Goal: More minority union labor

Before his advisory commission reported on construction-workplace diversity, Mayor Nutter addressed yesterday's Daily News story about Darrell Choates, an African-American masonry contractor who was given a runaround instead of a job on the $800 million Pennsylvania Convention Center expansion.

Speaking to a roomful of construction people at the Convention Center, Nutter's attitude toward minority small contractors differed sharply from that of the CEO of his Office of Economic Opportunity, Michael Bell.

Bell had suggested that Choates should bid on small weatherization jobs instead of trying to get work on a big construction project, telling the Daily News, "When we met with Mr. Choates, his largest job was $60,000. He doesn't have the capacity to do the work."

Nutter said that when he decided to run for mayor, people told him, " 'You have no base, you have no money and you have no capacity to do this.' "

But Nutter resigned from City Council after 14 years - "and you know the last thing this city needs," he said, "is another unemployed brother" - and won the mayor's race.

"Our responsibility is to make sure you have the capacity to do whatever you want to do," Nutter told the minority small contractors in his audience.

To the big general contractors, Nutter said, "You can't always do business with your friends. Get some new friends."

His commission found that although union construction work is "one of few promising sources of good wages and benefits that allow workers without college educations to support their families," minority contractors receive a tiny percentage of the contracts.

The commission set an unprecedented goal of 32 percent minority inclusion.

"According to my very unscientific, uncensuslike survey, the racial makeup of some Philadelphia Building Trades Council unions - laborers, cement masons, operating engineers - is 42 percent African-American," Pat Gillespie, the council's business manager, told the Daily News after the meeting.

"Other crafts are maybe 10, 15, 20 percent African-American," he said. "That has to change. The laborers union has to get lighter and all the other unions have to get darker."

Gillespie cast a jaundiced eye toward weatherization programs as the key to minority inclusion.

"The last time we tried that, years ago, we were paying the [trainees] a pittance while a lot of hustlers were getting rich running the training programs," Gillespie said.

"Training is minimal - caulking, fixing drafts, that kind of thing. When the funding stopped, so did the [trainees'] employment, and they had nowhere to go," he said.

Instead, Gillespie said, unions should establish apprenticeship programs that take trainees from weatherization to high-paying trades such as carpentry, electrical and plumbing. "That," he said, "makes sense."

The commission's report on construction-industry diversity is at: http://www.phila.gov/.