Labor Day - How Republicans Integrated the Trade Unions after Lyndon B. Johnson's Democrats Chickened Out

With the implementation of the Philadelphia Plan in 1969, President Richard M. Nixon's administration changed the federal government's stance on affirmative action. For the first time, a specific industry was required to articulate a plan for hiring minority workers. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson had identified affirmative action as necessary to redress the effects of racism. During their administrations, policies were created to facilitate both equal employment opportunities for African Americans and equal accommodations in the workplace. Yet the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had limited the type of remedies possible by forbidding any form of discrimination. This was interpreted to include preferential hiring, which was seen as compensatory discrimination.

Despite this limitation, the Nixon administration used the power of the federal purse to create specific hiring goals in the highly segregated construction industry. Designed by the Department of Labor during the Johnson administration, the Philadelphia Plan was revived by George Shultz, Nixon's labor secretary, and Arthur Fletcher, his assistant secretary. The plan required Philadelphia government contractors in six construction trades to set goals and timetables for the hiring of minority workers or risk losing the valuable contracts. No quotas were set. This left businesses a fair amount of autonomy in determining how to meet the goals. As a result, the Philadelphia Plan withstood a court challenge and growing public hostility to affirmative action.

Affirmative Action: Developing the Concept

The Philadelphia Plan makes sense in three contexts: the history of civil rights, the history of labor regulation, and the history of the exercise of state power in the United States. The plan may be seen as one of the last steps in a trend toward growing government activism that ranged from the end of the Civil War until 1980. The coalition that opposed the Philadelphia Plan formed the basis of the opposition to government activism that characterized the subsequent period.

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Howard Gillette, Jr., "The Philadelphia Plan"

Even as it underwent a painful process of economic restructuring in the years after World War II, Philadelphia garnered national attention from efforts to integrate historically white building trades. Dubbed the “Philadelphia Plan,” the program requiring federal contractors to practice nondiscrimination in hiring tested the liberal coalition formed in the aftermath of the New Deal in Philadelphia and nationally. 

Local NAACP chapter president Cecil B. Moore speaks outside City Hall during a protest over access to building jobs in 1963. (Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries)

Starting in the early 1960s, in reaction to civil rights campaigns in Philadelphia and elsewhere, the federal government used the wedge of contracting to require companies seeking its business to take affirmative action to assure the inclusion of African Americans among its employees. Monitored by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, the policy took a new turn during the Johnson administration by targeting construction trades in key metropolitan areas for compliance, starting with St. Louis in 1966 and extending to Philadelphia the following year. In adopting numerical goals for compliance, these area plans attracted the attention of U.S. Comptroller Elmer Staats (1914-2011), who ruled in 1967 that the approach violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which in prohibiting discrimination in hiring explicitly prohibited racial quotas.

Caught up in a difficult election campaign, the Johnson administration did not challenge the ruling. Not to be deterred, rights activists in Philadelphia worked with the city’s Commission on Human Relations under the leadership of its chair, Clarence Farmer (1915-2014), to adopt a localized version of the federal program, going beyond it, however, by requiring companies doing business with the city to “hire and train hard-core unemployed persons so that they may become an integral part of his workforce.” It covered not just the construction industry but all suppliers doing business with the city.

Despite its pursuit of a strategy to enlist southern states into the Republican fold, the Nixon administration revived the targeted area approach to affirmative action, choosing to promote a “revised Philadelphia Plan” in June 1969. With the First Bank of the United States as a backdrop, Assistant Labor Secretary Arthur Fletcher (1924-2005), perhaps the administration’s most prominent African American, announced an approach that skirted the prohibition against quotas by setting minimum targets to be achieved through good faith efforts in hiring. The program, which was quickly extended to other metropolitan areas, was partly intended to draw the support of African Americans to the administration and partly an effort to drive a wedge between blacks and their allies in the labor movement.

Implementation of the Philadelphia plan produced modest gains for blacks in the building trades, but it generated heated resistance from union leaders in Philadelphia and elsewhere. Formation of a local chapter of the Urban Coalition helped rally support for affirmative action in the city, but much of the white working class, facing a threat to their livelihood as the blue collar workforce continued to shrink, revolted. As Nixon perceived the political opening that the clash over employment presented, he moderated his support for affirmative action, leaving in place, however, precedents that continue to govern national as well as local programs.

Democrats were all for Black Civil Rights up until the moment it threatened their own livelihood and pet constituencies. Apparently Democrats are willing to criticize and condemn Nixon and Republicans for their so-called infamous "Southern Strategy" but then turn around and give no credit to them for their subsequent "Northern Strategy" to integrate Unions and the ENTIRE US workforce.

Nixon had an excellent record on civil rights. He supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He was an avid champion of the desegregation of public schools. The progressive columnist Tom Wicker wrote in the New York Times, “There’s no doubt about it — the Nixon administration accomplished more in 1970 to desegregate Southern school systems than had been done in the 16 previous years or probably since. There’s no doubt either that it was Richard Nixon personally who conceived and led the administration’s desegregation effort.”