Banks, N A (2006) “The last bastion of discrimination”: The New York city building trades and the struggle over affirmative action, 1961–1976. PhD thesis, Columbia University, USA.
Abstract
Drawing upon a number of sources---including government documents and court records, and the correspondence of political leaders, union officials, and civil rights organizations---this dissertation explores the struggle to racially integrate the nation's building trades unions in New York City from 1961 to 1976. The battles over the desegregation of these unions dominated the agendas of both the civil rights movement and the building trades in the 1960s and early 1970s. As home to the most vibrant movement to end discrimination in these unions and the most politically powerful coalition of building trades unions in the nation, New York City remained at the center of this conflict throughout the period. Because civil rights activists and policymakers viewed race-conscious policies as the most effective way to deal with employment discrimination in the lily-white construction industry, the political battles over the racial integration of the building trades often focused as much on the merit of race-conscious policies as on the racial integration of the unions themselves. The outcome of these conflicts had important consequences not only for the struggle for racial equality in the post-World War II urban North, but for the fortunes of affirmative action, as well. This dissertation examines the origins of the movement to desegregate the building trades and demonstrates its centrality to the civil rights struggle in the urban North; it illuminates the role that grassroots protests at the local level played in the development and implementation of union-targeted affirmative action policies; and it uncovers the crucial role that the building trades played in framing public debates over affirmative action, and how they used their political influence as the vanguard of the white working-class revolt of the 1960s and early 1970s to undermine this policy. This dissertation contributes to ongoing debates about the origins and development of affirmative action, popular opposition to this policy, and its relationship to the demise of the labor-liberal coalitions that governed many northern cities in the post-World War II era.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Thesis advisor: | Brinkley, A |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | building trades; conflicts; discrimination; employment; government; integration; policy |
| Index terms: | building trade, discrimination, documents, integration, New York, framing, drawing, movement, dissertation, construction industry, implementation, war, employment |
| Subjects: | practitioner, health behaviours and lifestyles, research dissemination and communication, conceptual models, contractual arrangements, conflict and crisis studies, Geography, professional ethics, technical documentation, professional development, management, industry analysis, organizational analysis |
| Topics: | Geographical Context, Procurement, Legal Issues, Research Practice, Information Management, Roles and Professions, Human Resources, Design Practice, Organizational Design |
| Descriptive scope: | 3 PCT |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here