Black workers say racial discrimination cost them their jobs on Sound Transit's $280-million Beacon Hill light-rail tunnel project. The project's general contractor, Japan-based Obayashi Corp., gave them ill-fitting equipment and incomplete job instruction, say black workers, making them feel unsafe and unwelcome.

"Obayashi's got people up there who are on a power trip or something," says Thurman Young, a black miner who left the job after just one day. "At first I thought it was me, but now I hear three, four, five brothers say the same thing."

Young adds, "They're racist up there. They don't like blacks."

The allegations surfaced a week after African-American demonstrators protested a bid process they say excludes black-owned firms. Sound Transit Chief Executive Officer Joni Earl responded to those complaints with a letter explaining that though state law bars the agency from requiring its contractors to hire minority workers and contract minority-owned firms, Sound Transit still established "goals" for those contractors—and thus far the contractors have met the agency's goals for minority involvement.

"We do take their concerns seriously and we'll continue to try to address them," says Geoff Patrick, a Sound Transit spokesman. He points out that minorities have performed approximately 25 percent of the work on the whole project, and that black workers' share is 11 percent.

But those figures don't speak to the job conditions—and the firsthand reports from black workers are disturbing. Discrimination claims seem particularly common among workers on the Beacon Hill tunnel's graveyard shift, which starts at 11:00 p.m. and ends at 7:00 a.m.

Of course, miners don't mind irregular hours, and Lafect Campbell was so thrilled with the opportunity he leased an apartment close to the job site. Campbell, who was born in Panama but has the black skin of his Jamaican parents, says that he was given boots that were two sizes too big and a respirator that didn't fit. Along the dark, treacherous terrain of a mine, snug-fitting boots are essential; and the heavy dust makes a respirator necessary for safe breathing.

There were less subtle hints that Campbell wasn't among friends. In the dry room, where the miners shower and change clothes, Campbell says someone had carved the words "Kill Niggers" into the floor. After a job-related injury led to a doctor's orders not to perform repetitive motion, Campbell was assigned jobs that required exactly that: sweeping, picking up, and then finally cleaning toilets.

After two months, Campbell—who has 14 years construction experience—had had enough. In his letter of resignation Campbell told Obayashi, "I don't believe that I can continue to work in a job where my physical and mental health are compromised every day by an environment that is racist and discriminatory."

Last Friday morning Campbell invited me to follow him as he approached miners with whom he used to work, just as they were leaving their graveyard shift. The first black worker Campbell approached wouldn't stop to talk. "I'm staying out of politics," said the miner. "I just try to take care of myself."

Another worker, of mixed race, told him almost the same thing. "The amount of fear the blacks have is more than any one should have," raged Campbell.

But his colleagues who are no longer employed by Obayashi speak more freely. Like Campbell, Thurman Young was excited about a $26/hour job that dovetailed with his past experience laying three miles of railroad tunnel.

But Young faced the same problems as Campbell. "They gave me boots that were too big, a respirator that didn't fit," he says.

As an experienced miner, Young was used to being greeted with a description of his duties. That never came. "Nobody wanted to tell me what was going on," says Young. He tried to keep busy but that wasn't enough to impress his supervisor. Young remembers the man approaching him and saying, "This isn't working out for you, is it?"

"I said, 'I'm trying to catch on,'" says Young, who also repeatedly asked for directions. But after hearing the same thing—"this isn't working out for you"—a few more times, he took the hint, and quit.

Miners rely on a strong sense of camaraderie with their fellow miners—and for Young it was lacking. "I'm not going to be in that tunnel 180 feet deep, down there with a bunch of white people and they don't like me," he says. "What if something happens? Accidents happen."

Like Young, Cornell Tunney had helped dig several tunnels—one along I-90, another in Mount Baker—so he felt qualified to dig the Beacon Hill tunnel. But despite 22 years of mining experience, Tunney was placed on a menial job, picking up refuse on the site. "I did my work fast, so fast that I needed more things to do," says Tunney. But like Young, he couldn't get new assignments from his supervisors, or even guidance from other miners. "Guys were walking around me like I was invisible," says Tunney.

On his second day, a boss finally talked to him: "He busts through the door and says, 'Here's your paycheck. It isn't going to work out.'" After he got back to the union hall, Tunney learned that Obayashi had dismissed him for being "argumentative."

Says Tunney: "I think it was discrimination."

Another black miner, Donald Mills, brought his gripe directly to Sound Transit and to Obayashi's U.S. headquarters in San Francisco. In a letter sent to both, Mills mentions the same problems with receiving tools, the same harassment from supervisors, and blames the problems on "racism" and "good-old-boyism." (Mills refused to comment for this story, citing legal concerns.)

Obayashi's project director, Paul Zick, says the company is actively investigating claims of discrimination by black workers. Every worker signs a form that says his equipment is satisfactory, says Zick, and each signs off on his orientation, where job tasks are defined.

Filing a grievance with the union, Local 440 in this case, is the best method for working out disagreements, says Zick. "If (workers) have a concern, we'd like them to write it down so we know what we're looking for, and we can talk to the people and determine what happened."

Sound Transit is also investigating the claims.