Preston, W. E., vice president, Northern Illinois Gas Co., Aurora, Ill., Rice, W. Thomas, president, Atlantic Coast Line Railroad Co., Jackson- ville, Fla., letter to Chairman Roosevelt.__ Robey, N. T., manager, American Oil Co., letter to Chairman Roosevelt, enclosing letter of J. H. Johnson to Louis G. Rupp, manager, Illinois State Employment Service and copy of "Employee Relations Princi- Robinson, G. H., plant manager, Shippers' Car Line, East St. Louis, Ill., letter to Chairman Roosevelt.. Russell, Garland, Swift & Co., letter to Chairman Roosevelt enclosing pages Smith, Robert L., legal department, Certain-teed Products Corp., Ardmore, Sophir, Charles, Morris Paint & Varnish Co., letter to Chairman Roosevelt Stockhus, C. R., vice president, industrial relations, Union Electric Co., St. Trimble, Gilbert K., president, Midwest Rubber Reclaiming Co., East St. 1085 1093 1087 Veeder, Nicholas P., chairman of the board and president, Granite City 1090 1087 (Study "Clerical Hiring * * *,” Illinois Conference of Branches, NAACP) Illinois Bell Telephone Co., clerical hiring by the......... EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY MONDAY, JANUARY 15, 1962 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, SPECIAL SUBCOMMITTEE ON LABOR OF THE COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND LABOR, Washington, D.C. The subcommittee met at 10 a.m., pursuant to call, in room 429, Old House Office Building, Hon. James Roosevelt (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding. Present: Representatives Powell, Roosevelt, Dent, Pucinski, Smith, Ayres, and Goodell. Also present: Don Lowe, subcommittee director; Adrienne Fields, subcommittee clerk; Richard Burress, minority clerk, Committee on Education and Labor; Tamara Wall, assistant general counsel for labor-management, Committee on Education and Labor. Mr. ROOSEVELT. The subcommittee will come to order, please. In opening these hearings of the Special Subcommittee on Labor of the U.S. House of Representatives, I want first to express my regret at having to be absent part of today and tomorrow, and I want to thank my good friend and colleague, the Honorable John H. Dent of Pennsylvania, for consenting to take up the gavel in my absence. Our subject, equal employment opportunity, has largely comprised the work of the subcommittee for several months. During late October and early November regional hearings were held in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City. Our assumption that such hearings were badly needed could almost be called the understatement of the century. The subcommittee found that, despite many encouraging developments, denial of equal employment opportunity is hardly a less pressing matter today than when it first became of concern to the executive branch of the Federal Government over 20 years ago. We have heard strong testimony to the effect: That employment discrimination of some kind can be found in almost every industry-if not with respect to initial employment, then certainly with respect to opportunity for promotion; That, as a consequence especially when age and sex factors are taken into consideration-employment discrimination probably adversely affects fully 50 percent of our Nation's population; That arbitrary denial of equal employment opportunity unquestionably contributes to our current staggering welfare assistance costs. For example, Mr. Raymond M. Hilliard, director, Cook County Department of Public Aid, conservatively estimates that $70 million additional yearly cost in Chicago's welfare grants can be attributed solely to employment discrimination. That industries, traditionally the prime employers of young people, are perhaps the most flagrant practitioners of employment discrimination. That, accordingly, denial of equal employment opportunity contributes to disillusionment of high school students and increases school dropouts, currently an acute national problem. That organized labor, despite solid advances, has much yet to do, particularly in the area of apprenticeship training; and That all is far from right in the employment practices of the Federal Government itself, where, above all, complete fairness ought to be the rule. In these final Washington hearings, we shall complete the regional picture by hearing witnesses from the South, Southeast, and Southwest areas of the country. We shall, in addition, hear top-level reaffirmation of our regional findings; we shall hear testimony concerning full manpower utilization in the next critical decade and testimony concerning the importance of our subject matter to the international relations of our Nation; we shall, finally, hear testimony from religious leaders of various faiths as to basic moral right in connection with equal employment opportunity legislation. This last aspect of our concern should not be taken lightly, for, as has been frequently said, and I have said it, too, I would hope that something besides mere expediency would be sufficient to move us to action. The right of a person to fulfill the potentialities of his best self, the right of a society to be enriched by the full contribution of each of its members-these are matters vital to the very fabric of our democratic way of life. These matters pierce deeply to our basic sense of right and wrong. What the rest of the world thinks of us pales into insignificance in comparison with what we think, really think without benefit of rationalization, of ourselves. If America is, or if we can make America become, the America of all Americans, then we need have no fear of our "image" in the eyes of the world. Following the conclusion of this week of hearings the subcommittee will meet in executive session Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, January 22, 23, and 24, 1962, in order to agree upon the final form of the bill to be introduced, and to be presented to the full committee for consideration. Our first witness this morning is Mr. Herbert Hill, the labor secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Mr. Hill will testify, No. 1, on the patterns of employment discrimination in the South, and No. 2, on the views of the NAACP on the proposed legislation. Mr. Hill, we are delighted to have you with us as a long-time student of this important subject matter, and particularly this year, when, at long last, considerable hope has been presented to us that perhaps we can do something about it. STATEMENT OF HERBERT HILL, LABOR SECRETARY, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE Mr. HILL. Thank you very much. In the interest of saving time, I shall read portions of my prepared statement, with the request that my entire statement go into the record. Mr. ROOSEVELT. Without objection. Mr. HILL. Thank you so much. My name is Herbert Hill, and I am labor secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, whose national office is located in New York City at 20 West 40th Street. I wish, first of all, to thank the committee for this opportunity to appear and to present testimony on the urgent need for the passage of a Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Act. The recent report on employment issued by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights noted that the Negro worker is "trapped in a vicious circle of discrimination." For more than a decade I have worked extensively in the southern region of the United States. In the course of my work I have had an opportunity to directly observe the operation of this "vicious circle" in the many Southern States. I recognize that problems of racial discrimination are not limited to any one region of our country. I realize that civil rights represent the great unresolved social problem of the whole American society, but there can be no doubt that in the Southern States there currently exists the most extreme, rigid, and systematic pattern of employment discrimination to be found anywhere in the United States. Whatever the problem may be elsewhere, in the South the Negro worker continues to be the victim of a tradition of white supremacy which is deeply rooted and gives way but slowly to the forces of social change and to the requirements of a modern industrial society. Industrial management and organized labor are both responsible for the continued existence of the pattern of employment discrimination throughout the South, as well as agencies of the various States and Federal Government. While it is true that an immense industrial development has been taking place in the Southeastern States since the end of World War II, a most disturbing aspect of the rapid growth of the manufacturing facilities in the South has been the serious inability of the Negro worker to register significant employment gains in the industrial plants that are transforming the southern countryside. Investigations indicate that in the textile industry, still the basic manufacturing industry of the South, Negroes remain in a most marginal position. Among the 400,000 textile workers in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina there is apparently not a single Negro employed as a weaver, spinner, or loomfixer. One might have anticipated that southern industrial development taking place in areas of heavy Negro population would result in greater use of available Negro labor. Unfortunately, this has not occurred. For example, according to State government figures, the number of textile workers employed in South Carolina was 48,000 in 1918 and 122.000 in 1960, while the percentage of Negroes in the textile labor force fell from 9 percent to 4.7 percent over this same period. On July 6, 1961, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People filed complaints against major textile manufacturing companies with the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity. But, because of the intransigence of the owners of the southern textile manufacturing industry, no change has taken place in the systematic pattern of discrimination in this industry. |