 the UAW-CIO convention at Atlantic City adopted a constitutional provision establishing a permanent fair practice and antidiscrimination department. We have set up a national committee, and under that national committee we have set up in each local union a functioning fair practice and antidiscrimination committee. Our constitution provides that 1 cent out of every individual's monthly dues payment goes into a special fund to fight all forms of discrimination. We have established complete appeal procedure by which a worker who has been discriminated against in his factory may file a grievance, have the grievance heard locally, have it appealed to our international executive board's fair practice committee, have it appealed to the executive board and to the international convention, which is the highest tribunal. We have complete machinery for providing for protection against discrimination inside the factory and inside the union, but we have no machinery to guarantee that a worker will not be discriminated against on getting into the factory at the hiring gate.

Senator DONNELL. Do your contracts with employers provide against discrimination by the employers, Mr. Reuther?

Mr. REUTHER. We have worked out in our industry what we call a model fair practice and antidiscrimination clause. It deals with discrimination both in the plant and at the hiring gate. We have had great difficulty in getting employers to agree to incorporate in the contract anything with respect to hiring procedure. They have taken the position that they exercise the sole judgment with respect to hiring procedure, and that once they have employed a worker, we then have some say over the conditions of employment, and thereby would say that in very few cases have we been successful in getting the employers to agree to a contract provision which deals with the question of employment. After they are employed we have had more success in guarding against discrimination, because there we have control of the seniority provisions over upgrading, promotion, trainee promotion, and that sort of thing. But the real discrimination takes place before the fellow comes under our jurisdiction, and if he is denied employment because he is a Negro, or for some other reason, we do not have anything to say about it, because he never becomes an employee and never comes under the jurisdiction of our contract provisions.

Senator DONNELL. Your contract provisions with respect to persons who have been employed by the employer-do those provisions contain prohibitions against discrimination?