Women in construction find solidarity as ‘sisters in the brotherhood’
| Chicago
When Isis Harris landed a job as an apprentice electrician in 2014, it meant far more than just finding well-paying work. It was a lifeline of sorts, a path to empowerment and independence, she says.
She grew up in northeast Portland, Oregon. After her mother died, she was raised by an aunt, and then lived in foster homes as a teenager. She had a child and dropped out of high school. “I was working in 10 jobs, just trying to make something stick,” she says.
Why We Wrote This
A story focused onAs more women enter skilled construction trades, they are laying a foundation to succeed in a rough-and-tumble world of labor union brotherhoods.
Then Ms. Harris entered a construction preapprenticeship program for disadvantaged groups. “The electrical trade was the one that spoke to me,” she says.
Skilled laborers like Ms. Harris, as well as a number of trade unions, often refer to women on the job as “sisters in the brotherhood.” The number of women in skilled trades has doubled over the past decade, though numbers remain small. In 2023, only 2.9% of electricians were women. In other trades, 3.1% of carpenters and 2.2% of plumbers were women last year.
“[Until] our numbers grow, we will continue to push for more women on the job,” says Lisa Lujano, a 25-year veteran carpenter in Chicago. “It’s a slow journey, but it’s going.”
Last year, Lisa Lujano, a longtime member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners Local 54, found herself in very unfamiliar company.
She had been tasked to build stairs in one section of the Obama Presidential Center on Chicago’s South Side. When she showed up for work, she discovered she would be part of a crew of five, all women.
“I don’t know how it came about,” Ms. Lujano says. “I don’t know if it was good intentions or bad intentions – keep all the women together. But all of a sudden, it was all girls.”
Why We Wrote This
A story focused onAs more women enter skilled construction trades, they are laying a foundation to succeed in a rough-and-tumble world of labor union brotherhoods.
Most of the time, when she shows up for work, she’s the only woman on the crew. And she and her fellow tradeswomen know as well as anyone an inescapable truth: The American construction site is still a man’s world. Until that moment, at least, when suddenly it wasn’t.
“It was a good experience,” Ms. Lujano says, looking back on the 11 months working alongside other women carpenters. “We were able to relate, be more comfortable with each other.” Then she adds, almost exultingly, “We’re sisters in the brotherhood!”
“Sisters in the brotherhood.” It’s a phrase that resonates powerfully among American tradeswomen. It expresses not only their hard-won and deeply felt camaraderie, but also both their aspirations and their struggles as women increasingly don hard hats and tool belts and shoulder their way into the domain of American construction workers.
Ms. Lujano has been a member of her union for almost 25 years. The journeyman carpenter loves her work, the daily routine. But she still puts up with unpleasant conversations. At lunch she’ll sometimes sit by herself, or take a nap in her car. But she sees a lot of progress since she was a young apprentice a quarter of a century ago.
On a recent Friday, she was up at 5:30 a.m. at her home in Gary, Indiana. After getting ready and letting her dogs out into her yard, she got into her red Ford Escape and headed to her current job.
She’s on a team of about 60 workers rebuilding a train station at the edge of the University of Illinois Chicago campus. She’s one of only five women at the site today, the only one on her crew of 10.
Her day at the site begins with a meeting in a trailer – the conference room of construction workers. A union foreman reads aloud the job instructions for the day and the safety precautions they must take. Ms. Lujano and other workers each sign an acknowledgment.
While supervisors linger to figure out assignments, Ms. Lujano leads the workers through a few minutes of stretching in the cool morning air, which has become a morning ritual for them. She hasn’t always had this kind of rapport with her mostly male co-workers, and afterward they head to their cars to put on their gear.
Ms. Lujano wears hard-toe boots, knee protectors, and a safety harness with a steel hook. Her hard hat is pink. She also wears a thick leather belt from which hangs an assortment of tools, including a $300 titanium Stiletto hammer. She buys only the best.
Over the past decade, the number of women in the construction sector of the U.S. economy has risen steadily, from about 800,000 in 2012 to about 1.3 million in 2023, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Only 11% of jobs in construction industries are held by women, and the majority of these jobs are in office work, sales, or other support services. A growing number are even becoming managers. But on construction sites themselves, the vast majority of construction workers remain men.
In fact, the number of women in the skilled trades has doubled over the past decade. But in 2023, only 3.1% of carpenters were women, according to federal statistics. In other trades, 2.9% of electricians and 2.2% of plumbers were women last year.
“The whole process of diversifying the construction trades has been an incredible slog,” says Jayne Vellinga, executive director of Chicago Women in Trades, an organization that has worked for decades to help women find jobs in the skilled trades.
Yet even Ms. Vellinga, who says she’s “not not optimistic,” sees this as a moment of hope for women in the trades.
There’s been a surge in demand for construction workers. The federal government continues to pour money into infrastructure and other construction projects. Areas affected by recent hurricanes also need to bring in hordes of outside workers as communities begin to rebuild.
But about 94% of construction firms report being unable to hire the skilled workers they need, according to the Associated General Contractors, a trade group in Arlington, Virginia. Experts estimate this shortage numbers more than a half-million workers.
Given these shortages, the contractors trade group also found last year that 77% of construction companies report that “diversifying the current workforce at our firm is critical to strengthening our future business.”
This doesn’t mean companies will be hiring more women. There remains a significant cultural obstacle to bringing more women into and training them for the skilled trades: Construction is still widely believed to be the domain of men. As one woman who owns a large construction firm put it in an oft quoted remark, “The biggest challenge of being a woman in construction is the constant reminder that you are a woman in construction.”
From apprentice to journeyman: one woman’s unconventional path
Like many women, Ms. Lujano followed an unconventional path into the trades. She had no family connections, no uncle or father to bring her into the business, as young men often had.
She had dropped out of high school to care for a son who was just a year old. “I couldn’t support him,” she says. “I couldn’t do anything.” She needed a way forward.
In 1998, she saw a flyer from Job Corps, a federal program that offers young people preapprenticeship training and a chance to finish high school. The flyer listed different jobs: plumber, electrician, carpenter, secretary, and more.
She enrolled in a program in Golconda, a small Illinois town on the banks of the Ohio River. There, over 13 months, she earned a GED certificate and received hands-on training in how to build things. She and other students built ladders, bunk beds, and even frame houses. “It was just so cool,” she says. “I ended up loving it.”
But it wasn’t easy. In her first job she spent four months demolishing and rebuilding porches for a nonunion contractor. Then she got her first union job, working on a bridge in Skokie, just north of Chicago. She was the only woman in a crew of young men in their early 20s. The men would make vulgar comments to her, or about her, even in her presence.
“Suck it up, buttercup,” she would tell herself. “That’s the way it is.”
That was a long time ago. Ms. Lujano is no longer a rookie apprentice, but a journeyman carpenter making the full journeyman’s wage: $55 an hour, plus health benefits and a pension. She’s also a union steward, responsible for making sure the workers are properly credentialed and helping them deal with complaints or problems on the job.
The pay gap between men and women in construction, in fact, is far better than the national average. Women are paid 96 cents to every dollar men in construction industries earn, according to the National Association of Women in Construction. Overall in the United States, this gender gap is 84 cents to the dollar.
Looking out over the worksite at the train station in Chicago’s Near North Side, Ms. Lujano sees both good and bad, both progress and the limitations of that progress. Including her with the carpenters, there is one woman among the electricians, one among the ironworkers, one among the bricklayers, and one among the painters. Tradeswomen often feel they are only tokens of diversity on the job site. But to Ms. Lujano, one woman is better than none.
“I actually feel connected that there are others on the job that are like me, the only female on the crew,” she says. “It’s a good feeling to see that there are other women on the job, even though it has to be in different trades. There are times where you are the only woman on the job between all the trades.”
As more women trickle into the trades, however, efforts are expanding across the country to recruit and train more qualified women. This includes recruiting efforts in union halls to train and support more women, and the forging of regulations and labor agreements to make sure it happens.
Like many veteran tradeswomen, Ms. Lujano is part of this work. Now in her third decade as a union carpenter, she feels keenly the need to help younger women as they face the challenge of working in a world that has, for so long, been dominated by men.
“It can sometimes be irritating that the crew has room for only one woman. But until our numbers grow, we will continue to push for more women on the job. It’s a slow journey, but it’s going.”
A path to empowerment and independence
When Isis Harris landed a job as an apprentice electrician in 2014, it meant far more to her than just finding well-paying work.
It was a lifeline of sorts, a path to empowerment and independence, even salvation, she says. She grew up in northeast Portland, Oregon. Her mother died when she was 3 years old. Raised by an aunt when she was a child, she lived in foster homes as a teenager. Like the young Ms. Lujano, she had a child and dropped out of high school.
Then Ms. Harris was convicted of assault and served five years and 10 months at the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville, Oregon. When she got out in 2011, she looked for work in a number of places. She was a mill tech in a steel mill, a processing and packing clerk at a paper mill, and then a customer service representative in a doctor’s office.
“I was working in 10 jobs, just trying to make something stick,” she says. “Once the background check came back, people would let me go.”
Three years after leaving prison, Ms. Harris entered a preapprenticeship program for disadvantaged groups. The program included visits to the worksites of different trades.
“The electrical trade was the one that spoke to me,” she says. By 2015, she was accepted as an apprentice in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 48, in Portland.
But she was constantly reminded of being a woman in what was a man’s locker-room-like domain. “I felt like I had to protect myself a lot, from persistently inappropriate conversations,” Ms. Harris says. She found ways to cope. She wore earphones at lunchtime. She avoided the lunch trailer. She tended to work alone.
In some ways her experience in prison worked to her advantage. She had lived with prison guards for five years, and that had toughened her. “I had some exposure to being treated badly by white men, but being resilient,” she says. Still, there were times she had to retreat to the portable toilet for a cry. And when difficulties weighed too heavily on her, she took a day off.
The challenge was that she was not just a woman, but a Black woman. At the same time, however, she came to understand that workplace inhospitality arose not so much from hostility toward women or to Black people, but simply because of the tough-guy, chops-busting culture of construction.
“The construction industry is one of those industries where everyone’s kind of indoctrinated that you have to have a tough skin,” Ms. Harris says. “You have to swing with the punches. It gives people a leeway to be rough, to be tough. To not be kind.”
She’s also had many good experiences with her co-workers, however. “I’ve been on crews that were great, that had a great culture,” Ms. Harris says. “It wasn’t just an absence of offensive speech, but the ability and willingness to interact with people from a diverse background.”
It grew difficult, however, when she became pregnant. Unions have been slow to accommodate pregnant women. There was no paid leave offered at the time, and as her pregnancy progressed, she says, she “was given some pressure to stop working, the way I was showing up to work, waddling around and sometimes being in pain.”
She stuck it out until her eighth month. Today, the union contract offers 12 weeks of paid maternity leave.
Ms. Harris has set aside her hard hat and tool belt for now as she deals with a back injury. She’s still a union member, and she keeps up with the continuing education required of a union electrician. She expects to go back to the tools one day.
Her work now is teaching, organizing, and promoting women and people from other underrepresented groups in the trades. She teaches preapprenticeship classes at Portland Community College. She also serves on numerous boards and committees, including Oregon Tradeswomen and the Women’s Justice Project.
She’s also launched her own business, 3v3ryday Grind, which both sells branded construction clothing and acts as a community initiative to address social issues in her community. The name pays tribute to her three children and the “grind” that helped support them. As a part of her business, she visits high schools to talk to students about the trades.
“They’re very inquisitive,” Ms. Harris says. “They want to know more about it. There aren’t a lot of conversations about the trades, especially in inner-city schools. Historically they have not been the communities that have been recruited from.”
Unions no longer tolerate “shenanigans or bad behavior” toward women
The work of recruiting women for the building trades has a long history. In some places, it has been going on for decades. But in most areas across the U.S., there is still a long way to go as construction companies struggle to find enough workers.
“For too long a time, unions were just contented to send out the people they had, who were part of the industry,” says Robert Bruno, professor of labor and employment at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “Those people tended to be white males with a long history of working in the trades. They didn’t have experience working with women or people of color or Latinx.”
He’s spent many years studying the composition of the American labor force, and today he sees real change. “There’s no question that the union side has done a far better job of recruiting people of color, non-English-speaking people, and women of color – recruiting them and sustaining them,” he says. Unions no longer tolerate “a lot of shenanigans or bad behavior.” At the same time, unions, to varying degrees, have developed “sophisticated and multilayered efforts” to increase diversity.
Indeed, women have made progress breaking into well-paying trade positions mainly in cities with strong unions, such as Seattle, New York, Boston, and Chicago. In much of the rest of the country, however, tradeswomen remain few and far between.
Recruiting starts young. In Seattle, the local chapter of Washington Women in Trades puts on a yearly trade show for high school students.
“We have exhibitors clamoring to be part of the show,” says Cynthia Payne, head of the branch. Two years ago, it began offering a summer camp for girls. Over three days in late July, the girls made trivets, jewelry boxes, sheet metal toolboxes, and more. “It was a huge success,” says Ms. Payne.
Unions have also been working to support women on the job. The national ironworkers union invites ironworkers to Las Vegas for weekend programs that include instruction on communicating and working with women and other underrepresented groups.
Led by the example of the ironworkers union, others have begun offering maternity leave. In some places there are programs to help aspiring tradeswomen pay for child care while they undertake training.
All this work has limits. Efforts to increase diversity tend to focus on big publicly funded projects that are subject to both public scrutiny and local politics. Infrastructure projects that receive federal money must meet diversity requirements that advocates say are rarely enforced.
Since 1978, federal rules have set a goal of 6.9% for women in federally funded projects. But advocates say that goal is rarely met. The main challenge, as they see it, is to enlist the help of unions, contractors, and government agencies to make sure it is.
Massachusetts has been a leader in this effort. A Boston city ordinance requires that 12% of hours on major building projects be worked by women. Even during the pandemic, the number of women apprentices in Boston exceeded 10%.
Elsewhere, progress is more modest. Last spring, the Illinois Department of Transportation began a program to monitor diversity in Illinois workplaces. Shining a light on actual hiring practices, advocates believe, can help make diversity goals more than just wishful thinking or good intentions.
At the same time, the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down affirmative action in college admissions has cast a chill over these efforts.
“We are living in an environment right now where goals by race and gender are under threat,” says Ms. Vellinga of Chicago Women in Trades. “Affirmative action may be something of the past with this current Supreme Court. Getting anyone to raise their goals or to enforce goals is really difficult right now.”
“I’m tired but excited.” Women offer support and solidarity.
On a recent evening, Verushuka Saez showed up in a glum mood at the offices of Chicago Women in Trades. Ms. Lujano is there, too, sitting in the lobby.
They have both come to attend a union meeting with other women carpenters. Organizations like Women in Trades offer more than training and advocacy. They also give women a place to meet and organize, to find sanctuary and solidarity.
Ms. Saez is tall, strong, and reserved. She has come by motorcycle and is clad in black leather. She approaches Ms. Lujano shyly. “I got a job, but there’s a hold,” she says. It’s a common worker’s limbo: a job but no work.
Ms. Lujano commiserates. “It’s crazy out there,” she says. “Everybody’s on a hold.” Their conversation turns to motorcycling. Ms. Saez is planning to participate in a charity ride the coming weekend.
But they return to the subject of work, and Ms. Saez voices old complaints about male privilege in the industry. “You need to know someone,” she says wearily.
Her first day on the job three years ago could hardly have begun worse.
She wanted to work as a carpenter, since she discovered how much more she could make compared with the low-paying jobs she’d had. She failed the written test three times before qualifying, but she persevered and became an entry-level apprentice.
Then, on her first morning, she missed a turn and arrived late. That was something she knew from her training she must never do. “Oh my God,” she thought. “I messed up already.”
Her boss was forgiving, however. And she learned her first on-the-job lesson: Whoever shows up late must pay the next morning with coffee and doughnuts. But that first day, and the next, and for weeks afterward, she faced a more difficult test. The work wasn’t difficult, but it was a new experience for everyone, with a young Puerto Rican woman in a crew of older white men.
“It was a little intimidating,” Ms. Saez says. “Some of the guys would think I couldn’t do the job. I was a girl. Or they said, ‘Don’t worry, we can do it.’ I was treated like a little kid. It took them a couple weeks to accept that I was a worker with them.”
She’s more confident these days. But she’s found that becoming a union apprentice is no guarantee of work. She spent last winter frustrated and unemployed. Indeed, she and other tradeswomen often feel they’ve been hired to be the token woman on a job, to satisfy diversity goals.
“I feel that once you’re in, companies grab you for just a certain amount of time,” Ms. Saez says. “They take male apprentices over female.”
But both of them love the work, and Ms. Lujano, as much as any tradeswoman who’s been around for 25 years, can feel a modicum of optimism.
Back at the train station construction site near the University of Illinois Chicago, she trudges off the platform at 3 o’clock, the end of her workday.
She’s hot and sweaty, her face flushed. Still, she’s in a buoyant mood. It’s Friday. In just a week she’ll travel to New Orleans to attend a national convention of tradeswomen. And tonight she’ll meet some carpenter friends for dinner. The thought of each cheers her.
“I’m tired but excited,” Ms. Lujano says. “I’m meeting my sisters.” She adds, “I don’t do it that often.”
