<Begin Segment 6>

HM: So Mike's thing about what are you gonna do about it, well, I was getting together with Tom maybe twice a week and we used to go over some of these things. And we thought maybe we should sue the Boeing Company as a class action suit. The appointed EEO person in our local area was a African American woman, and she took a completely different approach to the whole structure of our complaint than we anticipated. She came back and we had a meeting with her. And she said to us that African Americans in the Seattle area by population is about -- at that time it was about two point six percent of the entire population under the Standard Metropolitan Area Statistics. And the fact that they had less than one percent of blacks in the engineering workforce represented a total imbalance of blacks. And, "You Asians represent a total of six percent of all ethnic groups in the Seattle area, and you guys now have eleven percent of the engineering workforce. You guys are five percent over your limit." And she was a quota person. And she liked to tell us quota numbers. So she said, "Well, we need to triple the black engineering workforce, and we need to cut you guys down to half." And that was her idea, and this quota thing was really strong in that time period. And so she took it upon herself to say to us, "If you guys don't want to get cut in half in the workforce, you better play ball with me because I'm the EEO person here. I'm the one that's gonna call the shots."

TI: I'm sorry, the EEO person was an internal Boeing person or --

HM: No, no, this was...

TI: This was a government --

HM: This was a federal government...

TI: Okay.

HM: And she was really into the quota numbers. And we didn't know what to think after she made that presentation. I thought man, this person is crazy. She's nuts. But on the other hand, because the Department of Labor was using some of these criteria as a method of determining the number of people in different fields, I figure well, Tom, what are you gonna do about it? I became like Mike Nakata to Tom Koizumi. During this time period I was into various activities at Boeing and I was called into a human resources meeting one day and they told me flat out that they've been monitoring some of my activities and they don't like what I'm doing. I'm not spending enough time on Boeing work, I'm spending a lot of time doing other things. And I was. I was working with the Seattle Professional Engineering Association, and I was trying to get the numbers through their system because they had all this data of all the engineering workforce, number of years in grade, number of years since college, number of years of college, and all this kind of stuff, standard salaries. And I was asking them to run compilations of non-Caucasian data for us. And at that time the guy that was the director of SPEEA worked with Nihonjins quite a few times, and he thought it was an interesting project so he ran a whole bunch of data for us. But because it was SPEEA data, this EEO person wouldn't recognize it. She would only recognize the part that said that black African Americans... all of us in Boeing were classifying in labor code numbers. And if we were Asians they put us in one category, if we're blacks, or like Hispanics, they put us in a different category. These were all classified and you had to break through their coding system in order to establish what these breakdowns were. So we had a whole run made specifically for our purposes, and he was able to get the information out for us. So we used that as a baseline for our conversation with the EEO person.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.