For people who have taken a few detours on their career trajectory, construction can be quite forgiving, said Cesar Diaz, legislative and political director at California’s State Building and Construction Trades Council, AFL-CIO.
And unions like it because it trains women with tools they need to be more qualified, Diaz said.
“What’s going to change the culture is having more women on the job site, first and foremost.”
Many pre-apprenticeship programs are co-ed, but often, the most effective ones are the ones that are exclusively for women, said Vasey of Tradeswomen Inc. To qualify, participants need a GED or high school diploma and proof that they’re eligible to work in the United States. A driver’s license is recommended.
At the Rising Sun Energy Center in Berkeley, instructor Ester Sandoval, a compact woman with a pixie haircut and a ready smile, paces the packed room. It’s an all-women’s class, where women take field trips to job sites, brush up on their math skills, learn how to apply for a job, and work out with a trainer so they’ll be strong enough to haul gear and lift pipes. They also learn how to cope in a male-dominated industry: how to deal with bullying and the art of the snappy comeback.
The students, a variety of ages and colors, hunker down, all furrowed focus.
There’s Annie Batten, 54 and a little shell-shocked after 23 years in prison. There’s Rachel Foreman, 29, a onetime art major who’s working as a house painter after crawling out of addiction and homelessness.
And there’s Timberlie Laramie, at 19 one of babies of the group, wiry and bouncing with energy. She’s still in foster care, and said she really wants to be a neurosurgeon. But she needs a job, like, now, and can’t afford to be in school for the next decade. She figures a career in the trades will keep her brain engaged — and pay the bills.
Sandoval is part cheerleader, part drill sergeant, pushing the women, urging them to speak up, “raise your voice through your core.”
“Fake it till you make it,” Sandoval tells them. “You’ve got to be comfortable talking to folks who don’t look like you.”
Folks who happen to be men.
’Cause those people who don’t look like you are the ones who have the jobs, she said.
Several other states, among them Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota and West Virginia, have used pre-apprenticeship programs to launch women into careers in construction, cobbling together funding from a variety of sources. Maine was one of the first states to tie public works funding with actively recruiting women to work in construction. In 1994, the Maine Department of Transportation used a $157 million, four-year bridge replacement project as an opportunity to create a more “women-friendly” work environment, funding mentorship programs for women interested in construction. It even offered on-site child care.
And in 2006, Illinois lawmakers earmarked $6.25 million to fund pre-apprenticeships for women and other disadvantaged groups as part of an infrastructure bill. But amid the state’s budget crisis, the money dried up in 2014.
But California’s plan is unusual in its size and scope. It employs a multi-curriculum approach, exposing students to a variety of trades, from metalworking to pipefitting to plumbing, and it requires that the programs work directly with local unions.
“This is part of a trend to make sure that as we invest in roads and transportation, that we’re also making an investment in building a skilled workforce — and that we’re using those public dollars to end those inequities that have shut women out,” said Sugerman, who got her start in the trades as an elevator constructor in 1980.
On a recent day in the backside of the San Francisco International Airport, Sara Glascock, 38, a sweet-faced woman with green pigtails, is giving a visitor a tour of her job site. Pointing, she shows where she stood on the scissors lift, many feet above ground, and strung wires that hang from the ceilings of the warehouse.
Both her parents are professionals with master’s degrees and dreams of sending their daughter to college at Mount Holyoke. “That was never going to happen,” Glascock said, laughing. School never stuck for her. She tested out of high school at 16, and tried on a lot of careers, including stints at Starbucks and coordinating architecture projects. But desk work constricted her. Working with her hands, in the great outdoors, seemed more fun.
After she completed two pre-apprenticeship programs, she found work as an electrician’s apprentice.
She gets up at 4 every morning, and is out the door before 5, trying to beat the traffic. She brushes her hair in the car, slaps on some makeup, scarfs down some breakfast, and is on the job by 7. She’s off by 3:30, and twice a week, she’s taking apprenticeship night classes as part of her training. She doesn’t get much sleep, and she’s constantly battling carpal tunnel from working with her hands. But she loves it.
There are eight women out of 50 students in her class, a big jump from previous classes. And along the way, she’s encountered sexism on the job, like the foreman who wouldn’t make eye contact with her, or the one who just assigned her cleanup and put the more skilled tasks to the male apprentices.
This is a typical tactic to hold women back on the job, said Olwyn Brown, a journeyman carpenter who has taught pre-apprentices in Oakland and San Francisco.
Because of that, “women aren’t trained as thoroughly,” Brown said. “You have to fight for it.”
Glascock lucked out with her current boss, who makes sure that men and women get an equal shot at learning their trade. But even if her next boss turns out to be less enlightened, Glascock said she’s going to keep showing up.
“There’s nothing in this world that’s going to prevent me from having a pension and getting $57 an hour,” she said.
Alvarez leads a life surrounded by men. She lives with her teenage son. She temps as a day laborer at construction sites, where she’s usually the only woman. Her pre-apprenticeship class is co-ed, but the men far outnumber the women.
Even the 12-step meeting she goes to here in San Jose is located in an all-male rehab facility. She goes because it meets on Saturday mornings, close to her all-day class with Working Partnerships USA, a community organization located here in the Silicon Valley, and it’s easy to pop out for a quick meeting.
But after one Saturday session, right after participants recited the Lord’s Prayer, a heavily tattooed man approached her. “My friend wants to meet you,” he insists, gesturing toward a small man standing nearby. Alvarez demurs. The tattooed man presses.
“Why would you do that?” she tells him. An AA meeting, she adds, is hardly the time or place to hit on her.
As she walks back to her class, Alvarez frets. She’s trying to stay focused, stay clean, make a real life for herself, but men don’t take her seriously, she says.
One man who does take her seriously is her instructor, José Mendez. Back in class, he shows her how to read blueprints and use her engineer’s ruler. She hunkers down with her calculator, looking pleased.
“I know it’s not normal for girls to be hitting up construction sites and wanting to work hard,” Alvarez said.
But ever since she worked in a hardware store as a teen, she’s been fascinated with the idea of building things. This is where she belongs.
“I want to run stuff,” she said. “This is my calling.”
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