The few women lucky enough to get jobs on the Dan Ryan Expressway repairs last summer struggled with more than dust, sun and sore shoulders.
Along with their wages, they earned the kind of hostility that has given the construction industry its reputation as a wolf-whistling refuge for macho men.
That story now has taken the form of charges filed through the administrative process in the U.S. Labor Department`s office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The complaints-charging sexual discrimination in hiring and sex harassment on the job-are likely to remain unresolved for at least another year. But the grievances are familiar to the small number of women working or seeking work in nontraditional jobs across the nation.
Women can learn how to lift, draft and weld, but the inner strength needed to resist harassment may be the crucial qualification. Women electricians, construction workers, carpenters, welders and other tradeswomen either shape a new, unstereotyped image for themselves or ship out.
Those who dare it can find monetary and (surprisingly) spiritual rewards. Unskilled laborers can start at $16 an hour, more than four times the minimum wage for clerical workers and receptionists. And skilled tradeswomen, who earn more than $20 an hour, describe a sense of self-reliance that comes with knowing how things work.
”The most important reward I get from my job is a sense of being able to change things,” said Lauren Sugarman, 29, an elevator builder and director of Chicago Women In Trades (CWIT), a 350-member organization founded in 1981 to support and train local tradeswomen.
”Doing this work makes us feel we have power in the world,” said Sugarman, a brown-haired woman 5 feet, 2 inches tall. ”It`s hard to tell this to kids. Because it`s a dirty job, they don`t always understand. But it gives women empowerment. We`re not just pushing other people`s paper around or cleaning messes. We are putting up walls . . . buildings. We have access to machinery and tools that make things go.”
The money is attractive, especially to single mothers trying to raise children on receptionist`s or clerical salaries. The pay difference between traditionally female jobs and traditionally male jobs can change the lives of women who have the courage to challenge job stereotypes.
Statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics illustrate the way job stereotyping works. Women with high school diplomas make just $1,000 more annually than men with less than eight years of elementary school. In 1986, women with four years of college had a median income below that of men with only a high school diploma-$22,412 and $24,701 respectively.
One of the causes of the wage gap-women earning 65 cents for every dollar men earn-is the difference between what men and women without college degrees traditionally do for a living. Boys out of high school may step into trades jobs that start at $10 to $15 an hour, while women take minimum-wage clerical or sales positions with minimums hovering around $3.35 an hour-the federal minimum wage.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics doesn`t have figures on the number of women who have entered blue-collar work. A bill now before Congress would require federally-funded job training offices to count them.
But women who try to get into the trades now have a better chance to be hired than ever before. In the last 15 years, the work force has been flooded with women driven by economic necessity. The national Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that between now and the year 2000, two of three new entrants into the labor force will be women. Meanwhile, the number of young white males available for traditionally male jobs is dropping.
This change means employers are beginning to consider new, nontraditional employees-women, retired workers, members of minority groups.
Haila Williams, president of Krahl Construction in Chicago, said construction employers talk more and more about the viability of tradeswomen and female laborers.
”There is a lot of concern in the industry that the work force is drawing away the typical white male, who is going into white-collar work. There will soon be a shortage of white male workers, and this will be filled by minorities and women.”
The trades are not for everyone. These are gritty, grimy, hands-on jobs that involve skills and physical conditioning not all women have developed. But they are real alternatives for women now in minimum-wage jobs.
”The most important thing about nontraditional jobs for our clients is that there are a lot of poorer women without the skills or the inclination for clerical or receptionist jobs,” said Aviva Futorian, director of the Women`s Law Project, which is representing the women in the Dan Ryan case. ”They are physical and athletic, and they like the outdoors. Yet they are totally excluded from those jobs, and some of them are so conditioned that they don`t even know to consider those jobs.”
The complaint filed by 14 women who had worked or tried to work on the Dan Ryan project last year claims that women were subjected to sexual harassment, including being badgered to date supervisors, as well as pornographic ”gifts,” lewd comments and sexual touching and grabbing.
On jobsites around the country, women report facing similar discrimination, starting with simply being ignored or given make-work and including physical harassment.
The reasons that women face so much hostility in these jobs are a messy combination of economics and psychology.
Dale McCormick, a Maine carpenter and author who was the first female carpenter to get a journeyman`s card in 1975, speculates on the hostility women face.
”One of the reasons it`s been harder to integrate women into construction than, say, law,” McCormick said, ”is that men construction workers see their identity more tied up with their work than men lawyers. When their job status is lowered by `lower-status` people-women-taking those jobs, they get riled up.”
Contractors have admitted not hiring women because they don`t want their jobsites turned into frisky playgrounds or sexual war zones. In Arkansas, for example, Nabholz Construction Corp. said it wouldn`t hire women because they would be ”too distracting,” according to Nancy Seiff, coordinator of the Nontraditional Occupations Project in Fayetteville.
The Dan Ryan expressway case is one in which that attitude has been identified and challenged.
In the spring of 1988, Chicago Women in Trades sent 50 women to apply for jobs on the Dan Ryan project. A few were hired, but more were turned away.
The Women`s Law Project`s subsequent complaint asserts that the contractors-then headed jointly by Walsh Construction Co., Traylor Brothers, Inc. and James McHugh Construction Co.-sent women applicants back to the Urban League for ”referrals,” engaged in ”sex-specific” hiring and hired women only for special slots, or gave women make-work such as flagging, collecting scraps of wood, `watching` the jobsite or laboring for apprentice carpenters. Also charging that the contractors were not living up to a 1978 federal executive order requiring a 6.9 percent female workforce on all jobs with federal money, it asked the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs to investigate the hiring practices of the joint venture and the subcontractors as well.
This summer, the Illinois Department of Transportation reported that there were 27 females among 286 skilled and unskilled workers on the project- about 9.4 percent of the total. The department had agreed to a 10 percent goal for women employed on the project in 1988.
That investigation is not expected to begin until after the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission completes a study of its own, which may not be until 1990, Futorian said. The Dan Ryan construction project is scheduled to be complete by the end of October. (Meanwhile, the contractors on the first phase of the project were underbid by another joint venture, Kenny-Paschen, which is now in charge of the project.)
Chicago Women in Trade`s action on the Dan Ryan was singled out for praise at a recent Tradewomen`s Conference in Chicago. The project was one of the most aggressive undertakings accomplished around the country by any of the many organizations helping women get more nontraditional jobs.
However, said Cindy Marano, director of Wider Opportunities for Women, a Washington lobbying group that`s pushing for higher federal requirements on contractors to hire women, sometimes the difficulty starts at home with lack of family support.Surprisingly, many women entering the trades are college graduates.
California sprinkler-fitter Barbara Bane, 33, who has a college degree in art history, recalled her mother`s reaction when she described her new job:
”I was so happy I got the job, I called her. I heard this dead silence, and then she started crying. She would much rather have had me be a lawyer or marry a nice engineer.”
But as Futorian said, poorer women with little education stand to gain the most from wider acceptance of women in the trades.
”It`s always been the most qualified people that have to break down the barriers,” said McCormick, who founded Women Unlimited, a nontraditional jobs training program in Portland. McCormick earned a teaching degree from the University of Iowa in 1971 before entering carpentry. ”Our effort now is to make it possible for ordinary women to get in.”
In many areas, single mothers are the main beneficiaries of nontraditional jobs opportunities.
Cynthia Cuschieri, 29, scraped by as a grocery checker, clerical worker and waitress supporting her son in Glen Ellen, Calif. Then she heard how much money carpenters can make.
Cuschieri is now a second-year carpentry apprentice, making $10.76 an hour, more than twice the minimum wage. In two years, she`ll be earning $22.46 an hour.
Cuschieri`s other pre-carpentry jobs included those of waitress and clerk. And she tried to raise her son alone on those wages.
Once into carpentry training, her attitude about harassment was ”I want this job, and I don`t really care what you say to me. ”
”I know there are a lot of hassles for women in nontraditional jobs,”
said Pat Angermeier, 36, former sandwich wagon driver, now a welder apprentice in a Newburgh, Ind., Alcoa aluminum plant, making $14 an hour. ”But as a single mom, I tell you, you can`t make it on the minimum wage if you want to give your family a good life and still have time with them.”
Mothers like Angermeier and Cuschieri may train their children to grow up without job stereotypes for women. But for most kids, the images are dying hard.
Lauren Sugarman spends a day a week visiting Chicago-area schools, alerting children to nontraditional jobs for women on behalf of Chicago Women in Trades. Recently, talking in a classroom with her tool belt, she asked a question: ”What can women do?” The girls said women can do anything. But the boys disagreed.
”In a way,” Sugarman said, ”I think that the more of us out there and the less attention we get, the better for us with the men we work with. But the children`s attitudes aren`t changing. We have to be seen.”
The fact that today`s children still are imbued with such preconceptions about women`s work dismays retired Chicago printer Mollie West, 73.
West went from a clerical job to a trade job in 1959, ”and my wages doubled overnight,” she says. As a single mother then, ”I recognized what it meant for a woman to be able to earn a living wage.”
Women interested in skilled trades jobs can contact Chicago Women in Trades, which offers pre-apprenticeship tutorials in 10-week sessions twice a year. For information, call 942-1444. The Midwest Women`s Center will offer a 10-month carpentry and building maintenance program, starting in September, to assist women in getting carpentry and maintenance jobs. Call Marilyn Skipper- Green at 326-2818.
