158 Negro Migration 



capacity of unskilled laborers, while others employ as many 

 in skilled trades as apply qualified for the job, but state that 

 the large majority are not qualified for skilled positions. 

 Still others hold that there is no job in their shop which 

 Negroes cannot fill after a reasonable apprenticeship. 



Since management is so pleased to have the Negro added 

 to the labor supply, when Negroes are barred from jobs for 

 which they are fitted it is almost always through the preju- 

 dice of unions, foremen, or groups of employees who have 

 been with the company for a long time. In the present 

 active labor market, however, it seems that most colored 

 men are eventually able to find a place in some open shop 

 where they can employ all the skill that they possess. About 

 10 per cent are now in semi-skilled jobs, such as furnace 

 repair masons and tenders of almost automatic machinery. 

 A bare five per cent are found in the skilled positions, such 

 as truck drivers, stationary and hoisting engineers, foundry 

 moulders, rolling mill miters and rollers, butchers, skilled 

 auto body builders and heat finishers, and foremen. There 

 is one Negro who has risen to the position of chief chemist 

 of a large manufacturing plant and several who are heads 

 of large trucking departments. 



There are numbers of skilled building tradesmen, car- 

 penters, painters, plasterers, and plumbers, who come up 

 from the South but are unable to ply their trade because of 

 the stronger hold of the unions in these fields. Such men 

 usually accept work as semi-skilled or unskilled laborers 

 in industrial plants. 



Because progress in skilled occupations has been made 

 almost entirely outside the unions, in open shops, labor 

 leaders often accuse the Negro of favoring scab labor. In 

 fact several plants used large numbers of Negroes during 

 the recent steel strike. This, however, is not always due to 

 a simple tendency to act as strike-breakers. 



In the first place, the colored laborer is more or less justi- 



