A recent article I found on the Columbia News Service proves that the construction industry still doesn't get the idea that women NEED to be an increasing part of the skilled construction workforce.
A well written article, entitled "Hard-hatted women struggle to
land construction jobs" produced by Julia Marsh, chronicles the current-day struggles that women fact in this male-dominated industry. Read on, I think you'll be amazed at what a long way the industry still needs to go - and how the worker shortage in construction will continue until enlightened leadership steps forward.
Carole Jordan’s first day at
work was a frigid January morning in 2003. She rose early and arrived at the
job site by 6:30 a.m. After eight hours of standing on concrete, carrying
sheetrock up and down stairs, Jordan left the skeleton of the skyscraper she
was helping to build, arrived home by 5 p.m. and collapsed in bed by 6.
"After the first two weeks
I thought I was dying. Muscles I didn’t even know I had were aching," said
Jordan, a native New Yorker who is in her late 40s.
A little more than three years
later, the elements haven’t proved to be the hardest part of Jordan’s career as
a construction worker.
"It’s a man’s world,"
she said. "You work hard, come to the job every day and you’re often not
given a shot" at a promotion.
Jordan is among a small but
budding number of women entering what is officially called nontraditional
employment--a range of jobs that includes fishing and firefighting, the
toughest of which to break into is the construction industry. About 900,000
women across the United States work in some form of construction, be it brick
masonry or drywall installation, a rise of 18 percent over the last eight
years, according to the National Association for Women in Construction.
Though the Equal Employment
Opportunity Act was passed in the early 1970s, women account for only 9 percent
of construction workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which
recently published a survey showing that 88 percent of those women had
experienced sexual harassment on the job.
Jordan sat at a table with two
other women, Olga Aguilar, 29, and Donna Kielbasa, 28, at the New York
headquarters of a job-training nonprofit group called Nontraditional Employment
for Women, known as NEW. The three came through NEW’s construction school, a
six-week program in which they learned to read blueprints and handle skill
saws. Seventy percent of graduates are placed in jobs averaging $53,000 a year
in the construction, transportation and utilities industries.
The NEW model of supporting women
in blue-collar trades is also used by sister organizations like Tradeswomen
Inc. in California and the North Carolina group Charm and Hammer.
All three women had some history
in construction. Aguilar’s father renovated homes. Jordan’s childhood mentor was
a woodworker. Kielbasa built tree houses.
"I always liked to work
with my hands and wear my jeans," Aguilar said, slapping her
paint-speckled pants. "The better angle is that I make $16 an hour."
The lure for many women, said
NEW's director, Anne Rascon, is a desire for economic independence. Rascon, who
worked in a gold mine in California to pay for college, added, "Our
experience has been that the women spend their 20s cycling through dead-end,
low-wage jobs, and then a light goes on and they see us as an
alternative."
Women entering the trades are
ethnically diverse, typically about 31 years old and single heads of
households, according to statistics from advocacy groups.
Participants of Hard Hatted
Women, Cleveland’s version of NEW, which also began in the late 1970s, have an
average income of $15,000 before entering the training program. The pay they
receive in their first jobs is $11.50 an hour, which with overtime and union
benefits comes to an annual salary of just under $30,000.
"It’s a different kind of
lifestyle," Rascon said. "You have to like getting up early, working
in the hot and cold weather."
Though the women have to be
prepared for physical work, technology is such today that workers no longer
have to rely solely on brute strength.
The women also often have to go
it alone. Though the current job the NEW graduates are working on, a building
for City University of New York, has a relatively high 7-to-45 ratio of women
to men, in many cases there may be only one woman on a site.
"The women have it real
rough," said Kevin Simmons, shop steward for the CUNY site. "I tip my
hat to the ones that last."
Although the construction
industry has experienced a labor shortage in recent years, one of the greatest
challenges to bringing in women is simple recruitment.
"A lot of women don’t think
about it," said Nancy Gentile, former chairwoman of the Committee of Women
in the Trades, a division of the AFL-CIO. "They’re raised on Barbie dolls,
not tools."
Though trade unions are mandated
to train a certain percentage of women in construction, for Aguilar and Jordan
the unions still have an old boys club feeling.
"Have you been in a union
hall?" Aguilar asked. "It’s all white Irish men sitting in the directors'
chairs."
Jordan switched out of a
floor-covering apprenticeship, when, she said, she was twice overlooked by her
construction teacher and then by a union director to fill job openings.
Kielbasa and Jordan said the
harassment they had encountered included lurid sexual drawings at the site and
come-ons by coworkers. Sometimes the discrimination is less overt or emerges as
a lack of awareness about women’s needs in a male-dominated environment.
The three women said that at
their most recent job, the one portable toilet for seven women was being used
regularly by men. Also, without any running water to wash their hands, the
women found it unsanitary to switch from fitting insulation to using the
facilities during menstruation.
"Sometimes I feel like a stepchild
[and] I don’t want to be too much of a problem," Aguilar said. "But
are we a problem now that we need a place to wash our hands when we have a
‘woman’s issue?’"
But as Beth Young, director of
Tradeswomen Inc., points out, it’s less of an anomaly to see a woman with a
tool belt slung on her hip than it was 20 years ago when she worked as a crane
operator.
"When I started I was told
straight up, women don’t belong here," Young said. "[People thought]
I either wanted to be a man or I wanted to get a man. I just wanted to get a
paycheck like anyone else."
Harry J. Holzer
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