Liz Skidmore
Title: Business representer/organizer, New England Regional Council of Carpenters
Age: 51
Experience: 29 years
Apprenticeships are the path to well-paying union jobs in the building trades, and the percentage of women and minority apprentices has grown steadily since the recession. At the end of 2017, there were nearly 500 women apprentices in Massachusetts building trades, or more than 7 percent of the total. Union organizer Liz Carpenter, in partnership with the nonprofit Northeast Center for Tradeswomen’s Equity, is pushing for more progress. The recent launch of the “Build a Life” program has a goal of bringing women’s participation in the Massachusetts building trades up to 20 percent by 2020. The program includes a website, BuildALifeMA.org, with links to career guidance and a marketing campaign to raise the visibility of women in the building trades.
Q: What’s the biggest reason women are reluctant to consider careers in the building trades?
A: There’s not enough representation. Women don’t see women doing this work. In middle school, moms aren’t coming in talking about their careers as a welder or an ironworker. That’s why we launched the “Build a Life” campaign. We’ve got (photos of) real Massachusetts tradeswomen up on billboards and job site scrims and bus stops. A lot of people think of a big butch lesbian with a plaid shirt, and some of us are that, and some of us are not. Some of us want to get dressed up after work. The kind of woman who wants this is the woman who wants a good paycheck and a good job.
Q: What prompted your interest in construction as a career?
A: I went to college and was getting close to graduation, and it seemed like all the adults I knew, all they did was complain about their jobs. I was trying to find a job I wouldn’t complain about the rest of my life. Getting to construction sites and doing what was not traditional for a woman was appealing to me. My first job, I applied for an apprenticeship and one of the contractors I’d asked, A.J. Martini, a good union company, called me and said, “We want to put you to work.”
My first job was renovating a big old historic mansion in Malden to become A.J. Martini’s headquarters, a very unusual job. To get to work on this very ornate, high-level finish project was a special opportunity. It was an amazing way to start my carpenter’s apprenticeship, which is four years. You get partnered with a skilled person and do 160 hours of classroom training a year. It’s free, so not only did I have income across the four years of my training, but I also have no debt. I worked in the field for about 10 years and then the union opened up the path to coming on staff in 1999.
Q: What was the work environment in construction like at the time?
A: I was almost always the only woman everywhere I went. And so that by itself is challenging. There’s certainly wear-and-tear and dealing with the little jokes and comments: “You’re going to get coffee?” On the other hand, I’m almost six feet tall and I’m white, so that helped with not having to deal with a lot of bullshit. It’s hard for guys to look at me and tell me I can’t do the job. The other thing that helped me was I was incredibly interested in learning and loved the camaraderie on the job site.
Q: Which trades are underrepresented among women?
A: It all boils down to union and contractor leadership. Any grade in Massachusetts that’s not doing well, I can find another state where they are doing well. We had 20 years of failed strategies, doing leadership training, but the number was still 2 to 3 percent. When UMass-Boston signed a project labor agreement on a $700 million cluster of work, they said, “You’re going to meet the city of Boston’s goals (for minority and women-owned business participation),” and they set up an access and opportunity committee to meet regularly with the state to make sure contractors are meeting the goals. This was innovation. This was having compliance not just done by the contractor or owner, but inviting the public into that conversation. Community groups started going to those monthly meetings and we were able to hold the industry accountable in a much more effective way than happened before.
This was a way to do the demand side. We also wrote a manual, “Finishing the Job,” that tells people how to do it, making the case for why and a checklist for general contractors and owners. Now as more and more women are getting work, we’re turning back to the supply (side). That’s where “Build a Life” comes in. We’re getting 30 to 50 people every month to meetings in Dudley Square. In Boston, half of the women who work in the building trades are women of color.
Q: What’s the wage gap between men and women?
A: According to the latest studies, zero. And that’s because it’s union. In a union situation, men and women are paid exactly the same. It’s about $20 an hour starting wage for a first-year apprentice, and all the apprentices have step raises. Who has access to a 5 percent raise every six months and the training to make you worthy of that raise?
Skidmore’s Five Favorite Labor and Civil Rights Leaders:
- Peter J. McGuire
- Mother Jones
- Harriet Tubman
- Delores Huerta
- Clara Lemlich
