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Kimberly Brinkman (third from right) rallies with other
Minnesota tradeswomen. Brinkman said that in roughly
two decades in the
trades she has never worked a job start to finish. Credit: Kimberly
Brinkman
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The Hechinger Report
The jobs where sexual harassment and discrimination never stopped
Apprenticeships are spreading as a debt-free path to the middle class.
But in these training programs, sexual harassment and discrimination
are endemic. Now women are pushing for change
By Caroline Preston
January 31, 2021
SEATTLE — The job on the light rail platform was to be one of her last
as an apprentice sheet metal worker, and Vanessa Carman was relieved.
She was one year shy of achieving journeywoman status and the higher
pay and better treatment it typically afforded — at least to men, who
account for virtually all her coworkers.
Carman, who is a muscular 5’8’’ with raven hair, had endured a litany
of injustices since entering construction. On her first job as an
apprentice, in 2008, men called her “the pookie princess” after the
sealant she used to close ducts that snaked along the ceilings of the
tract homes where she worked south of Seattle. Sometimes, her foreman
had her stand for hours next to his ladder, handing him screws. On the
next job, a 30-story condo tower in nearby Bellevue, her male coworkers
sliced off the padlocks and vandalized the site’s women-only
port-a-potty. Men hit on her, yelled at her, groped her and pushed
their groins against her while ascending in aerial platforms known as
scissor lifts. She white-knuckled her way through the work, hoping
that, as a journeywoman, things would get easier.
Then came the job on the light rail platform at the University of
Washington. It was 2012, and construction work had yet to rebound from
the recession. Carman had been unemployed for months. The project was
to install decorative panels on the new rail platform. The panels,
designed in an architect’s shop, featured blue squiggles inspired by
the diverse geology of the area. The men were in charge of the
installation, though; Carman was assigned the low-skill task of sanding
panels that would cover the sides of the escalator.
On the job, Carman struck up a friendship with a male coworker. They
chatted about the safe topics she stuck to at work: children, cooking,
pets. She bought the coworker a birthday present, a gift card to a
coffee shop, and gave him the bike carrier her sons’ bicycles had
outgrown. Most afternoons when the work day ended, they rode together
on the shuttle back from the job site to the parking lot and caught up
about their work days. But one afternoon, Carman missed the shuttle, so
she walked the mile or so instead, past the tall steel-and-glass
buildings on the University of Washington campus. Midway there, she
heard a bicycle screech to a stop, and felt someone grab her buttocks
from behind. It was the coworker she’d thought of as a friend. He
peddled away just as she realized what had happened.
The journeymen had told her stories of women who complained about dirty
jokes, or who flirted too much — or not enough. She worried what it
would mean to be the woman her male coworkers told other females not to
become. But she was livid. The next day she told a coworker what had
happened. He informed a supervisor. Soon, one of company’s owners
showed up on the job site, she said, ordering Carman and her colleague
to huddle together. “I don’t want to have to fire either of you,” she
recalls him saying. “Sort it out.” Carman dropped her head and closed
her eyes as they started to fill with tears. “Suddenly you’re
threatening me with being fired?” she thought, but she was too
intimidated to speak.
The next day, a Friday, much of the crew was home after working a
four-day week; the journeyman who’d groped her was the acting foreman.
Carman showed up for work in pelting rain. As she waited for the
elevator to carry her underground — man lifts, the elevators are called
— her coworker approached. “There’s no work for you,” she recalls him
saying. “Go home.” It was barely 7 a.m., and rain was seeping into her
insulated overalls below her jacket. She drove home and called the
company headquarters in another city. The owner apologized, she
recalls, and promised to pay her for that day and take action. But on
Monday, her coworker was still there.
He was there the next day, and the next. One afternoon that week,
Carman returned from lunch in the job trailer to find her tool bag
covered in spit. A day or two later, she found the bag emptied and the
tools tossed around the job site. She spoke with a friend in her union,
who told her she could file a complaint, but that both she and her male
coworker would be represented by the union and word of what had
happened would spread. By this time, she had just one year left on her
apprenticeship before completing it and journeying out. She felt she
had two choices: stay quiet or end her career. (An official with the
company, asked to comment on Carman’s experience, said he disagreed
with her description of the facts but declined to provide specifics.
“We welcome and encourage women to enter the trade, and do everything
we can to ensure they are treated equally and with the utmost respect,”
he wrote in an email.)
“When you’re an apprentice, you don’t want to rock the boat,” Carman,
43, told me the first time we spoke. “You don’t say things when someone
grabs your butt, you don’t say things when someone spits on your tools,
you don’t say things.”
Apprenticeships have been around nearly as long as work itself, but in
recent years policy makers on both sides of the aisle have begun to
embrace them as an alternative to four-year college. Tom Perez, when he
was labor secretary under former President Barack Obama, called them
“the other college — without the debt,” and the administration of
former President Donald Trump pushed apprenticeships too. Labor force
experts who are calling for a massive retraining of workers displaced
by the coronavirus also point to apprenticeships as one solution. The
programs, which are often run in partnerships between unions and
contractors, give workers free classroom training and on-the-job
instruction while they work for gradually increasing wages. But
apprenticeships in fields that have been typically perceived as women’s
work, such as early childhood education, pay very little. It’s only in
male-dominated fields like construction that apprenticeships have
historically offered a true portal to the middle class. And for women,
these training programs are often hostile, even dangerous, environments.
Men, who make up more than 97 percent of the employees in construction
and nearly all of its leadership, have tended to view females entering
the trades as intruders, routinely denying them equal opportunities for
training and work. “Every woman has faced discrimination; if she hasn’t
yet, she will,” Meg Vasey, a former electrician who now runs
Tradeswomen Inc., an Oakland, California, nonprofit, told me. Vasey
entered the trades in the late 1970s, after Title VII of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 outlawed workplace sex discrimination and around the
time that the Department of Labor put in place regulations banning sex
discrimination in apprenticeships and requiring sponsors of those
programs to recruit more women. Today, more than 40 years later, the
number of women apprentices remains roughly the same as it was then, 3
percent. Women are essentially being pushed from one of the clearest
pathways to the middle class.
“It’s a sad commentary, to be honest,” said Patricia Shiu, who led the
Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs
under Obama. “During my tenure at OFCCP, we were largely unsuccessful
in ensuring that more women and people of color had jobs in the
construction industry.” She added, “You can prescribe until you are
blue in the face, but unless you have the leadership and the culture
and the commitment from the top to really put life into equal
opportunity goals, they won’t survive.”
In my interviews with more than 40 tradeswomen, most told me they had
been mistreated because of their sex. I heard stories of men grabbing
and groping women with impunity, of women being told to go home and
work in the kitchen, of being given the most dangerous jobs and the
jobs that kept them from learning valuable skills necessary for their
careers. The uniformity of some of the stories of abuse was striking:
Women who did speak up said they’d had their tools stolen or destroyed,
that they been denied dispatches to jobs by their union, or that they’d
been blackballed across their trade. Women told stories of being tied
to a chair with shrink wrap and of being left high in the air on
scissor lifts. And yet, many of these women loved their jobs — not just
the pensions, health care and pay, which was enough to raise a family
and take vacations and retire — but the physical labor and skill
involved.
When the #MeToo movement erupted in 2017, toppling prominent men in
Hollywood, journalism and academia, tradeswomen wondered if it would
prompt changes within their industry. The TIME’s Up Legal Defense Fund,
which was started by women in the entertainment business, devoted some
of its resources to defending females from harassment in blue-collar
workplaces. In California, Vasey used the momentum of #MeToo to push
successfully for legislation encouraging contractors and apprenticeship
programs to recruit women and establish worksite cultures to protect
them. “But I don’t think there’s a voice,” she told me. “I still don’t
think the voices that represent women in the blue-collar trades have
come.” Many of the younger tradeswomen I spoke with felt the movement
had glanced over their industry, despite the brazenness of the abuses.
“I really don’t think it’s had an impact,” Carman told me the first
time we met. And yet, with few allies outside of the industry, and
little attention to their cause, women within construction have started
to speak out and fight for change.
Carman grew up in Bellevue, just east of Seattle, the only girl in a
family of four children. Her maternal grandfather, who had migrated
from Costa Rica on a tuna boat at 16, worked as a fishermen’s engineer
on ships that sailed to Alaska and back. Carman’s father followed him
into the trades, getting a job as a building operating engineer at the
Seattle Center, the city’s downtown entertainment complex. But the
women in Carman’s family tended to stay home, and it wasn’t until her
20s that she began to consider a construction career.
Carman and her three siblings were cast in roles only partially of
their own making. Joe was the charismatic troublemaker, who briefly
dropped out of high school to chase a girl, then ran for class
president on a platform of throwing large parties and won. Mike, who
was closest in age to Carman, was the peacemaker. Damien was the baby,
whom the family had adopted after his biological father abandoned him.
Carman was the girl. When she was young, her father insisted she wear
dresses, but after school she’d pull on corduroy pants underneath to
play outside with her brothers. In high school, she, Joe and Mike
begged their parents for a gym membership, and they spent most of their
weekends lifting weights, running on the treadmill and playing
pickleball. By her mid-teens, Carman could bench press 175 pounds.
After high school, she found work as a cashier and barista, and later,
helping with the books for a wholesale florist. In that job, she spent
all day in front of a computer in the basement of a brick warehouse
full of flowers she never got to see. One day, her brother Mike, who’d
started working in non-union positions in heating and cooling, asked
his sister to help him repair the furnace in their uncle’s house in
nearby Snohomish. Crouched in the basement, watching her brother bend
sheet metal into a new duct for the furnace, Carman knew she’d prefer
this physical work to a career behind a desk.
Carman began applying to jobs in which she could use her hands — dozens
of positions, in plumbing, sheet metal, and one for a dog fence
company. But no one called her back. It wasn’t until she changed the
name on her resume from “Vanessa” to “Van” that she started receiving
calls. Once business owners learned she was female, however, their
interest in hiring her evaporated. They didn’t bother to hide their
sexism, barking questions about whether she could lift heavy pipes and
tolerate the itchiness of insulation. Around that time, Carman applied
to a local union, hoping to join an apprenticeship program, but she was
told there wasn’t any work for her.
For a time, she picked up non-union work, doing sheet metal in
residences. Carman liked the work, helping to fix the gas piping in
Seattle mansions, where she glimpsed private bowling alleys, wine
cellars and panic rooms. But by this time, she was raising three sons
on her own. She knew a union apprenticeship would offer free education
and better health insurance. Carman visited the local sheet metal
union, where she took a 20-minute math test and had a brief
conversation with an apprenticeship coordinator. It was early 2008, and
there was a building boom; the union was taking just about everyone,
including women. “I don’t think it was necessarily that they wanted
me,” Carman told me. “They wanted a human, and I was at their door.” At
orientation, she squeezed into a large conference room, in a building
in Kirkland, Washington, with 70s-style furniture and dusty cabinets
against the walls. She was one of just six or so women in a crowd of
about 100.
A few years earlier, Carman had driven to a commercial strip in the
Seattle neighborhood of Ballard and asked for a tattoo of an octopus on
her left arm. She didn’t know exactly why she’d always loved octopuses,
but it had something to do with their multiple means of thwarting
attack, by escaping through tiny spaces, using their suckers to lift
thousands of pounds or inking predators. The tattoo had become
something of a totem, as she realized how routinely she, like the
octopus, would have to protect herself. On the job, she’d started
carrying notebooks to record the names of tools male coworkers asked
her to fetch. Now, while waiting for man lifts and scissor lifts, she
began to record what her male coworkers said and did to her. There was
no one to whom she might report these things, and no one to listen if
she did. But writing them down made her feel a little less powerless.
Since entering construction, she had felt like everyone wanted her to
quit. One supervisor had her sweep all day and pick up garbage, which
kept her from learning the skills she needed to advance her career.
Another laid her off the first chance he could. But most of that
disrespect felt like the inevitable price of working surrounded by men.
The abuse on the light rail platform by the co-worker whom she’d
trusted stung more. “There are bullies everywhere,” she said. “But it
was the fact that he did that and it lasted so long, and nobody did
anything. There were job sites they could have moved him to.” It was
always the woman, never the man, who was moved to a different job site
or laid off, she observed. “That doesn’t solve anything,” she said.
If she could, Carman would have quit the assignment. But apprentices
can’t quit or transfer assignments, lest they risk being kicked out of
the program. Plus, she needed the money, which had risen to roughly $30
an hour. By that point, her sons’ father had moved out of their house
in Renton, Washington, leaving her to cover the mortgage and raise her
three boys. Many mornings, she was up before her alarm, the worries in
her head running in loops. She’d drop the boys at her parents’ house
before dawn, carrying them inside if they’d fallen back to sleep, even
though her oldest, Jonah, was close to 70 pounds. Then she’d go to
work, where the man who’d groped her worked near her every day. One day
she noticed red bumps spreading across her hands and dotting her face.
A doctor she visited blamed them on stress.
Finally, many months later, Carman was called into the job trailer. She
tried to hide her relief when a supervisor told her the work was
slowing down and she’d be the first one laid off. Driving home that
day, she felt her life was rearranging itself again in the right ways,
despite the injustice of her layoff. She called a sheet metal company
she’d worked for previously and was given a position in the shop. Women
in sheet metal often end up in the shop, sometimes out of a misguided
paternalism, since there’s less exposure to workers from different
trades and fewer opportunities for harassment, Carman said. She didn’t
want to spend her career in the shop, but it gave her a chance to
finish her apprenticeship while avoiding more harassment. Her new
supervisor nominated her for training on sheet-metal installation
software, putting her on the path to becoming a foreman. It was one of
the first times she’d felt encouraged or supported within the industry.
The next year, 2013, Carman journeyed out in front of a crowd of 50 or
so at the union hall.
After that, the work got a little easier but the culture didn’t. A
month or so later, Carman was standing twenty feet in the air on a
scissor lift, repairing a duct in a Microsoft building near Seattle,
when she shouted to the journeymen below to crank her up a few inches.
The men were stationed there for that purpose, but they refused and
insisted she descend from the lift and do it herself. A few days later,
she was working inside a duct near the ceiling when the same men moved
the scissor lift, stranding her in the duct. She sent frantic text
messages on her cellphone to coworkers, asking for help. “I thought I
was being left to fall to my death,” she told me later.
It was around this time that the possibility of doing something to help
other women began to absorb her thoughts. More women were joining the
sheet metal apprenticeship, but few finished. Without more women in the
trades, she saw little possibility of the industry becoming a safe
place for females to work.
Carman began to search for allies among the handful of female sheet
metal workers she’d gotten to know. There was Tausha Sheff, an
apprentice who sat beside Carman in a class on drafting software at the
union hall. There was Liz Fong, a journeywoman she’d worked with during
her last job as an apprentice, and Kara Cowles, another apprentice on
that job. Before one union meeting in 2015, the four women went for
drinks at a nearby sports bar and discussed what it might take for
women to feel more welcome. Carman felt something as simple as giving
women an opportunity to feel supported and heard might help.
From an office in the union building, she began calling every female
apprentice and asking about their struggles. The women started talking.
In nearly every conversation, sexual harassment topped the list of
problems. Being denied training was another, along with trouble finding
childcare. A month or two later, Carman invited all the women to a
meeting at a public library in Tukwila, Washington, a Seattle suburb.
Some of the women worried they would provoke a backlash from male
coworkers if they spoke out. But Carman had found an ally in the
union’s new business manager, a man named Tim Carter, who encouraged
her to move forward with a formal mentorship program and a women’s
committee that could come up with proposals for recruiting and
retaining more women in their trade.
That led to changes beyond their local. Carman was invited to attend
sessions at national conferences and to speak to union business
managers and agents about how their practices discouraged women from
continuing in the trades. She and a handful of other women across the
country helped to form a women’s committee to advise the international
sheet metal union. The timing was right: The economy was booming and
the construction industry was desperate for workers. The international
iron workers union had recently won praise for becoming the first
building trade to offer paid maternity leave, up to eight months.
Joseph Sellers, Jr., the international sheet metal union’s general
president, began to hear from Carman and other women at conferences. “I
was shocked, and maybe it’s naïve, when I heard and listened to the
stories of my sisters,” Sellers told me in an interview. “I recently
had a sheet metal sister tell me she was pinned down on the job. That’s
not 25 years ago, that’s not 10 years ago, that’s right now, that’s
happening in the moment on jobs across North America.”
I first met Carman in October 2019 at Trades Women Build Nations, an
annual conference for women in the trades. The event gathered 2,800
people in a Hilton hotel in downtown Minneapolis, for sessions on
#MeToo along with ones on pensions and caring for hair and skin under a
hard hat. When we met, Carman was feeling encouraged. Sellers was one
of two union presidents to speak at the conference.
That August, union leadership had voted to update the organization’s
constitution to add gender neutral language, define harassment and
discrimination, and make them chargeable offenses. The union also
committed to double the number of women apprentices and add an
amendment stating that no one would be denied union membership based on
race and sex, among other categories. Sellers, a second-generation
sheet metal worker who wears his white hair clipped short, outlined
these changes to the crowd after being escorted to the stage by a
gauntlet of female sheet metal workers. “Our history, our culture, has
not been good,” he said, “but we are going to change that culture one
local at a time.” Sellers told me that he credited the women’s
committee with forcing him to confront the harassment and sexism within
the trades. “The women’s committee has really changed me,” he said.
Carman’s optimism, and her progress with her union, was relatively
rare. At the tradeswomen conference, despair pervaded many of the
conversations I had with the women I met. One was Kimberly Brinkman, a
sprinkler fitter in her 50s who lives near Minneapolis. In late 2019,
Brinkman sued her union and two contractors after what she describes as
years of harassment, discrimination and retaliation.
“Our unions, they are broken. Women and people of color, we don’t get
treated as a brother in the brotherhood,” said Brinkman as we sat in
the hotel lobby. “We are the distant cousin and nobody wants to talk
about us.”
Brinkman’s mistreatment started as a first-year apprentice, in 1999. On
one of her first jobs, her foreman berated her so routinely over the
workplace radios, shouting insults and demanding that she run from one
side of the job site to another to bring him tools, that a worker in
another trade complained. Angry, the foreman lodged a false sexual
harassment against Brinkman’s defender and called her into a meeting
with company investigators to make it appear that she was the man’s
accuser, she said. Brinkman denies she made the accusation, but she
nevertheless earned a reputation as someone who complained of
harassment. Her car was keyed. On another job as an apprentice, a
foreman beckoned her toward him, then said, “I just wanted to see if I
could make you come with one finger,” as the crew of roughly 20 men
erupted in laughter.
Over the years, little changed. Brinkman said she was consistently
subjected to “checkerboarding,” a practice of moving women and
minorities from job to job, hiring them only to fulfill minimum
participation goals that sometimes exist on public projects, but laying
them off quickly when the goal is met. The union has only three
journeywomen among 380 active members. But Brinkman said that in
roughly two decades in the trades she has never worked a job start to
finish. Sometimes she went years without work, collecting unemployment,
then turning to food stamps and pulling from her retirement to get by.
Brad Hopping, the union’s training director, declined to comment.
“I became a dead person walking,” said Brinkman. Her union, like
others, is now — on its face — more open to women, something she and
others told me was largely the result of the economic gains of the past
decade fueling a demand for workers. “We are taking a lot of women in
our apprenticeships, which is fabulous,” she said. “But if the culture
doesn’t change, we have really just widened that revolving door.” With
workers now facing permanent job losses because of the coronavirus,
Brinkman and others worried that whatever progress women have made will
be undermined.
Related: Good jobs — a map to the middle class
I met women who’d spoken out against their local boilermakers’ union in
northern California. In 2016, a female apprentice alleged in a lawsuit
that the union had failed to dispatch her to jobs because of her sex
and retaliated against her after she complained by falsely accusing her
of making inappropriate sexual comments. Seven women came forward to
provide supporting testimony. Genevieve Leja was one. She told me that
the union apprenticeship instructor refused to look at her or train her
on skills such as welding, and that male coworkers verbally harassed
her on job sites. Men drew labia with chalk on metal beams on a job
site and asked Leja for her opinion on the drawings’ accuracy. Another
apprentice, Sheila Walton, told me she was groped while sanding a
vessel. After she complained, the union did nothing, she said. Edith
Pastor, one of only a handful of women in the union to make it to
journey status, told me that she was refused training and had to learn
the trade on her own. “Men won’t help you because they say you are
taking a job from another man,” she said. Tajuana McNear told me that
after she missed months of work when her son was sick with cancer, she
was told she had to restart the apprenticeship if she wanted to
continue. The case was settled before trial in 2019. The union declined
to talk about the lawsuit but said it was making an effort to recruit
female apprentices.
“Our unions, they are broken. Women and people of color, we don’t get
treated as a brother in the brotherhood. We are the distant cousin and
nobody wants to talk about us.”
Kimberly Brinkman, tradeswoman
The unabashed hostility to women felt, to me, different from the
predations experienced by white-collar workers, which tend to be better
concealed. In the trades, women also have few options for recourse.
Unions represent all their members and may be reluctant to take a stand
against any one party. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the
federal agency tasked under Title VII with investigating claims of
workplace sex discrimination and granting workers the right to sue, is
notoriously understaffed and provides remediation in just 18 percent of
cases, according to a 2019 Center for Public Integrity investigation.
Under federal law, apprenticeship programs are required only to make
“good faith efforts” to recruit women and people of color, a vague
principle that is difficult to enforce. And because of the transient
nature of the construction workforce, it’s difficult to prove that any
one employer or union is responsible for discrimination.
Lisa Stratton, who is Brinkman’s lawyer, was particularly forthright.
“It’s like Title VII of the Civil Rights Act never got to the
construction industry,” she said. “This is the kind of systemic
practice that class action lawyers should be all over, and the reason
they are not is they’ve [the unions and contractors] been so successful
at discriminating and keeping the numbers of women so low in every
single union, local, there aren’t enough [for a class action].”
Stratton has won cases involving undocumented workers, and women in
paper mills and processing plants. But when it comes to construction,
she said, “the law is not set up well to deal with these kinds of
situations.” When we met at the tradeswomen conference in Minneapolis,
Stratton told me that working on Brinkman’s case had darkened her view
of the legal system as a remedy. “I always felt like the law had power
to change things,” she said. “And with this one, I just feel so
powerless.” In July, a judge dismissed Brinkman’s complaints against
the union, but the discrimination lawsuits against both contractors are
ongoing.
One drizzly afternoon last year, Carman arrived at a dive bar in
Seattle for the monthly meeting of the women’s committee, which she has
been running since 2016. She was carrying a small black toolbox that
she’d filled with tampons and pads. “Did you hear about this?” Carman
asked the two sheet metal workers who’d arrived before her, Tammy Meyen
and Jamie Kunnap. “Tampon-gate?” said Meyen. A female apprentice had
absentmindedly placed a box of tampons on a table at a job site, Carman
explained. “The men lost their minds,” she said. She’d been barraged by
calls, texts and emails from male coworkers who were offended by the
sight of the tampons.
The men wanted Carman to take the matter up with the apprentice, as if
this were a problem that needed fixing. The women saw the problem at
hand very differently: Job sites are often in remote locations, far
from drug stores and 7-Elevens, and port-a-potties hardly come equipped
with tampon dispensers. Getting a period unexpectedly at work often
means having to go home without pay. Carman had come up with an idea:
She would give the toolbox to a worker attending the meeting to hang in
a port-a-potty at one of her company’s field sites. Eventually, she
imagined assembling more of these toolboxes and distributing them to
lots of women, but this was a start.
Carman had taken a seat at the head of the table, which was slowly
being taken over by beers and spicy wings and hummus as more women
arrived. Antlers hung from the walls and and kegs ringed the room. The
women had taken different paths into construction. Some, like Carman,
had fathers and brothers in the trades. Others had earned college
degrees before growing dissatisfied in their careers or discouraged by
the low pay. One young woman had heard about construction
apprenticeships while incarcerated in the juvenile justice system. But
nearly all of them had had moments in which they questioned whether
they belonged in the industry.
Carman rose to speak. She thanked everyone for their contributions of
the past year: the career fairs they’d appeared at, the mentors they’d
trained. “We’re at about 10 percent women apprentices,” Carman
reported. That number was one of the highest for sheet metal locals —
the national average was 3 percent. That success had prompted
researchers from the University of Washington to reach out to Carman;
they planned to help half of the locals nationwide to adopt the
program, then study its impact on the recruitment, retention and mental
health of female apprentices.
One of Carman’s goals for the year was to get more women in union
leadership. There were elections coming up, she said, for positions
like secretary, trustee and treasurer. A few years ago, Carman was
appointed to serve on the apprenticeship program board. Her photograph,
with her hair curled and lips polished with berry-red lipstick, hung by
the entrance of the union hall and apprenticeship training facility,
the big concrete building north of Seattle. “Everyone who is able
should run,” she said. “We have to get in there.”
Carman spoke about the union’s changes to its constitution designed to
improve conditions for women, which were only just being unveiled
publicly that month. She mentioned that another journeywoman, Emily
Wigre, had designed stickers women could distribute to male allies, the
men on job sites who trained females and protected them from
harassment. This way apprentices would know whom to trust just by
looking at men’s hard hats.
Carman’s work on behalf of other women had turned into a second
full-time job. The year before, she’d pushed the local to better
accommodate apprentices who are pregnant. Two female apprentices had
been rotated to new job sites while they were visibly pregnant, putting
them at high risk of being laid off. Now, that practice wasn’t allowed.
Carman also worked to support the increasing number of moms in their
membership. One of the apprentices, Arielle Mayer, had lost her baby
when he was 8 months old, so Carman had organized a memorial at the
union hall and set up a GoFundMe account to help pay for it. “If it
weren’t for her doing all that, this experience would be different. I
probably would still be in it but it would have been a lot harder,”
Mayer recalled one afternoon last year as her then-3-year-old daughter
stretched across her legs.
Another apprentice, S.J. Alexander, who came to the union from the tech
industry, turned to Carman for help when a foreman bullied her. “One of
the first things he said to me was, ‘Are you going to quit sheet metal
when you get pregnant?’” recalled Alexander, who is 43 with 15- and
20-year-old daughters. He warned other apprentices not to talk to her.
Whenever she asked him questions about her work duties, he would stand
within an inch of her, refuse to answer, and yell nonsense at her until
she walked away.
Alexander stopped interacting with him, but that meant there was no way
to learn about her job duties. “It’s not like my old day job where you
just send passive-aggressive IMs,” she said. “It was just an impossible
situation.” She had nightmares about the foreman standing over her bed,
yelling at her, and woke herself and her daughter up with her screams.
Carman made some calls. A day or so later, Alexander was standing in
the yard at her job site, painting a fence, when the union business
agent called to tell her she’d be sent to another company. Though it
meant Alexander would have to spend a few extra months as an apprentice
before journeying out, she felt relieved. “Vanessa did this,” she
recalls thinking to herself.
Carman still lives in the house she bought in 2007, in a quiet,
middle-class suburb south of Seattle. I drove there one Sunday
afternoon. There was a basketball hoop on the street out front, and
football and soccer balls lying on a patch of grass nearby. The
family’s dog, Chepe, a spaniel, stood on his hind legs by the large
front window, barking. In a back room, Carman’s younger boys, Gabriel
and Elijah, were learning to make balloon animals. A Rosie the Riveter
doll hung from a picture frame under the television; there was an
octopus print on one wall and an octopus pillow on a loveseat.
As we talked, Carman’s family members kept dropping by. First her
parents and her brother Damien, then Mike and his son. They were
bringing cash to repay her for Cirque du Soleil tickets she’d purchased
to celebrate their grandmother’s 100th birthday the next week. As a
foreman, Carman earns $63 an hour, more than any of her brothers. Her
family had always been close, but in recent years she’d become its
center.
Carman’s parents told me they were proud of the time she dedicated to
other tradeswomen, but that sometimes they wished she’d take on less.
“She has so many irons in the fire,” her father, Stan, said. “I get
worried, is she eating right, is she sleeping enough, is she taking her
vitamins. It’s real noble and I admire the heck out of her but I just
get concerned. She has the boys and their sports and the realities of
her job and helping out people in need. But you have to think about
yourself too.” Carman, meanwhile, said it had taken her years before
she’d found her voice and she didn’t feel she could take a pause.
A few months earlier, in fall 2019, Carman had been offered a job as a
detailer. The position, creating computerized drawings of sheet metal
for installation, was coveted and recession-resistant. It would also
spare her back, which had started to bother her. But for the first time
in 15 years she’d be working behind a desk.
That desk is behind a gray divider with her nametag in white letters,
up a flight of stairs from the shop of the sheet metal company where
she’d finished her apprenticeship. One weekday we drove to the building
in spitting rain. Carman spent the day sitting behind two computer
monitors, fitting together a jigsaw puzzle of brightly colored shapes
using the drafting software AutoCAD. Occasionally she’d ask the guy
sitting next to her for help, then complain to me that she had to ask.
“Remember how I told you I got into construction because I hated office
work?” she said at the end of the work day, as we lingered by her
minivan before she drove to pick up Elijah and Gabriel from their
grandparents’ house. “Well here I am at an office job. It’s a little
bit like being an apprentice all over again.”
At a certain point, though, her work on behalf of other women had
almost begun to feel like her real career. And yet, when it came down
to it, despite the progress she’d seen, she wasn’t sure how optimistic
to be. “We can’t save all the trades,” she said. “There are a whole
bunch of people who won’t work with you and you can’t do anything about
them.”
But even when she was feeling discouraged, she could still see the
industry changing, if only one person at a time. “The culture, it’s not
changed of course, but they see the support our leadership gives us,
and they are kind of scared to do the actions they might have done
before,” she said of male coworkers. Ultimately, it might come down to
a matter of waiting out the misogynists. Her sons and their friends
didn’t consider gender roles or think twice about their mother working
in construction. “There are new generations coming in,” she said.
Read this and other stories at The Hechinger Report
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