On the front lines: while policy makers debate affirmative action, many black business owners fear the real-life cost of eliminating such programs.

While policy makers debate affirmative action, many black business owners fear the real-life costs of eliminating such programs

GROWING UP IN A POVERTY-RIDDEN, racially segregated community in Elton, La., Barry Baszile didn't give much thought to an equal playing field. Nor did the 58-year-old entrepreneur imagine that he would one day own a business that would enable him to raise his family in an affluent suburb of Los Angeles, where homes with commanding views of the Pacific Ocean dominate the landscape.

Baszile credits affirmative action with providing the opportunities that enabled him to build an $18 million metals supply and distribution business and realize his dream of economic empowerment.

Affirmative action opened doors previously closed to minorities and women, according to Baszile. "Without affirmative-action programs to give us the opportunity to compete, Baszile Metals Service wouldn't exist today... I would not have had the opportunity to get into the aluminum industry without efforts to hire blacks brought on by the pressures of the civil rights movement."

Baszile Metals Service (BMS) is the nation's only black-owned distributor of aluminum for the major aluminum producing companies, including Alcoa, Reynolds, Kaiser, Alcan and Alumax. BMS's customer base spans the aerospace, defense and transportation industries,

The success of BMS enabled Barry Baszile to provide his family with a way of life that was unknown to him as a child. For example, his two daughters, Natalie and Jennifer, as he notes, had access to a good public school education, "because of the income level that I could achieve as a business owner." Baszile's eldest daughter, Natalie, joined her father's company after completing undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of California. Some day she may take over the reins at BMS.

The threatened elimination of state-sponsored affirmative-action programs in California probably wouldn't kill BMS, but it would make it extremely difficult for other minority business owners to follow in Baszile's footsteps. It may also make it more difficult for Baszile's children, and countless other African Americans of their generation, to provide for their children in the same way that they were provided for.

According to the Census Bureaul California has more black-owned businesses than any other state. In 1987, the last year for which statistics a-re available, black-owned businesses in California had gross receipts of $2.4 billion. (There are 12 California companies on BE's 1995 INDUSTRIAL/SERVICE 100 list.

Baszile is closely watching as this conflict unfolds. BMS, which had sales of $18 million in 1994 and 28 employees in three locations, does most of its business as a subcontractor. However, the company is now courting the federal marketplace directly, bidding against Kaiser, Alcoa and Reynolds for Defense Department contracts.

BIRTH OF A SALESMAN 

Baszile learned sales and the ways of corporate America in the food industry. While working in Los Angeles as a parole officer in 1961, he heard that Hunt-Wesson Foods was looking for a black salesman. "Pressure on white companies to hire blacks made me a salesman," Baszile recalls. Seven years later, he was offered a sales job by Kaiser Aluminum.

After becoming one of Kaiser's top salesmen, Baszile developed the desire to "find something I could sell for myself." After owning three successful retail operations, he started BMS in 1975. "Everything that we have done to open doors and to compete to sell our products, we have done as a viable company,' Baszile says. "But it would be naive and arrogant to say that opportunities come to us because I am a good salesman. Baszile Metals gets a chance to compete because of affirmative-action programs and policies."

ACCESS TO THE ECONOMIC MAINSTREAM

As a child growing up in suburban Denver, Audrey Rice Oliver was not aware of gender or race obstacles. "The values instilled by my grandparents and parents were that we were part of this society... That we could do anything, but that we would have to work hard." Her father worked on the railroad, her mother earned money as a domestic, and eventually they owned a restaurant.

In high school, Oliver recalls, counselors encouraged the black girls to be telephone operators, file clerks or domestics, as her mother had been. "But my mother wouldn't settle for mediocrity. She told me, `Set your sights on being the president of Southwestern Bell, not the switchboard operator,'" Oliver remembers.

The problem was that the doors to corporations like Southwestern Bell were not open to African Americans. But that began to change following passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The affirmative-action laws, according to Oliver, forced companies to "look at what was out there. They had to ask, Why not give a chance to that woman in the mail room who has excelled? Why not give a chance to those who have been ignored?'

Affirmative-action programs are far from perfect, but business owners like Oliver argue that they're all that African American business owners have in order to gain access to the economic mainstream.

Oliver is president and CEO of Integrated Business Solutions Inc., a six-year-old computer systems company based in San Ramon, about an hour's drive east of San Francisco. "Without affirmative action, the doors would just not be open to us," Oliver, 53, says of her $10 million company. Integrated provides personal computer-based information systems services to public agencies and larger corporations. The company also provides programmers and analysts to design custom solutions for business technology needs, in addition to reselling hardware and software.

Integrated counts among its customers Fortune 500 companies, the federal government, state, city and county agencies, and some of California's largest public utilities. Oliver attributes her company's first contracts to sheer perseverance and knowledge of how the state's minority and women business enterprise (MWBE) programs worked. Still, Oliver recalls, the obstacles were tremendous. "When I hear people talk about handouts, I shudder."

Oliver's previous MWBE experience--from 1977 until the founding of Integrated in 1989--was developing the MWBE program for Denver's regional transportation district.

Even with such measures, Oliver says, minority business participation goals are rarely met. One frequent complaint about California's program is that it's ineffective. It is neither a set-aside, which delivers dollars directly to minority- and women-owned businesses, or a preference, which gives an advantage to bidders who use minority- and women-owned firms. Bidders need only show that they've made a "good faith effort" to meet the state's participation goals.

"As a business owner, I want the opportunity to deliver a quality product. We are very good at what we do," Oliver says. "But prospective customers only look at us initially because they have to, and they have to because of affirmative action... Affirmative-action programs do not hurt anyone. What hurts is greed. I wish the day would come when we did not need the programs, but that day is not here."

BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS

Eugene Bramlett, the 61-year-old founder and CEO of Aire Sheet Metal, built a $10 million company in an industry not generally receptive to minorities or women. Bramlett, who started in the union-dominated sheet metal trade in 1959, formed Aire Sheet Metal in 1971, "with the idea of doing any job we could get," says his son, Bobby Bramlett. Aire Sheet Metal employs about 50 people throughout the year, with more than 75 employees on the payroll at peak construction times.

The younger Bramlett, 39, who serves as the company's president, credits his father with building relationships with some of the Bay area's largest and best known construction and management firms, "so that performance, not race, is the first consideration."

But Aire Sheet Metal's minority status has played an important role in getting contracts. While less than 10% of the company's revenues come directly from state contracts, Aire Sheet Metal regularly subcontracts to prime contractors on projects where minority goals apply.

Affirmative action creates opportunities with contractors who otherwise wouldn't know us, or give us a chance," Bobby Bramlett says. "The work comes through relationships, but that first opportunity to build a relationship comes from affirmative action."

PULLING BACK

BMS's Baszile says he continually has to fight to prove his company has a rightful place in the metals distribution business. "There has been resistance from the outset, and there is resistance today," he says, noting that talk on a national level about dismantling affirmative action has spawned retrenchment from minority business goals by prime contractors as well as by the state agencies that administer affirmative-action programs.

While the dismantling of California's affirmative-action laws wouldn't affect federal affirmative-action programs or court-mandated ones, the current political climate indicates that these programs may be in jeopardy as well. "Without government-mandated programs, the private sector will quickly back off from their own programs," Baszile predicts. "Without the laws on our side, the opportunities that we have known over the last 20 years, and that are still available to us, would not be there."

Bobby Bramlett says societal attitudes toward black businesspeople were, at one time, more receptive. "The project owners and general contractors wanted to see [my father] Gene Bramlett succeed and gave him the opportunity to improve as a businessman." Now, he believes, such attitudes have changed. "I think this [attempts to eliminate affirmative action] is the first major wakeup call. Unless we empower ourselves as business owners, we will continually be burdened with the decisions of others as to how, and to what degree, they will empower us. We will be condemned to sit on the sidelines while someone else decides whether we will have a little, or nothing."