A LTTE from the New York Times:
To the Editor:
I fully agree with Bob Herbert and President-elect Barack Obama that we must fix the infrastructure. But big-muscle construction jobs seem male-oriented. So what about the women? What retooling for jobs is being considered for all those women who have lost their employment?
Alison Goodwin Schiff
New York, Nov. 26, 2008
Yes, what about the women? Are there further plans for economic stimulus that would involve jobs that wouldn’t require women to break into male-dominated fields and all the hassle that entails if they want a piece of the economic-stimulus pie? Are there plans to ensure that a substantial portion of the construction jobs go to women and women-owned businesses? Are there plans to ensure that women don’t face discrimination on the job while employed with these infrastructure projects?
And while we’re asking, what about unions and prevailing-wage laws? Are there plans to ensure that the stimulus plan will strengthen rather than weaken these?
Ah, no fair! I was just going to write about that!!! I mean, I’m 54, unemployed, bad knees and ankles - am I going to do manual labor in this brave new world?
What we need is less discrimination in those jobs against women. I am a woman and I have never worked in anything that was not a male dominated field. I rode horses and broke colts to pay my way through college. When I graduated I went to work in an oil refinery as a chemist. Later I earned a M.S. in environmental engineering. I have worked in waste water plants, as a foreman over a town maintenance crew and now as a state regulator of irrigation wells.
I worked my ass and have always refused to listen to men who claimed I was taking a man’s job. I learned to take their crap and fight back young. I refused to take a lower paying “woman’s work”. Women need to assert their entitlement to a decent job and not be afraid to put a little muscle into it.
any construction job that is federally funded is subject to the davis-bacon act, so yes, there would have to be prevailing wage guarantees if there were a federally funded stimulus package to improve infrastructure. that is, assuming that there isn’t some rider in the stimulus bill that doesn’t waive davis-bacon. but the default rule would be that prevailing wages must be paid. and that, in turn, ends up strengthening unions by making union firms more competitive in the bidding process (because every contractor has to pay what is effectively union wages)
the questions about women is harder. there really are very very few women in the construction industry. at least that’s my experience working as a union lawyer. i highly doubt in the current political climate there will be any appetite for set-asides, or even women/minority-owned firm guarantees. actually when there are such set-asides, most of the “women-owned” or “minority-owned” firms are a sham, in my experience. whenever i’ve dealt with them, they turn out to be an established (i.e. white male owned and operated) business which has been created in the name of the person who really calls the shots’ wife, or they pay a black man a lot of money to be a sort of figure-head president or owner on paper. i’ve gotten really cynical about the effectiveness of those kind of set-asides.
the questions about women is harder. there really are very very few women in the construction industry.
Right, and why is that? If it’s a culture that keeps women out, then providing jobs only in the construction sector is discriminatory because it will either mean women get fewer jobs, or face discrimination on the job, or have to endure worse conditions than their male counterparts.
If it’s a lack of training, then efforts need to be made to train them. I would imagine that there would be training made available for the skilled trades, since those folks would be needed en masse for some of these large-scale projects.
If it’s a culture that keeps women from even considering the idea in the first place, then more effort has to be put into changing that. Set-asides aren’t the answer, for the reasons you state, but there are a lot of things that can be done to get more women into the field (as well as a lot of things that need doing that aren’t highly-physical infrastructure jobs).
it’s probably both, lack of training and the culture that keeps women out in the first place. actually the two probably reinforce each other. when a workforce is almost all-male, it breeds the kind of culture that is pretty uninviting for women. which means that a lot of women won’t seek training and a lot of people already in the industry won’t be going out of their way to provide it to women.
on the other hand, necessity is the mother of invention. it this economic decline gets to the point that gov’t-financed construction jobs are the only jobs around, more women will probably give it a try simply because they have no better option. the male-dominated incumbent workforce might not like it, but unlike the depression-era, we at least have title VII now. if nothing else, a lot of contractors could end up in consent awards agreeing to increase the number of women they hire. and that could work to change the culture in the long run.
As someone that has worked as a woman in many “male” jobs (construction, garbage hauling, milking cows, tree planting, and some others) I have to say that the locker room actions and attitudes can turn many women off.
I also found that I had to find different ways to do things that didn’t rely completely on brawn, using levers and other mechanical devices to do the same things (I.E. my BRAIN). Those manual jobs really should be retooled and procedures altered so it doesn’t take as much upper body strength to do them.
I mean, really, why do people think that bulldozers were invented? At one time ditch diggers did all that kind of work. So, why on earth are they continuing to do so much hard labor?
Oh, and if universal health care were also implemented at the same time, that would open up lots of jobs for women as nurses, doctors, and other health care providers, along with support jobs like office workers and clerks. There would have to be massive hiring of all kinds of workers to take care of all the people that have been doing without. If Congress would just pass HR 676, Medicare for All, it could get going quite quickly.