The year was 1984, and I was a 26-year-old at loose ends. I'd moved back to California after sowing my wild oats in Alaska, and was having lunch with an acquaintance who happened to be a mover and shaker with the local Laborers' International Union. The pressure was on to bring more women into the building trades, and he didn't need to do much arm-twisting to get me to sign up. While my father was alive, he'd been a proud member of Operating Engineers Local 3, so I was familiar with construction work, and the pay was $16 a hour - much more than I was making picking up shifts as a bartender at the local watering hole. Beyond that, I was convinced that I'd be fighting feminism on the front lines - something I'd previously done through political activism.
It was a fight - one that I battled for three years. There was the understandable resentment from the guys inching close to retirement, for whom the "light" job of traffic control (being a flagger) was usually reserved. Foremen and superintendents who didn't know what to do with women stuck flags in our hands and told us to keep the traffic at bay, forcing the older guys to spend another day grinding their already broken-down bodies. There was the veiled hostility from those who pretended I wasn't there and the overt hostility from those members of other building trades who would stand on the sidelines and harass me while I wrestled a piece of compacting equipment into submission. Eventually, there was the grudging respect of crew members, borne out of spending too many sweltering days together, virtually ankle deep in hot asphalt.
Like many construction jobs, mine rode the roller coaster of good times and bad. The overtime and $1,000 a week paychecks alternated with weeks where I only had a day or two of work and the rainy season where I had no work at all. I ultimately moved back into political activism, never experiencing the arc that a lifetime of construction work brings.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look as though many of my "sisters" are following a path into the building trades, either. The U.S. Department of Labor Women's Bureau still lists many construction jobs as "nontraditional occupations for women," and the numbers bear out that assessment. As of 2003 (the latest year for which statistics are available), women comprised only three percent of the population of construction laborers, slightly over one percent of operating engineers, and less than one percent of masons.
It's difficult to know if women today are facing the same obstacles that existed when I worked in construction over two decades ago, or if other factors come into play. Organizations like the nonprofit Women in the Building Trades are trying to break through the concrete ceiling by offering women introductory classes, pre-apprenticeships, and ongoing support for entering the building trades, but it appears as though progress is slow.
It's a shame that the building trades haven't embraced women, and that women are, to a large extent, still fighting it out on the front lines. Construction jobs - particularly those that are unionized - are exactly what many women need in order to support their families and move out of the category of "working poor."
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