Planting in the Ghettos

Executive View/Marshall Loeb

A prominent American revolutionary wears a frayed blue necktie, likes to cuss and preaches a shake-'em-up gospel. "Too many big businessmen are just sitting on their butts!" he thunders. And: ''We talk a lot about human rights, but I don't know of any human right that is more important than a job."

The speaker is William Norris, a Nebraska farmer's son who learned about computers when he was a World War II Navy cryptographer (he helped to break the German code), then sold stock at $1 a share to start Control Data in Minneapolis in 1957. Last year the company had sales of $2.3 billion, and its profits rose by 42%. But Chairman Norris at 66 is doing much more than adding to his millions. While other people merely fret and fuss about hard-core unemployment, this plain-talking engineer is taking long risks to create jobs for people who had felt left behind and shut out by the system.

So far, 1 ,000 people-- mostly unskilled and black-- have found work in plants that Control Data has opened in the ghettos of Minneapolis, St. Paul and Washington, D.C. The number will rise to 1 ,400 next January when Norris opens a fourth plant in a renewal area of St. Paul. Other business chiefs have tried to build in the ghetto, only to fail. Norris says he knows why: "They figured it was just philanthropy. They sent in their money, but not their smarts or their guts."

When Control Data built its first inner-city plant in Minneapolis in 1968. Norris laid down three rules: "Make the plant new and modern. Make it profitable. Make us dependent on it, so that we will have to make it work." The plant accordingly was designed to build intricate components.

Norris also sought out local black leaders and followed their street-smart advice: Build a day care center for working mothers. Offer to put them on flexible hours, say, 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., or 1 to 5 p.m. Don't ask if the applicant has been arrested. Yes, many have been busted, but what difference does that make? Don't ask for personal references. Should the ghetto resident get the corner bookie to vouch that he pays his bills?

At first, absenteeism and quitting were problems. But Norris and his executives held on, training, prodding, sometimes bailing workers out of jail after long weekends. Today, the average worker in the first plant has held his job for five years, building skills and climbing up. The story is much the same at Norris' other inner-city factories. Says he: "Businessmen come to visit those plants, and they ask, ' Jeez, don't you have terrible trouble with people breaking your windows and smearing your walls?' The answer is no-- because if somebody gets a notion to do that, they had better watch out. People in the neighborhood protect the plant. It's a source of pride as well as jobs. They feel it is theirs. "

Ultimately, Norris figures, America's cities will be rebuilt by big consortiums of private business. The Government will help guarantee bank loans and perhaps kick in some grants; churches and universities will put in investment funds. Construction companies will erect buildings; transport companies will bid for mass transit; energy, environmental control and waste recycling firms will all have roles, and much of the work will be parceled out to small business. The object is not only to raze and remake scabrous neighborhoods, but also to create private jobs, help small entrepreneurs and, not incidentally, to make money.

Control Data is studying cities in which to start, and Norris is talking with some mayors, seeking support. "Dammit," he snorts, "rebuilding the cities will be one of the great growth industries of the future. It will replace the auto as the big provider of jobs-- if we Americans can ever get ourselves organized."

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