18

Knocking on the Door: Blacks and Women in Construction

When John Short was a young man, he decided he wanted to learn carpentry. He contacted a local nonunion firm. After a brief telephone conversation, the owner offered him a job. Short had been promised work as a carpenter. When he showed up, the reality fell short of his expectations. “I applied for it,” says Short, “but they told me they made a mistake when they saw me.”

I had to do everything. I had to dig ditches. I had to be the laborer. I had to be everything—water-boy, coffee boy. During “leisure time,” I did carpentry work. When there was no laboring work to be done. They made a mistake when they saw the color of my skin. That’s what it was.

Construction has always been a white industry. Carpenters in Massachusetts have come from a number of different backgrounds—English, Irish, Canadian, Scandinavian, Italian, Jewish, French-Canadian, etc.—but they’ve usually had one thing in common, namely, the pigment of their skin. Blacks and other racial minorities have been relegated to a negligible role in the nation’s building industry. Short, who joined Local 40 in Cambridge in 1967, became a member of a highly select club. A survey conducted by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the same year that Short got his card revealed that the UBCJA had a grand total of 5,284 black members, 1.6 percent of the national membership.¹

In 1900, just 37 of the 11,500 blacks in Boston were carpenters and joiners. Thirty years later, the census counted 59 black carpenters in Boston—all but 4 nonunion. Most of these men had learned their trade in the South, where there was a long and rich tradition of skilled black craftsmen, particularly carpenters, bricklayers, plasterers, and painters. When they brought their craft knowledge north, contractors pulled in the welcome mats. A 1905 article on Boston’s black working population found that the migrating craftsmen never had more than “intermittent occupation” and attributed this condition to the “white artisans [who] dislike to work with them.”²

From its inception the national Brotherhood adopted enlightened official policies on race. When a black delegate to the 1884 convention was refused service at a popular “workingman’s” restaurant in Cincinnati, the body immediately declared a boycott and insisted that the establishment be held up to “public execration.”³ Despite this noble gesture and other similar statements that periodically appeared in the Carpenter, the national office was reluctant to impose measures to overcome racial discrimination within the organization. McGuire and other national leaders deferred to the principle of local autonomy, thereby guaranteeing Jim Crow locals in the South and a tiny handful of black union members in the North. In 1903, General President Huber condemned the existence of segregated southern locals. For many months thereafter, the pages of the union journal were filled with letter after letter from white southern carpenters attacking Huber’s impudence. Though Huber did appoint a black organizer, he relented in his criticisms. He never again took up the challenge and the locals remained separate.

Most builders refused to hire nonwhite tradesmen. Sometimes they argued that blacks were not qualified; sometimes that the unions shut out racial minorities. Usually, they did not bother to justify their discriminatory policies. Joe Corbett was born in Trinidad in 1912, where, like his father, he made his living as a union carpenter. In the early 1950s, he left the West Indies, moved to Boston, and joined the Brotherhood. Despite his years of experience, membership in the Boston local did not guarantee employment.

The BA sent two of us out one morning for a job. An Englishman and myself. The contractor put the Englishman on the job and told me in no uncertain terms that, “it’s a disgrace for a nigger to come and apply for a job in the shop. A nigger’s rightful place is on the railroad as a porter.” That’s quote and unquote.

The unions were often as guilty as the contractors. Like most other whites in American society, union craftsmen had no desire to integrate blacks into their ranks. Racism was one obvious cause but additional factors operated to keep blacks out. The craft was usually passed on from one generation to the next, effectively barring anyone who had not been born with hammer in hand. What some called nepotism was standard practice in the building trades, especially before World War II. The sons and nephews of building tradesmen learned to manipulate tools as an integral part of their childhood education. Their advantages were not just a matter of better contacts inside the industry. From their earliest years, they had a leg up in craft skill on anyone else who hoped to enter the trades. As Seaton Wesley Manning observed in his 1938 investigation of black unionists in Boston, “The craft unions became more or less exclusive societies with limited memberships. This policy of exclusion was not in all instances aimed directly at the Negro though he naturally suffered from it.”⁴

The general problem of exclusion has long haunted the building trades unions. There are insiders and outsiders, and the distinction rests largely on relative appreciation and respect for the idiosyncrasies of construction. In terms of peers, carpenters identify with fellow carpenters first and other building tradesmen second. Beyond that, there is a large gulf. Union carpenters have, at different times and to varying degrees, felt a bond with organized workers outside the building industry and, infrequently, with unorganized members of the workforce. The feeling of belonging to a unique world fosters a social isolationism that is only increased by the cultural homogeneity of the father-son workforce.

The stress of occupational insecurity provides an objective basis for exclusive policies. Without contractual or informal provisions for job security, unionists assume the best path to self-protection lies in limiting entry into the trades. The easiest people to exclude are those who are already outsiders. And no one has been more outside the construction industry than people of color.

In 1969, John Cort tried to explain the relationship between racism and exclusion in the building trades to the Massachusetts Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “This is not simply a white versus black thing,” he said. “There is racial discrimination, but there is also another kind of discrimination which you might say operates regardless of race, creed or color.” Cort linked the insular mentality to the trauma of the Depression.

Building trades union officials, even the younger ones, suffer from a kind of nightmarish memory of the depression of the 1930’s when the building industry ground almost to a complete halt and virtually everyone in the industry was unemployed. This same nightmarish memory is handed down in tales from father to son and is extremely strong in the industry. . . . They operate on the theory that as long as there is any union member who is or might be unemployed, they are not going to admit additional union members.⁵

At the time the Advisory Committee was taking testimony in Boston, blacks had become increasingly unwilling to accept the role of outsiders. The civil rights movement had rushed past its initial emphasis on legal and political discrimination to address issues of economic justice. As Michael Harrington, president of the Massachusetts State Council of Carpenters, told the 1964 state convention, “With Negro unemployment over twice the rate of white unemployment, and with half the Negroes of the country living in poverty with an income of less than $3,000 a year, it is understandable that Negroes are pushing hard to get jobs in industries and trades where none or few have been working before.”⁶

The construction industry, with its almost lily-white character and racist reputation, was a natural focus. According to Chuck Turner, who has spent much of the last fifteen years advocating affirmative action in the building trades, blacks looked to opportunities in construction because of their history of underutilized skills in the carpentry and trowel trades. In addition, notes Turner, “the sites are so visible. You’re able to see very clearly what’s going on, especially on jobs in your own community. Also, jobs are reorganized on a regular basis. This is a real difficulty for existing members of the trades, but it means the community looks at it as an opportunity to get people in.”

In 1930, Boston’s UBC locals had 4 black members; four decades later, just 10 of the 5,500 members of the Boston District Council were nonwhite. Contractor records told a similar story. Turner Construction, a major builder in the Northeast, employed 248 workers on 8 Boston projects in 1969. Thirty-four were nonwhite, and two-thirds of that group were unskilled laborers. Turner’s subcontractors offered even fewer opportunities, averaging less than 3 percent minority employees. Amazingly, the record of the carpenters was better than almost any other trade. A 6 percent figure of minority apprentices in the Boston carpentry program in 1969 was significantly higher than the electricians, ironworkers, or pipefitters.⁷ Joe Corbett’s firsthand experience confirms this statistical portrait. There were very few black carpenters, he observes. As for the other trades, “you could count them on one hand.”

In the latter half of the sixties, the federal government instituted a series of local and regional projects through the Model Cities program to increase minority representation in the industry. Model Cities projects emphasized small-scale residential and rehabilitation work in targeted urban centers with a preferential hiring policy for qualified community residents. The Boston version, the Boston Urban Redevelopment Program (BURP), opened shop in 1968, hiring mixed crews of union craftsmen and black trainees with temporary union permits. Midway through one of the BURP jobs, the contractors slashed the workforce in half. “All the black guys were laid off, and all the French-Canadians were kept,” remembers Leo Fletcher, a carpenter on the job. “Somebody from out of the city, even out of the country, getting paid to do work that I could do in my community.” Fletcher and a number of other black carpenters confronted the builder and threatened to disrupt the project. After a week of discussions, the men were rehired.

The BURP experience prompted the formation of the United Community Construction Workers (UCCW), an organization of minority trades workers. At the time, federal agencies were casting about for methods to introduce more nonwhite workers into the industry. Model Cities administrators had reached agreements with the Boston Building Trades Council and the Workers Defense League to train up to two hundred carpenters, painters, bricklayers, and plumbers on projects limited to four stories in height. The unions had insisted on the building size limitation as well as a strict 3 to 1 ratio of trainees to union journeymen in order to keep the program small and out of the mainstream of unionized construction. But even within these boundaries, the programs failed to produce many qualified workers. Frustrated by the slow pace of change, Model Cities officials went outside the union structure and offered the UCCW funding for a six-month hands-on training program for fifty-six sheetrockers and tapers in a Dorchester apartment complex.⁸

The federal commitment to the UCCW was never more than halfhearted, particularly once the group turned to direct-action tactics. In the wake of the BURP protest, Fletcher and other UCCW activists concluded that the industry would not alter its racial composition without the threat of confrontation. “They’d always say you had to be in the union to get a job and you had to get a job to get in the union,” comments Omar Cannon. “In order to get to the stage of negotiations, we had to disrupt the flow of work.” In 1969, the UCCW shut down a Perini job site for three days. The following year, the group demonstrated at the $11-million addition to Boston City Hospital, calling for 40 percent of the construction jobs to go to minority workers. Site demonstrations soon became the UCCW’s calling card. Says Cannon:

We had to go to the point of production, stop the job, and negotiate right on the spot. We even had people go on the job, pick up tools, and start going to work without getting paid. Some guys actually got hired like that. What worked best on any job that came into this community was to iron out an agreement before they broke ground. They would promise to take a certain amount of people through the UCCW.

In the summer of 1970, the Department of Labor approved a $680,000 grant for the Boston Hometown Plan. Created jointly by the Associated General Contractors, the building trades unions, and community representatives, the plan promised to bring two thousand minority construction workers into unionized jobs over a five-year period. A tripartite committee was formed to administer the program, recruiting through community agencies and radio and newspaper advertisements. The committee divided the recruits into four categories—journeymen, advanced trainees, trainees, and apprentices—depending on their level of experience. But despite the carefully constructed format and the ample funding, the committee never resolved its internal divisions. Chuck Turner worked with the plan in his capacity as chairman of the Boston Black United Front. “At the end of the first year,” he reports, “the community actors withdrew, saying that the tripartite character made the unions and the contractors work together against the community interests.” The union and management representatives continued to operate the plan and were, even by Turner’s admission, “fairly effective” for a time.

The UBC was starting to correct discriminatory patterns. An updated Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) survey in 1972 indicated that national minority membership in the Brotherhood had increased to 11.4 percent, almost a ten-point jump from five years earlier.⁹ But many of the other Internationals, especially the mechanical trades, showed few signs of improvement. Overall progress remained slow and varied from city to city. In Boston, the Hometown Plan lost much of its early steam without the presence and prodding of minority participants. In the long run, the plan was not successful, admits Local 67 Business Agent Barney Walsh, but not because of the unions’ role. “Contractors would use an individual on a covered job,” he points out, “and when the job was completed that individual was turned loose without a light at the end of the tunnel. When the federal government then set guidelines or quotas for the unions, it was more effective, because it had teeth in it.”

In 1974, the Labor Department cracked down on the sluggish plan and instituted mandatory hiring goals. Through the department’s Manpower Training Act, Turner, Fletcher, and others won funding for a Third World Jobs Clearing House to act as a secondary source of labor for contractors seeking to fill hiring quotas on publicly supported jobs. For the first time, public agencies began to put some bite in enforcement policies with intermittent monitoring and mild financial sanctions. But the penalties were still too few and far between to ensure compliance. “There was no reason for contractors to contact us,” notes Turner, who was executive director of the Clearing House. “And they didn’t. We referred twelve jobs in our first three months.”

Workers associated with the Clearing House held a series of meetings in the winter of 1975–76 to discuss what further steps to take. “People were getting mad and frustrated,” claimed Thomas Ng. “When you’ve got three hundred to four hundred workers looking for jobs and you only give us fifteen openings, you’ve got to expect frustration to set in. . . . I’m not talking about minorities without skills or training, but journeymen who’ve been working ten years or more.”¹⁰ They decided to take their protests back to the streets. The timing of the decision was fraught with danger. The industry had already drifted into its mid-seventies tailspin, and white craftsmen who had never been pleased with the prospects of significant numbers of new entries into the unions in the best of times became adamantly opposed to heightened pressure during a recession. Long-time union members had been out of work, in some cases for two years, and were desperate for employment. They were in no mood to welcome new competition for exceedingly scarce jobs. The stage was set for an explosive confrontation in Boston, already reeling from the racially divisive battles over school busing.

In the first few months of 1976, the Third World Workers’ Association, a group of black, Asian, and Hispanic workers affiliated with the Clearing House, picketed and often closed construction sites around the city. Though the demonstrations were peaceful, on-site worker resentment built with each day’s pay lost to a protest-induced shutdown. The actions proved successful at first. During one three-week period, minority workers won twenty-five to thirty jobs at a Barkan site on Huntington Avenue, several buildings on Warren Street, a library in Codman Square, and the Barletta pumping station project in the South End. The pumping station protest raised the ante when it ended in a scuffle between picketers and representatives of the Building Trades Council and the anti-busing South Boston Marshals. The anger of union tradesmen spilled into the streets on May 7, as two to three thousand construction workers marched on Boston’s City Hall demanding police protection on job sites and City Council defunding of the Clearing House.

Mayor Kevin White responded by placing a full complement of Tactical Patrol Force officers on the rooftops and sidewalks of the Madison Park High School project in Roxbury, a site of frequent demonstrations. But the two groups of workers had already been thoroughly polarized—black “outsiders” looking in at a sea of predominantly white faces holding the jobs they hoped for and white “insiders” viewing the protestors as one more nail in a coffin of insecurity. “I’ve been working now for five months,” said a white worker on the Madison Park project. “Before that I was loafing for a year and a half. Do you honestly think I’m going to give up my job to one of these fellows?” In calmer moments of reflection, the common concerns of chronic economic hardship emerged. “We’re all Depression babies,” Al DiRienzo of the Massachusetts Building and Construction Trades Council told a reporter at the height of the conflict. “It’s not like we don’t know what Leo Fletcher and the blacks are talking about.” But those moments were few and far between, vastly outweighed by the passion and panic of a perceived threat to the white construction workers’ livelihoods. “In the past four years I made $7,000, $7,500, $8,000, and $7,600,” said another Madison Park worker. “I got two kids to support. It ain’t enough. There’s lots of us been loafing for much too long. There ain’t enough work for those in the union, much less for those outside.”¹¹

The escalating tension bore some fruit for the Third World Workers’ Association. “The whole atmosphere was very negative,” Chuck Turner says, “but it also created a kind of turmoil and counterpressure in the industry. Contractors began to say they’d rather not have problems and became more cooperative.” Indeed, by the end of 1976, the Clearing House had made 290 placements and had begun to function as a serious referral source. But the seething tension also took its toll. Turner believes the unending confrontations “broke the spirit of the workers who had been in the demonstrations. The pressures were too great for the returns they were getting.”

The Clearing House staff and supporters decided to take a different tack. They had insisted from the start that they had no fight with white construction workers but rather with the policies of the union leaders. The turnout for the May 7 rally indicated that they overestimated any fissure between leadership and rank-and-file. They turned to the Boston Jobs Coalition policy, a more inclusive strategy. As Turner says, “We saw the only thing that would save affirmative action in the trades was an alliance with white Boston residents to break the political ties that the suburban-based unions had with the City Council.” Omar Cannon makes the same point.

At one time union workers were mostly Boston residents, but they had become suburbanites. The guy from Charlestown or South Boston who at one time could be referred to a job by his uncle or a friend down the street didn’t have that connection any longer. They were being pushed out too. This is why we started the Boston Jobs Coalition, to put a policy together that would address everybody so it wouldn’t be just minorities and you wouldn’t have a conflict between white workers and minority workers.

Census data support these observations. Though most of the Boston workforce is made up of commuters, the situation is particularly extreme in construction. In 1980, almost three of every four construction jobs in the city was filled by a nonresident. The economic advances of the post–World War II era allowed urban white craftsmen to move to roomier houses and less congested neighborhoods in the suburbs. By now, barely more than one in five white construction workers still live in the central cities of Massachusetts.¹²

Though the Coalition never made deep inroads into white neighborhoods, its broader focus and moderated tone made a residency policy more palatable to Boston politicians. In 1979, Mayor White signed an executive order implementing the Coalition’s program—50 percent of the jobs to residents, 25 percent to minorities, and 10 percent to women—on all city-supported construction. Four years later, the Boston City Council upgraded White’s order when it unanimously endorsed the identical ratios as part of the Boston Jobs Residency Ordinance. In December 1984, Mayor Ray Flynn appointed a seventeen-member liaison committee to monitor the ordinance.

The affirmative action campaigns have changed the industry, though not dramatically. Many white union leaders and rank-and-file workers continue to express resentment at the presence, minimal as it is, of people of color in the trades. Overall minority participation in construction in Massachusetts remains low, in part due to enduring patterns of exclusion and in part due to the relatively small nonwhite labor force in the commonwealth in general. Blacks and Hispanics made up 4.4 percent of the metropolitan Boston construction workforce in 1980, compared to 6.4 percent of the total workforce. On the other hand, from 1960 to 1980, the number of minority workers in construction increased by 144 percent as opposed to an all-industry gain of 121 percent. The residency policy has speeded this process. City figures generally indicate compliance. In 1983, 22 percent of the work hours on contracts covered by the Jobs Residency Ordinance were filled by minority trades workers; the following year, the number climbed to 30 percent. The principle of the ordinance has won widespread acceptance, but covered projects still only account for 8 percent of total construction in Boston.¹³

At the same time that the Jobs Coalition was being formed, affirmative action advocates in Boston moved to expand their constituency in other parts of the state. Clearing House satellites were established in Cambridge, Worcester, and Springfield. These fully integrated operations met little of the fierce resistance that had characterized the Boston office. In a city plagued by a decade of intense racial conflicts, every debate over quotas and hiring goals was magnified in the glaring national spotlight. The anxiety stemming from the building slump only exacerbated the preexisting volatile atmosphere in Boston. “Smaller towns have more intimate working relations,” notes Turner. “There was less pressure. We didn’t have the big hassles we had in Boston.” In fact, many of the building trades unions in central and western Massachusetts supported the job residency concept because of the growing influence of out-of-state contractors with their own workforces.

Attitudes in Boston eventually took a turn as well. Subsiding racial hostilities in the city created a more receptive environment. The revival of building in the early 1980s eased the panic of white workers. Above all, the rapidly growing clout of the open shop wing of the industry forced many white unionists to reconsider who their friends and enemies really were. Most union members recognize that their organizations have been slow to adapt. “Any change is going to be resisted,” says John Greenland, but he claims that minority workers now participate fully in the activities of the Brotherhood. Barney Walsh concurs. “They are part of our ranks, the same as any other member of our union today.” Compared to some other construction unions, the UBC has been recognized as more responsive to minority concerns. In an otherwise highly critical 1983 feature on race relations in Boston’s craft unions, Boston Globe reporter Gary McMillan described the Carpenters as having a “decent record of admitting blacks.”¹⁴

Chuck Turner, who now serves on the Mayor’s Liaison Committee, also believes that opportunities have increased. “I’d say that affirmative action for workers of color is no longer a program that white politicians on the City Council automatically take potshots at. The construction trades are voting for it because it’s part of a program that says white workers will also get their share. The basic assumptions are being respected. The unions are now negotiating in a genuine process.” Bob Marshall, business manager of Boston Local 33, believes the residency requirement will actually benefit the Boston unions. “The unions have the manpower available where we can supply any job in the city with 50 percent residents. We can supply them with 20 to 25 percent minorities, and we can supply the females for the job. One of the reasons people opposed this was because they were only enforcing the requirements on the big union jobs and not on the smaller jobs.”

In April of 1985, hundreds of union construction workers overflowed Gardner Auditorium at the State House to attend hearings on an Associated Builders and Contractors sponsored bill. The proposed legislation would have lowered the prevailing (i.e., union) wage scale on state-funded construction projects. ABC lobbyists contended that the aim of the bill was to provide expanded opportunities, not to break the building trades unions. As in the past, the assembled workers cheered every prounion speech and hooted every ABC speaker. But the underlying issue of race was handled differently in 1985. Massachusetts Building Trades President Tom Evers and state AFL–CIO chief Arthur Osborn hammered at the ABC logic and derided open shop minority hiring policies. They contrasted the 625 minority apprentices in the building trades unions’ programs in Massachusetts to the total of 18 certificates presented by the Yankee chapter of the ABC to graduating open shop apprentices.¹⁵ Evers argued that the time had come for the building trades to shed their narrow perspectives and build links with organizations of women and minorities against the rising antiunion tide. In a symbolic demonstration of shifting orientations and alliances, hundreds of predominantly white union workers rose to their feet to applaud black State Senator Royal Bolling’s comments criticizing racially exclusive union practices while, at the same time, opposing the ABC legislation.

The building boom in Boston has relieved much of the tension between workers on the job. Relative security reduces the perception of coworkers as competitors and thereby smooths conflicts, racial and otherwise. Turner thinks “there’s more general acceptance” on the site. Others agree, but ingrained attitudes die slowly. Joe Corbett’s experience of the 1950s is continually being replayed into the 1980s. Nazadeen Arkil describes a fairly typical event and the toll it takes on those “outsiders” who are gradually becoming “insiders.”

One day after payday, I told the guys that I was buying the coffee. My boss looked at me straight in my face and said to me, “What did you do, hit the nigger pool?” And everybody went, “Whoa.” The whole job just held their breaths. I turned to him and said, “Does that mean you don’t consider me a nigger?” He apologized and said, “You know, I’m just so used to you,” and he went through this whole thing. The whole day, everybody was more upset about it than I was. But I said to him, “That word just rolled off your tongue a little bit too easy for me.”

You gotta End the gray areas between black and white without losing your own identity, because if you’re black and proud on a construction job, you might be black and dead. The attitude is “we let you in here, what the hell else do you want.”

Arkil represents another recent development in the world of construction. She is both black and female. She is one of the millions of American women who entered the labor force in the 1970s. Many younger women have been attracted to nontraditional work, to the blue-collar manual occupations that pay far more than ghettoized clerical and service sector jobs. Some have sought careers in the building trades, particularly as carpenters and electricians and, to a lesser extent, as plumbers, painters, bricklayers, or ironworkers. “It’s hard for a woman to make the kind of money she can make in construction,” suggests Sharon Jones.

Women’s entry into construction received a big push in 1977 when the Department of Labor included women in their affirmative action guidelines for the first time. The Department issued a three-year set of hiring goals—3.1 percent in the first year, 5 percent in the second, and 6.9 percent by the third. President Jimmy Carter’s Executive Order 11246 in October 1978 strengthened the Department of Labor suggestions by mandating the quotas on any federally funded construction project over $10,000. In many ways, women were starting below the ground floor. In 1978, there were only 114 women in the entire construction labor force of Massachusetts and most of them were not craft workers.¹⁶

A spate of programs emerged to introduce women to building skills. The YWCA in downtown Boston offered the Co-ed Building Trades and the Non-Traditional Jobs for Women courses, but training programs really took off with the Massachusetts BTC-sponsored Women in Construction Project. Funded by the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), sites were set up in Brighton, Carver, Lowell, and Northampton to train women in the basics of the trades and to prepare them for their journey into the construction world. Women entered the program for the earning potential and the challenge of being a pioneer in a new field for women. Mary Ann Williams had painted and loaded trucks for Jordan Marsh. She had also tried to organize a union at the department store. She explains her move into construction carpentry: “I got fed up with working there. I was riding on the train and I saw a poster with a lot of hands holding tools in the air, and it seemed like a powerful gesture. It said, ‘Women Build Your Own Future,’ and I said, ‘Aha, I’ll build my own future.’” By the end of 1978, seventy-two students had graduated from the thirty-two-week program. Fifty-one entered union apprenticeship programs.¹⁷

If anything, the appearance of women on construction sites proved to be an even greater shock for white male construction workers than the presence of workers of color. The possibility that women could be equally competent craft workers threatened the rough-and-tumble “macho” image that many tradesmen had come to relish. “For a lot of these guys,” Arkil says with a laugh, “their fathers, their grandfathers, and God was a carpenter. So they were born with a hammer in their hand. They think I was born with an S.O.S. in one hand and Dawn in the other.” Initiation into the industry is not easy for anyone, but the transition has been particularly tough for women. Arkil says the foreman on her first job told her that she had three strikes against her—“being black, female, and left-handed.” Women in the trades commonly express that, at best, they are not taken seriously and, at worst, they are abused. After finishing the Women in Construction program, Williams found her own job—a nonunion site in Cambridge.

I was harrassed from the super all the way down. They told me to get my lumber out of what turned out to be the junk pile. They sent me over to dig out wood to make small footing forms. By the end of the day I had a rash all over—it was a mean little trick they played on me because that was where all the poison oak was.

Men don’t have to worry about sexual harassment or being raped and women do. Some men may take it lightly, but it’s a real threat. I have, and other women have, been physically grabbed. I have been assaulted by someone I worked with off my job.

There has been turnover among women in the trades, but many have persisted, finishing their apprenticeship and working steadily at the journeyman’s rate. The future seems to promise more women in construction. In 1984, 235 of the construction unions’ apprentices in Massachusetts were women, including 10.6 percent of the Boston Carpenters’ program.¹⁸ On-the-job acceptance of women has increased as time has passed and women have demonstrated their capacity to perform the work. “On a job that you’ve been on for a long time—nine months, a year—at some point, the men develop some sort of respect for you,” says Jones. “OK, if not all women can do this kind of work, at least they respect that you and the other women in the program can do this kind of work.”

Women report the same satisfaction in the work that men have always found. “If you’re a secretary or a bank executive, you’re pushing paper or answering a telephone,” Faith Calhoun observes. “In construction, you put something together, you build it, and you can show something physical to someone else.” Certainly, the high hourly wages are a big part of the appeal but, according to Jones, there is something more. “Most of us don’t do it just for the money. We wouldn’t stay in it if we didn’t love it so much.” Jones also places a great deal of importance on being part of the labor movement.

The women in the union really feel that their union is important to them. I don’t hear that from every man I meet on the job. But the women are real committed, because they have more insights into the importance of unions, because they haven’t had the opportunities to make the kind of money men do. They’ve seen that it’s important to work in groups to get to the places they want.

For women as for racial minorities, the outsider–insider dynamic has not been finally resolved. The construction workforce has changed dramatically in the last twenty years and continues to change. The industry remains at bottom, however, a white male preserve. The changes in the labor force were initially foisted on both contractors and workers by community organizations and public agencies. With time, many of the unions switched from a stance of antagonism to one of reluctant cooperation. Many observers now wonder what the future holds with a declining commitment to the principle of affirmative action among politicians and the public at large. Outside the Boston Ordinance, enforcement of hiring quotas is rapidly scaling down. Sharon Jones is proud of her reputation as a competent union carpenter, but she worries about the impact of an adverse political climate on her future.

There’s a general pervasive attitude that some day we’re going to get back to the place where we don’t have to have women in the trades, where the quotas aren’t going to be there anymore. And they’re waiting for that time and will reserve judgment until then and hopefully things will get back to the way they were. Because that happened once already, in World War II, when the Rosies were doing welding and riveting, and then the boys came back from the Army. It’s happened before and they’re waiting for that time to come again.