Kaitlyn Moser had been working in bars for about 10 years when she decided she needed a change. The pandemic had fundamentally altered the service industry, and she wanted to be better able to support herself and her son, who’s now 10 years old.
Moser, who is now 29, has two aunts who are retired electricians, so she asked them how they’d managed their financial independence and comfortable retirements. They pointed her to a local pre-apprenticeship program run by a nonprofit organization called Chicago Women in Trades. There, she got the resources she needed to prepare her both physically and academically to qualify for an apprenticeship—as well as sage advice on how to navigate such a male-heavy industry. Moser grew up with seven brothers. She had no illusions about what job sites could be like.
“They gave me so much insight from a woman’s perspective,” Moser, who is now a first-year apprentice with a local electrician’s union, said. She wanted to know everything from how to manage future relationships to whether and how she could get promoted in the field; she was also given tools for how to handle workplace harassment, whether she experiences it herself or sees someone else targeted. “I’ve heard horror stories … from women that I’ve met, and they would cry about their experience,” Moser said.
Construction trades can provide excellent careers. They are well paid, especially for jobs that don’t require a college degree, and are highly unionized. They can also lead to opportunities for self-employment or small-business ownership once workers become licensed. Traditionally, though, they’ve been dominated by white men. Moser became an apprentice at a time when women were specifically recruited to join early-career apprenticeship training programs, and when the federal government stepped up to ensure that these training programs took measures to prevent and deal with harassment against women and minorities on job sites.
President Donald Trump has put a stop to this. From the beginning of his second term, he’s attacked diversity, equity, and inclusion, which had helped bring more workers into the construction labor force, and this summer his Department of Labor announced a new rule that eliminates a nearly 10-year-old sexual harassment training requirement that had barely gotten off the ground. “It almost breaks my heart because I feel like it took so long to get where we’re at, and it’s taken a second to go backwards,” Moser said.
Apprenticeships are highly sought after. Many provide on-the-job training at no cost, and some pay workers while they’re still learning. Apprentices don’t just save on the tuition costs they’d pay in a higher-education program, they also don’t have to work additional hours at an unrelated job to support themselves. And for workers who already have children, it’s a more financially secure path than the more traditional college route.
The only problem is that these types of training programs are heavily concentrated in male-dominated construction and manufacturing fields. Many girls and young women simply don’t believe careers in the trades are available to them after high school, an idea that’s reinforced by stereotypes of plumbing, steelworking, and similar careers as dirty, physical, rough work. Less than 10 percent of construction jobs are held by women in any given year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but those workers are overrepresented in sales, business, and management positions. The kind of skilled work that can lead to promotions—pipe fitting, plumbing, carpentry, electrical work, etc.—is even more lopsided toward men, with only about 4 percent of those jobs taken by women.
Pushing for more women and people of color to have access to these apprenticeship training programs, and the good jobs they lead to, is about fairness and equity. “Part of why a white man with no college degree outearns a Black woman with a college degree is because white men can get access to those good jobs without the education, where Black women, in order to get higher earnings, have to get that additional education,” said Kate Bahn, chief economist at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “We don’t see women, and women of color in particular, having those opportunities for upward mobility without having to invest a huge amount in their education or otherwise.”
Ensuring that apprenticeships are more widely available can help level the playing field, especially when you consider that young women often already have caregiving duties that can make it hard to balance an education program with the need to be a breadwinner. Not only do apprenticeships pay, but they often provide sick leave and other benefits that a college program wouldn’t.
Affirmative action rules established in the 1960s helped push employers to recruit more diverse workforces, but those workers still found that they were discriminated against on the job—some before they even started their job. An Institute for Women’s Policy Research survey found that nearly half of women in these fields said that they were held to a different standard or faced discrimination, and more than a quarter reported they are “always or frequently” harassed for being a woman.
“The vast majority of women and LGBTQ+ workers say they experience some kind of harassment, regardless of the kind of employment they have,” said Emily Labarbera-Twarog, an associate professor at the University of Illinois who studies workplace harassment. “But these are jobs where women are in the very, very, very small minority. I mean, you’re talking about 4 percent of the population.… So it’s super small, and harassment is definitely something that is happening on a regular basis.”
President Barack Obama worked to expand apprenticeship programs during his tenure, and his Department of Labor established new anti-harassment rules at the end of his second term. Those rules didn’t merely require anti-harassment training, they also expanded the categories that were protected from harassment and held companies accountable for their failures to protect their workers.
While the rules survived during Trump’s first term, it wasn’t until President Joe Biden was elected that the Obama orders had a president truly invested in progress. Biden made it one of his explicit goals to bring one million more women into construction jobs and to require that some federal contractors provide childcare. His administration also worked to expand apprenticeship opportunities into more female-dominated fields, like nursing. When Trump entered office, he signed executive orders reversing many of the DEI requirements established by Obama and Biden. (Chicago Women in Trades is one of several groups suing over those executive orders.) The anti-harassment rule was targeted for elimination by Trump’s second-term Department of Labor in July, and the public comment period ended earlier this month. The Trump administration said it was eliminating “onerous and burdensome regulatory mandates.”
Ariane Hegewisch, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, said the programs were much more involved than simply watching a video, a traditional form of anti-harassment training with which many people with desk jobs might be familiar. These training sessions were often designed in short, interactive modules within unions or on job sites. The training also provided information about how to report harassment, and the Department of Labor was tasked with holding companies accountable.
Prior to their advent, women had often said that when they made a complaint about harassment at work, nothing would happen. Or worse: Since hiring for construction jobs can often happen on a project-by-project basis, those who complained would find that they were not picked up for the next job. Hegewisch said that the Department of Labor rule was a signal to companies that they should take complaints seriously. Rolling that back “is a whole way of saying that this doesn’t matter,” she said.
Multiple trades and unions often work together on job sites, as well, so the fact that the federal government is ending these requirements means that even those unions or companies that take harassment seriously might have less control over what their workers face on job sites. “If the Trump administration is saying you no longer need to worry about anti-discrimination and harassment … then they’re going to make it an even more hostile environment and they’re not going to be very tolerant of people speaking up,” Labarbera-Twarog said.
More importantly, these trainings also provided information about how to report harassment and how to help if someone witnessed, but was not the target of, the harassment. Labarbera-Twarog said many new trainings she has worked on helping design also frame harassment as a safety issue: If workers were busy cracking jokes or doodling obscene drawings on unfinished drywall, or if someone was subject to harassment, it can keep everyone from being as focused on their work as they should be. “When we frame it as a health and safety issue, I think it becomes a much more accessible way to think about it,” she said.
Without the anti-harassment training requirement, and the accountability the Department of Labor had provided around it, some of the push to better design and study the impact of these trainings may end. Proactive prevention by companies may end, as well. Women who experience harassment will have to report it to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and wait for a resolution, which can take as long as two years. During that time, they might have to go without pay, as well, she said. “The burden is on the worker to understand when they’ve been wronged,” said Beth Berendsen, policy director at Chicago Women in Trades.
Many of these programs were too new to be fully evaluated for their efficacy. And while women and Latino representation, especially, had ticked up in many of these fields in the past two years, it was still an uphill battle for these workers to earn these competitive positions. The Trump administration has pulled back funding and canceled contracts for many apprenticeship programs in general. “They talk a big game on apprenticeship,” said Mary Alice McCarthy, the senior director of the Center on Education and Labor at New America. “They actually haven’t really put any resources towards apprenticeship.”
Canceling diversity requirements on government-contracted job sites matters too because local, state, and federal government contracts can be such a huge part of this field. For many women, these are the positions for which they’re most likely to be hired; when they are, it can make the difference between staying on their career path or being forced to look for other work to make ends meet.
There is already evidence that Trump’s actions have had an effect, though. The United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America pulled out of a female-centered conference, Tradeswomen Build Nations, scheduled for Chicago on September 19 to 21. “The UBC and all affiliated Councils should not have any involvement or expenditure for this conference,” the union said in a memo, citing “current executive orders and policies targeting identity-based initiatives.”
Moser is continuing her education and already has a job as an electrician. She said she is committed to staying in her field no matter what, that she’s been able to use humor to defuse any particularly awkward situations, and advocates for herself to fully take part in trainings and job opportunities. “I wanted to be proud of my workday, knowing that I made an honest living. Like I made something,” she said about her decision to go into this field. “I can walk away from a project and look up at it and know that I played a part in building that or turning on the lights.”
Without the pre-apprenticeship program and apprenticeships, which helped make her job transition affordable, she doesn’t know if she would have had the confidence or ability to make her jump into a new career—and she knows that young girls need to see other women doing the work to feel they can too. It’s a shame, she said, because women come to these jobs with experiences and talents that will make the industry better. “You know, we want to add to the world,” she said.
The post Trump Is Making It Harder for Women to Work in Construction appeared first on New Republic.
