Fired for hiring a black plumber

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Terry

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Fired for hiring a black plumber

Sounds strange doesn't it in this day and age. Though I did grow up in the 60's during my high school years and saw plenty of news about civil rights, opening schools to all races in the South. Busing to integrate neighborhoods, and a lot of news about the Vietnam war every night. It was like the world was one big fight. We had a famous fighter that had won a gold medal for us in the Olympics, and then he came home and was refused a meal in a restaurant because of his color. He then chose not to fight in a war against people of a different race than him, and was stripped of his world boxing title.

One of my customers was barely in high school, too young to be arrested for refusing to sit in the back of a bus. She and her friends would get on the bus and try to sit up front. The bus driver would stop the bus, call the police and have them take her and her friends off the bus. But that was in the South, and I grew up in the Seattle area where it's more subtle.

So perhaps twenty years out of high school, and in the the construction field for a good amount of time too, I also ran up against the problem. What problem? It kind of depends on your viewpoint I guess. In the 70's I worked for a large plumbing company that was trying to integrate it's workforce. That company asked if we knew of good workers we could hire that were in the minority. That company was wanting to hire people of color.
So now going forward about ten more years and I'm in charge of hiring for a different plumbing company. A company that is looking to expand their plumbing department. Previously I had been one of four plumbers for this company. Most of their work was HVAC, heating and cooling. Some of my favorite jobs for that company had been installing kitchens for processing meat for sale in grocery's. I would go in and lay out the job, get the slabs saw cut, the plumbing roughed in, concrete poured and then the fixtures set. Each store had a grease trap and three compartment sink. I was fast and they knew it. I did these between Woodinville and Tacoma, and even in Bremerton where I took a ferry to the job.

Like all things that change, a few years had passed where I worked other places, and came back to this place of work as a supervisor. I had been hiring plumbers at a very busy time in the construction industry for Seattle. The really good plumbers were working steady. I was having to hire new to the area plumbers that simply were not as fast, or as strong as I was. I was a few months into this new job title and lo and behold, I get a new person applying for a plumbing job that looks to be as big as me. Most of my crew were on the small side, and sometimes you just could use something more. I was also looking to add more skill to the team. After talking to the new man in my office, I decided to hire him........

Did I mention that the new man in my office that I was offering a job to was black?

Well, anyway, the moment I told him he was hired, I heard.

"Terry! Come in here right now!"

So yes, I abruptly leave that room and go see my boss.

"Get your things and clean out your desk! You're fired. Get everything!"

I was told to stay there until they could give me a check for two weeks of pay and the reminder that I was fired. I never found out what happened to the man that I had hired, so I'm guessing they told him a story and asked him to leave. I also think that he had heard me being fired, so maybe he didn't stick around after that. It was a very strange thing to happen.
Always before, I pretty much got any job I ever applied for, and here when I was doing the hiring, I was the one that got fired for doing what I thought was a good thing. I had no idea that hiring a black plumber would be an issue. And I would do it again.
Anyway, that's my story about white privilege. I could pretty much work and do anything I wanted, unless I was wanting to integrate a plumbing company. I wish I knew who that plumber was. After all these years, it would be fun to sit down with him and trade war stories. I hope he did well. And really, I'm sure he did.

Terry Love
http://plumbinghacks.com/

fired-for-hiring.jpg
 
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Bluebinky

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Being born a few years later, I saw all the civil rights stuff, but it didn't really sink in. Living in the 'burbs, the few black families I knew were just like everyone else. None of it made any sense.

I think that these days, it has much less to do with actual race (beliefs about genetics or whatever) and more to do with the assumed "culture" that comes along with being in a particular group. Now, it feels like people look at your skin color and assume that you were raised without a father, are spoiled rotten, or whatever.

This afternoon I will be interviewing at probably the 10th company since I was laid off. The days of me being able to walk across the street and get hired are over -- I'm a old white guy. No one hires "old white guys" for engineering jobs any more. Those positions are reserved for Asians (Indians in particular) and to a lesser extent women; and only those under 30. It doesn't matter that I'm now better at what I do than ever...

At some point, I may be forced to "retire". Maybe I'll start flipping houses instead, or perhaps do odd jobs with my excavator.
 

Terry

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The days of me being able to walk across the street and get hired are over -- I'm a old white guy. No one hires "old white guys" for engineering jobs any more. Those positions are reserved for Asians (Indians in particular) and to a lesser extent women; and only those under 30. It doesn't matter that I'm now better at what I do than ever....

Ageism is a problem as you get older. My older brother that wrote software ran into that, and I have a lot of friends my age that have had to shift what they do for work, if they can even find work. My youngest son, graduated from the Bothell campus of the UW last Spring and is doing contract software for Microsoft.

In plumbing, when I dislocated a shoulder in my 20's, my bosses were acting like I was damaged goods. It didn't matter that I was outperforming the other workers. I had been hurt.
So at 38 I was the one lifting 8" cast iron overhead and installing it because the others on my crew couldn't do it. I had them running copper while I did all the heavy lifting. In my 60's I'm installing water heaters and installing one-piece toilets. At the dump, I love tossing the old ones out the back of the van and seeing them smash. Especially the Champion 4's.

The day I was fired for hiring a black plumber, I made one phone call and I was working the next morning. That was in my 30's.
 
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Kreemoweet

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I'm old enough to have personal experience with the old Jim Crow practices in the southern states. It was undoubtedly some
creepy, ugly stuff. When my family visited relatives down there, my little cousins were always embarrassed and tongue-tied when
I pestered them with questions about the strange things I saw. Many of the "rules" were unwritten: you were just expected to
know which water fountain you were allowed to drink out of, based on the apparent level of upkeep, I suppose. The mysteries
of it all were mostly beyond me, and I received chastisement from all sides.

Nowadays, that sort of thing is gone, but we have the new institutionalized racism in the form of enforced "diversity". Not much
of an improvement, IMO.
 

FullySprinklered

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I've enjoyed reading this thread. I like hearing from folks outside the deep south and learning what their feelings are about race relations and civil rights issues back in the mid century.

I'll add more stuff while I'm snowed in this weekend. It will include a submachine gun and a narrowly averted race riot at my alma mater. Don't touch that dial!
 

Bluebinky

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Nowadays, that sort of thing is gone, but we have the new institutionalized racism in the form of enforced "diversity". Not much of an improvement, IMO.
Back in January '82, I applied as a driver for Metro Transit (Seattle area). When I walked into the interview, the lady told me to not bother sitting down as the quota for white guys was already filled for the year, but I was welcome to "try again next year". It seemed like a big a setback then, but it was for the better in the long run...

Facing that kind of thing again 30+ years later is annoying, but I have saved enough to retire if necessary ;) In the end, we are each responsible for ourselves.

Besides, Trump is gonna fix it all, right???
 

Asktom

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I was on the phone talking to a friend in New Mexico who told me of a good friend of his who was shopping in a supermarket when a woman walked up to him, got in his face and said loudly, "You need to go back to where you came from!" The guy she was yelling at is Navajo.
 

Reach4

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Terry

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I was on the phone talking to a friend in New Mexico who told me of a good friend of his who was shopping in a supermarket when a woman walked up to him, got in his face and said loudly, "You need to go back to where you came from!" The guy she was yelling at is Navajo.

I had a plumber working for me that was from New Mexico. He grew up a town with a ski area. He was a snowboarder growing up. He got mistaken for being Mexican too. His last name was Chaves. I doubt that he could speak Spanish. They don't teach that until High School.
I tried learning Spanish in High School, but was never good at it.
 

Dana

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Chaves- that's the Portuguese spelling of the name- he must have only spoken Portuguese! ;-)

I remember reading about Mexicans and Mexican-Americans being beaten up for being Iranian, back during the hostage crisis. Stupidity knows no ethnic or racial boundaries, and it doesn't take much prompting to reap violence against the perceived "other", even when it's a mistaken identity.

Like most countries, the US still has a way to go, but the more ethnically cleansed and monochrome the culture, the more hyper-aware people are about the differences.

eg: There a 10th generation Koreans living in Japan who have only second-class citizen status. Despite being closer genetically to most Japanese than Ainu or Okinawans, the ong since transplanted Koreans aren't considered "real" Japanese by many (or even most.)

eg: Serbo-Croatian culture is nearly indistinquishable across a handful of nations by outsiders, and even within those countries they can't easily tell by accent or appearance who is Serb and who is Bosniac or Montenegran etc. But those differences are deemed important enough to be worth major bloodletting to some. For decades and at least 2-3 generations Sarajevo was a cosmopolitan mix- those differences didn't seem to matter, and most people were comfortable with their neighbors' religions & habits until...

I personally prefer living in a diverse urban area with a high immigrant population, even when there is some discomfort & misunderstanding due to language or cultural differences, but I can understand how folks who grew accustomed to a far less diverse community might have a hard time adjusting at first. The most common languages heard in the halls of my kid's high school are (in rough order of prevalence) are American English (standard & Ebonic) , Carribean Spanish, central American/Mexican Spanish, Twi (the predominant language of Ghana), Albanian, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Arabic, and Mandarin. Euro-faced foreigners & 'mericans comprise ~43% of the student body, a "majority-minority" population. About a third of the soccer team are Twi speakers, making it easy to call the play without cluing-in the opposition at times.

The upper level Spanish classes at this school are dominated by native speakers of new-world dialects learning how to speak Castillian, and how to better understand one other- the idioms and accents vary (a LOT!). My kid's Spanish teacher grew up speaking a Dominican/Caribbean version of Spanish at home.

Among my kid's friends around town are people who also speak Greek, Uzbek, Ewe, Arabic, French, Twi, Mandarin, Spanish, Farsi, Portuguese, Russian, or Tajik either at home or with their grandparents, but few have distinct & identifiable accents (unlike some of their parents.)

Here in the northeast you can hire anybody you like, just as long as they're not Irish, OK? ;-)

No-irish-need-apply-sign.jpg
no-irish-need-apply-new-york-daily-times-25-mar-1854.jpg
 

Dj2

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In all my years in the business, I've met only one black plumber. He was a very dependable and capable drain specialist, with reasonable prices, on time and doing good job.
 

FullySprinklered

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First plumber I ever saw on a job was a black man. I was working as a carpenter for a design-build guy at the time. I said shoot, I would never be able to do that. But I did.
Dana, my early exposure to humanity didn't include a lot of variety. We had black people, white people, and a couple of dozen Indians. They may have been Creole, not sure, but nevertheless they weren't the type of Indians who would let a cigar store sneak up behind them. No Hispanics, no Asians, no Jews, Catholics, Presbyterians, and on and on. The most exotic folks there were a retired couple from Chicago. They talked funny, but they were nice.
I've been flooded with memories since this thread started, so I'll reserve the right to unsputter this post at a later date.
 

FullySprinklered

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The blizzard of '17 blew in last night. We're looking at an inch, inch and a half of white death out there. So, while I'm waiting for the helicopter I need to end that cliff-hanger I left yesterday.

Desegregation, originally called integration, was not an easy thing to accomplish. It wasn't that the school busses would be taking a left turn instead of a right turn to get the kids to school. There was a monumental amount of infrastructure considerations that had to be addressed to make it all happen. The school superintendent had to present a plan to the courts and have that accepted. He had to present a plan to the school board and have that accepted. Sometimes a new physical plant was needed to accommodate a doubling in the size of the student body in a single location to meet federal requirements. Leaving a lot unsaid, let's move on the machine gun.

There was a big build-up of fear and uncertainty about how all this would go down. Both whites and blacks suspected that there was a backlog of resentment in the other that could cause an outbreak of violence. Most of the problem here was with the adults. The kids were much more adaptable. As it turned out there were very few problems with people getting along within the student population. But the uncertainties were there. Desegregation took a while to implement and fears built up over the several years it took to put all the kids together in one building, as required.

So, first day of school, sophomore year for me, my brother and I rode to school in a sheriff's car, my Dad being a school administrator, in case of any hare-brained scheme to harm someone in the system came about. I rode in front with the deputy and my older brother rode in the back seat. There was a small machine gun lying on the back seat next to my brother. I suppose if someone threw an algebra book at the deputy they would have seriously regretted it.

Next week: the riot that never was.
 

FullySprinklered

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I should mention, Terry, your original post touched my heart. The sheer volume of views tells me that it touched others as well.

Let's see, we need to talk about that race riot.

A year or two after I graduated, my dad moved from the middle school to the high school as an assistant principal. One day, rumors flew around that something big was coming down. A confrontation between blacks and whites was expected to occur in the open area called the atrium after school.

Last bell rang and people began to gather in the atrium; blacks on one side and whites on the other. Insults were exchanged. All the teacher's assistant types ran to the office to report the impending melee.

The principal wouldn't leave his office and the coaches could not be found.

Someone reported the situation to my dad, and he left his office an went down the hall to the atrium area near the cafeteria.

He walked out into the open area between the two groups and pointed toward the waiting school busses and said: " the busses are leaving, get on the bus."

He walked on down to the waiting school busses as if to send the on, and everybody broke and ran for the bus.

Riot over.
 

Terry

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Someone reported the situation to my dad, and he left his office an went down the hall to the atrium area near the cafeteria.

He walked out into the open area between the two groups and pointed toward the waiting school busses and said: " the busses are leaving, get on the bus."

He walked on down to the waiting school busses as if to send the on, and everybody broke and ran for the bus.

Riot over.

To me, that would make your dad a hero. If I had been there, and your dad told me to get on the bus, I would have run too.

There was one time in Junior High when I was throwing food in the cafeteria and a guy got kind of mad at me. He wanted me to stay after school and fight him. I had a paper route to do, and walking home was two miles. Missing the bus didn't seem to be a good idea. Besides, I was totally okay with throwing food on him, there was no good reason to let him hit me for nothing. So I told him he won, and I took the bus home to do my route. It made him pretty happy.
Maybe I should have tossed food at him the next day too. :)

I did fight a lot with my brothers. There were five of us. We had gloves though, so it was just for fun.
As an adult I did spar with my 6'-3" 225 pound brother to help him get ready for his fights at Key Area for the Tough Man fights. It's surprising how sore your nose gets even with head gear on.
 
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