Women in the Building Trades

Being a woman in the building trades is not easy. This is the center of a very masculine work environment, with all that means. I’ve known women who tried to work in the trades and…..yeah, they have some rough stories. Meanwhile, the trades are having trouble actually recruiting new members. One could argue they could, you know, organize the vast numbers of construction crews working in housing, but that’s for another conversation. One reason though that the trades have come around on immigration–at least at the international level–is that they want unionized construction to continue and, as they will tell you, in a system set up to basically pass the job down to your sons, young people don’t really want to work construction. So someone has to do it.

Anyway, one of the supposed solutions for the trades is to recruit more women.

According to the report, in 2019, the percentage of women in apprenticeships run jointly with unions, which are multi-year training programs that pay people to learn a trade, was double that of programs that aren’t union-affiliated. 

But the wins are marginal when looking at the bigger picture of trades worker demographics.  In 2019, women made up only about 4.8 percent of participants in those apprenticeship programs, and more than half ended up dropping out. These dropout rates were even higher in nonunion programs. 

However, the report pointed to pilot programs around child care and maternity leave, most of which have been spearheaded by women in the industry, that aim to bring more women along as the demand for workers grows.  

One initiative mentioned in the study was created by Vicki O’Leary, director of diversity for Ironworkers International and chair of the NABTU Tradeswomen’s Committee. In 2017, for the first time, the union offered maternity leave for apprentices and journeywomen. 

“It was one of the best things we could have done at the time,” O’Leary said at the forum. “Women were hiding their pregnancies on their jobs and not being honest with their doctors about how hard and grueling the work actually was.”

So far 143 women ironworkers have used the policy, which offers ironworkers up to six months paid leave during the pregnancy and up to six to eight weeks paid leave postpartum.  Eighty-three percent of the workers returned to their jobs after they had their children. 

“That’s a great bang for our buck, quite frankly, because we’re spending up to $50,000 to get them through the apprenticeship,” O’Leary said. “To know that 83 percent come back is huge.”

Several other unions representing painters and carpenters, plumbers and sheet metal workers have since followed suit, developing their own maternity leave policies. 

Finding child care presents another barrier to caregivers in construction trades due to the cost and the often early hours of the job that fall outside of normal child care operations. 

A new nonprofit, TradesFutures, which is supported by NABTU and formed to raise money for workforce development, is currently running two pilot programs in New York and Wisconsin that issues vouchers to tradeswomen to pay for child care. It has also negotiated with one center in Wisconsin to offer early hours care. 

This is all good. I do think, however, that we have to have conversations about the conditions for women on the job on a daily basis if we are going to be serious about dealing with this issue. Because a lot of those women have to put up with a lot of sexist shit day after day after day. And they often aren’t going to put up with it for long. This story mentions it in one sentence. It is deserving of a lot more than that.