Now, in the light of yet another death and the stagnation of more than thirty years, we asked ourselves whether the toll of our history outweighed the gains. Even though we’d all paid a price for our outspokenness, we wondered whether we’d been too silent. Or too positive. We pulled out our stories of the “welcome wagon” that greeted the first women who entered the industry that have never been officially acknowledged ––of rape, stabbing, torched car, and assault by falling object (sheet of plywood, sledgehammer) and mysteriously livened circuit.
Although the violence is now less, the supports are fewer. It’s been painful to continue to see so many qualified women enter apprenticeships in good faith, expecting long careers, only to find haphazard training and short-term employment. We began to talk more openly about the violence and fear we’d experienced, and its cost, not only to ourselves but our families and friends.
As apprentices, we’d kept our story upbeat: Nothing happened on job sites that we couldn’t handle. And later, we shared what we loved about the work: the way skilled trades combine aesthetics and functionality to produce a job that you can point out and even walk into; the camaraderie of great jobs where everyone makes money, has a good time, and crews work together like a jazz ensemble; the brilliant mentors who can see the end of the job from the start and teach you how to coordinate a project to bring it in safely, accurately, and on time without getting ulcers. We shared the rare success stories of tradeswomen whose well-rounded training led to steady employment with health benefits for their families and a pension to retire on.
If sometimes we were afraid for our lives, we kept that to ourselves.
An electrician and longtime national leader of the tradeswomen’s movement from the Bay Area suggested it’s time to acknowledge that we’ve lost, wrap the construction industry in yellow caution tape, and encourage women toward careers where they’d have a fairer chance to succeed. Where their intelligence, hard work, and resourcefulness might be rewarded. Where they’d be safer. We should face facts, she said, and spoke the F-word: failure.
I loved the electrical trade immediately. The way it combines physical, mental, and creative challenges fits me well. I started out as an apprentice in 1978, the same year President Carter issued two executive orders to open the construction industry to women. One order set goals for apprenticeship slots: roughly a quarter of each class since 1979 was to be women. The other set hiring goals for women on federally funded jobs, meant to increase each year as more and more women graduated from these training programs.
The policies laid out a path that, more than three decades later, should have led to women surpassing 25 percent of the construction workforce. That would have ended the designation of construction occupations as “non-traditional” for women. But federal enforcement lasted only a few years, never recovering from dismantlement under Reagan, and women’s workforce percentage in the trades stalled at roughly 2.5 percent, where it remains today. Even that figure is misleadingly high, since it measures those working in a given year, often as lower-wage apprentices, not those with careers. The systemic changes made in so many other historically male occupations have yet to occur in construction.
As my union steward at the Westin Hotel at Boston’s Copley Place told me in 1983, “Just because we have to take you in, doesn’t mean anything has to change because you’re here.” When I’m asked why I left working with tools in 1994, I answer honestly, but rarely the whole truth. I say what seems most comprehensible to people unfamiliar with the industry—and what won’t give ammunition to those opposed to unions. I say that I enjoyed the work but hadn’t expected the numbers of women not to change. I say that I got tired of being in the same compromised position of lose/lose choices: accepting discrimination and harassment, or speaking up on my own behalf and being labeled a troublemaker. I don’t go into the toll that it took on myself and others, for tradeswomen as individuals and organizations to daily take on the responsibilities that rightfully belonged to the contractors, unions, and government. And I don’t say that I stopped feeling safe on jobsites after a death threat for my activism. I had no idea how seriously to take the threat, but I knew that construction sites are dangerous places where “accidents happen.”
Susan Eisenberg (susaneisenberg.com) is author of We'll Call You If We Need You: Experiences of Women Working Construction, and creator of the mixed-media art installation On Equal Terms, exhibiting January 29-May 6, 2012, at MSU Museum of Art in East Lansing, Michigan. She's a resident scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, where she directs the On Equal Terms Project.
This is an excerpt from Susan Eisenberg's remarkable essay in the September issue. To read her entire article, and to read the whole issue, simply subscribe for $14.97 and you'll get a year's worth of The Progressive at 75% off! Just click here.