Fight Over Jobs Divides Interests of Blacks, Latinos : Recovery: Protests win work for African-Americans, but others are upset over attempts to force them out.

Four times on a sweltering afternoon last week, Robert Jackson drove by a South Los Angeles construction site, eyeing the newly framed wood skeleton of a shopping complex and its crew of hard-hatted workers.

On each pass around the mall, which burned down in April during the city’s days of rage, Jackson noted that the number of black workers on the site remained unchanged. There were none. “Looks like we’ll have to stop on back,” he said.

Jackson was on an urban espionage mission, an advance scout for an increasingly visible pressure campaign using street protests to win jobs for black workers in the rebuilding of riot-ravaged Los Angeles.

Two days later, acting on Jackson’s surveillance, Brotherhood Crusade leader Danny Bakewell led a contingent of 50 placard-waving demonstrators back to the site at Venice Boulevard and Western Avenue.

Hectoring the workers, the crowd chanted: “Blacks don’t work, nobody works!” until a flustered supervisor arrived. He quickly caved in, agreeing to negotiate.

Work-site protests in South Los Angeles have become a familiar feature of the city’s post-riot landscape, a gambit that has won jobs for several hundred workers in recent months, activists report.

But after a July protest turned violent--a work site was vandalized and white and Latino workers complained that they were chased away by protesters--contractors and critics of the demonstrations warned that black activists are raising expectations each time they try to shut down the sites.

The protests have also fed anxieties in the Latino community, prompting conservative leader Xavier Hermosillo to warn that Latinos will not tolerate being forced off the sites or fired in favor of black workers.

Activists and their opponents complain that the city’s leaders have been largely silent on the issue. Their failure to intervene between the factions, some activists say, makes for piecemeal progress at best. Critics of the protests believe that the absence of neutral mediators has allowed the incidents to teeter on the edge of intimidation and violence.

“The politicians are steering clear,” said Prentice Lee Jenkins, an official of the Black Fund, another group that is conducting work-site protests. “When there’s trouble on one side, you can always be sure that politicians will go to the other side.”

Civic leaders deny that they have sat on their hands. At the same time they caution that their effectiveness in such matters is limited by market forces beyond their control.

“I don’t think that any government entity can impose a solution here,” said Thomas Epstein, deputy insurance commissioner. His boss, state Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi, provoked a storm of criticism from Bakewell and his allies this year when he tried to mediate construction conflicts.

Such skittishness may well be prudent. Studies by urban experts depict agitation over job sites as an inevitable result of long-term economic restructuring in the region--a trend that has drained 120,000 jobs from South Los Angeles in the last 20 years and pitted minority communities against each other in a struggle over the shrinking job base.

James Johnson, director of UCLA’s Center for the Study of Urban Poverty, says that traditional high-wage union jobs have dwindled in Los Angeles, replaced by a growing stock of low-wage service industry posts.

“The unfortunate part of this restructuring is that it creates employment for some groups and cuts it out for others,” Johnson said. “Latinos get poverty-level wages and blacks get no wages. One group ends up as the working poor and the other ends up as the jobless poor.”

Latino leaders have long complained that immigrant workers from Mexico and Central America are exploited by non-union contractors who pay them less than the going rate. Carpenters report that some white contractors hire immigrant carpenters for as little as $7 an hour instead of paying standard wages, which range from $17 to $24 per hour.

“We understand the desire to get African-Americans working, but we disagree with the methodology of removing others to reach those goals,” said Hermosillo, who heads NEWS for America, a Latino interest group. “The fact that we have these jobs doesn’t mean we’re not being discriminated against--and we believe that Latinos deserve a representative share of any new jobs that go to minorities in rebuilding Los Angeles.”

Officials of the Black Carpenters Assn., a small, independent, construction coalition, insist that blacks have historically had the most trouble winning trade jobs and penetrating local trade unions. And as more construction jobs are won by non-union contracting firms, they say, black tradesmen end up left further behind.

Steve Graves, an administrative assistant at the Southern California District Council of Carpenters, estimates that blacks make up 10% to 20% of the union’s 40,000 members. As the economic slump chokes new construction in the region, Graves said, carpenters of all races are left desperate for work.

But African-American workers contend that they are the first to be shut out--left in the lurch while contracting crews largely made up of white, Korean-American and Latino workers are hired for demolition and construction jobs in riot-devastated areas.

“The union hasn’t done a damn thing for me,” said Ray Perry, 42, a black carpenter who has gone without steady work for four years. Like many black tradesmen, he has spent weeks driving from job site to job site, asking for work.

The answer is always the same.

“All you do is waste your gas,” said Mark Fletcher, 30, who last worked three months ago. Like Perry, Fletcher has shuttled between job sites, stopping at as many as six a day without a flicker of success.

The two tradesmen were hired at the Vermont and Western site last week after members of the Black Fund approached officials of the Nagel Construction Co. and pressured them to hire more blacks.

The negotiation was “very intimidating,” said Ray Radke, Nagel’s on-site supervisor. Black Fund officials, he said, “were very loud and vocal.”

The group has been operating for a year, Jenkins said, trying to establish itself as a liaison between employers and unemployed black workers. “We can be tough when we need to be,” he said.

Voices on both sides of the debate say that discussions between activists and contractors would benefit from intervention by city leaders--though they hardly agree on what those leaders should do.

Some would like to see city officials work toward a broad-based agreement between the black community and the white-dominated construction trades; others would prefer to see officials jump in on a case-by-case basis.

“It would clearly help if somebody from the city would step in and dispel all this tension,” said Gary Butler, an official with the Associated General Contractors of California, which represents more than 150 contractors in the Los Angeles region.

Jenkins said that in several recent negotiations City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas played a behind-the-scenes role, steering activists and contractors closer together. But he adds that he has seen little evidence of interest from other quarters--notably Mayor Tom Bradley, other council members and Peter V. Ueberroth’s Rebuild L.A. coalition.

Ueberroth and other Rebuild L.A. officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Bill Chandler, a spokesman for the mayor, says city leaders “can be effective in using moral suasion” on contractors. Though he cautions that “the mayor and even a coalition of council members cannot reach every business in the city,” Chandler said that Bradley has made many phone calls recently to insurance companies and contractors, prodding them to hire minority workers.

And, Chandler said, the Bradley Administration is working on plans to find more jobs for minority workers. In June, Bradley created a consortium of businesses called the Los Angeles Community Partnership to award minority-owned businesses up to $10 million in contracts to demolish 500 buildings charred by arson during the riots.

On Thursday, Chandler said, city officials met to iron out details of a new program that will set up a clearinghouse for construction firms interested in hiring minority workers on their rebuilding contracts.

Critics say the success of such a plan will depend on the good intentions of contractors, who have shown little inclination to hire minorities. “Left to their own devices, the contracting community does nothing for black people,” Bakewell said.

Still, Bakewell, a member of Rebuild L.A.’s board, pointedly advises city leaders to “stay out” of negotiations on rebuilding projects. “We don’t need great white saviors. Or great black saviors, for that matter,” he said.

When Garamendi met with insurance company representatives in June to urge them to hire more minority firms, Bakewell disrupted the meeting, angrily accusing the insurance commissioner of trying to stage the meeting without the involvement of black activists.

“I was livid,” Bakewell said. “He was trying to make decisions for us without us having a say in the matter.”

Deputy Insurance Commissioner Epstein said: “(Bakewell) just basically wanted to short-circuit our agenda.”

The animosity cuts even deeper between the activists and contractors.

Jenkins says that white-owned contracting firms try “every trick in the book” to avoid hiring more black tradespeople. Jenkins says one white contractor claimed to qualify as a minority because he lost a leg in the Vietnam War “fighting to keep us free.”

Another contractor pointed to a tanned worker whom he said had Latino blood. “This kid looked and talked Malibu to me,” Jenkins said. “Maybe he had Latino parents 200 years ago, but all he looked like was a surf bum.”

Butler and other contractors deny that construction firms purposely attempt to keep black tradesmen out of work.

The recession, they say, has forced them to keep work crews “lean and mean” so they can bid low on contracts. One result, Butler acknowledges, is that non-union crews are more likely to hire low-wage immigrant workers from Mexico and Central America--laborers willing to accept low salaries that unionized black workers refuse.

After several recent job-site shutdowns forced Latino workers off their jobs, Latino activist Hermosillo threatened to meet pressure with pressure, bringing out his own protesters to counter Bakewell’s people. Threatening to videotape black activists during job- site actions, Hermosillo said: “We understand the desire to get blacks working. But we won’t stand for them pushing Latinos off the job.”

Yet when Bakewell led his demonstrators to the Vermont and Western site last week, he was met by only Carmen Chavez, a lone schoolteacher who had decided on her own to counter Bakewell’s protest.

Surrounded by black demonstrators, she toted a placard that read, “Latinos Live Here Too!” Chavez said: “Our people are outraged. We feel like we’re being attacked for having a decent job. The white community listens to black people because they vote. But they don’t listen to us because most of us can’t even vote.”

Blacks at the site drowned out Chavez with their own complaints. When they try to win jobs from white contractors, one shouted, “all we get is the royal runaround.”

Jackson, the Bakewell aide, said that when he tried to get a job at the Vermont and Western site several days earlier, he was shunted from worker to worker. Each identified someone else as the foreman. Jackson never was able to reach the actual foreman. Bakewell added that repeated calls to the contractor, Nagle Construction, went unanswered.

John Hoehn--foreman for Allen Construction, a subcontractor at the site--denied putting Jackson off.

The demonstrators play their own brand of hardball, contractors charge.

Last month, more than 40 members of one black coalition allegedly swarmed onto a construction site at Vernon Avenue and Main Street. Reese Lloyd, an attorney for three workers at the site, contends that the protesters chased two Latino laborers and threatened the contractor, Charley Gruver. The demonstrators, Lloyd says, slashed tires and broke windows on a pickup truck, ripped up plumbing lines and tore down the wooden frame of a two-story commercial building--causing at least $2,500 in damage.

“It was no different than the Ku Klux Klan attacking black workers,” said Lloyd, who blames Bakewell for originating the idea. Bakewell said his group had no part in the protest and condemns violence.

S. Deacon Alexander, a former Black Panther and one of the leaders of the Vernon and Main protest, confirmed that a faction of demonstrators caused damage at the site. Speaking during a news conference at another job site protest at 43rd and Figueroa streets July 29, Alexander vowed that any contractor who tried to work without hiring black employees at Vernon and Main would be shut down.

“We’re gonna harass you, we’re gonna bump down on your head, whatever,” Alexander said.

He insisted that the group did not run Latino workers off the job. But he added that the “job will be disrupted every night.” On at least three occasions since then, Lloyd said, vandals have returned to the site at night, tearing down wood frames and smashing plumbing.

“We’ve got to stop this now before someone gets seriously injured or killed,” Lloyd said.

Lloyd cites New York City as an example of a city that allowed such protests to mushroom out of control.

In Manhattan, work-site protests have mutated into an abusive form of extortion. Bona fide activist groups still use the tactic to find jobs for minorities. But they have been joined by scores of criminal enterprises posing as community organizations to extort money and no-show jobs from contractors, law enforcement authorities say.

Known as “minority coalitions,” these groups accounted for more than 540 disruptions at New York job sites in 1991. Michael Cherkasky, chief of investigations for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, said the coalitions, operating under “the trappings of legitimate civil rights groups,” have been involved in “everything from low-level corruption to extortion and murder.”

Mayoral spokesman Chandler sees no evidence of such an outcome here. “Los Angeles is not necessarily going to follow New York,” he said.

But Lloyd and other critics say that when minority coalitions began to mushroom soon after their appearance in New York, it became more difficult for contractors to know whether they were dealing with “a legitimate group or a fly-by-night.”

“That’s starting to happen here too,” Lloyd said.

In fact, when Hoehn, the foreman at Vermont and Western, saw Bakewell’s protesters gathering near his site last week, he assumed that they were from the Black Fund--whom the company had negotiated with only a few days before.

“They can’t be here for us,” Hoehn said. “We already signed a contract. Maybe they’re for the guys across the street.”

As the protesters began surging toward him, Hoehn gulped.

“What,” he asked weakly, “do they want now?”