Tanya Ridley, Local 46 at WTC (photo- J. Woolhead)
By Julie Shapiro
Monday, October 19, 2009
Ashia Johns goes to work every day wearing a white hard hat on her head and a flashy white-gold diamond ring on her left hand.
The hard hat keeps her safe as she builds the new Goldman Sachs headquarters Downtown. The engagement ring look-alike, which Johns bought for herself, also keeps her safe — from the attentions of the dozens of men she works with.
“I wear the ring as a decoy,” Johns said, laughing as she ate lunch on the edge of the construction site on a recent afternoon. “They don’t really bother me,” she said of her male co-workers. “I just use [the ring] to throw them off.”
Johns, 35, is one of the rare women who choose carpentry as a career. For every 65 male carpenters, there is only one female carpenter, according to a 2008 U.S. Dept. of Labor study. Other trades are even more skewed toward men — in the same 2008 study, the most unbalanced of all professions in the country was bricklaying, which boasted only one woman for every 230 men.
On the whole, women represent 2.5 percent of the total workers in the construction and excavation industry, up from 2.1 percent 20 years ago, the Dept. of Labor said.
In Lower Manhattan, where so much construction has flooded the neighborhood that the city and state created a command center to keep track of it all, the numbers do not appear to be much different, though no one collects the statistics. Women at several large construction sites said they work with hundreds of men but just a handful of women.
The Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center runs several programs to attract women and minorities to work sites Downtown, including classes and job placement assistance.
“It’s not a man’s world anymore,” said Beverly Bobb, who manages the command center’s equal-opportunity programs. “If a woman can do it, why not?”
While Bobb said women remain very much in the minority and occasionally face harassment or poor work conditions, those who spoke to Downtown Express this month did not describe an atmosphere of negativity or discrimination. The biggest challenges of the job come not from their minority status but from the job itself, the women said.
Arlene Fisher, a surveyor at One World Trade Center, the Freedom Tower, said the most difficult thing she has to do is navigate the red tape associated with rebuilding ground zero.
“It’s different than any of the other jobs I’ve worked on,” Fisher said. “The chain of command is longer than normal… It takes 10 times as long to get anything done.”
Fisher, 39, spoke of her male co-workers with affection and a trace of condescension.
“Believe it or not, the guys on construction sites have good manners,” she said. Her one problem is that “They just don’t listen,” she said. “But most of the guys are well-trained,” she added. “They don’t like to see me get mad.”
Fisher, who is divorced and has two young children, started working in construction nine years ago after growing frustrated with her low-paying job as a special-education teacher. Now she spends most days outside, and on a recent afternoon she was using a laser to measure whether a concrete wall around the Freedom Tower’s core was perfectly straight and exactly where it was supposed to be.
Fisher and others described the salary — an average of nearly $50,000 a year for a full-fledged union member, plus benefits, according to a women’s advocacy group — as the biggest perk of the job.
The promise of good money drew Estelle St. Clair into a carpenters’ union in 1999, when she was out of work and had a 5-year-old son to care for.
“I did it at first for the income, but now a lot of the work fascinates me,” said St. Clair, who is building Tower 4 at the World Trade Center site. “Looking at the massive structures in New York, it makes you interested in how they get done, start to finish.”
reprinted with permission from downtown express
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