Women in Construction
October 23, 2012Read the original transcript at https://nccnews.expressions.syr.edu.
Sunday, October 28, 2012
Repost: Syracuse women build homes
Read the original transcript at https://nccnews.expressions.syr.edu.
Repost: The Mag Interview | Alise Martiny helps women build a future
THE MAG INTERVIEW
The Mag Interview | Alise Martiny helps women build a future
Alise Martiny, who had been a concrete finisher for 32 years, is now the business manager at the Greater Kansas City Trades Council.
Alise Martiny of Merriam is business manager for the Greater Kansas City Building and Trades Council. This conversation took place at Crossroads Coffeehouse.
Q What is the Building and Trades Council?
AThe AFL-CIO is the umbrella organization over all of organized labor. Underneath that are different departments, and one is building trades. So I work with all the construction trades on a daily basis.
Q How did you end up with this big union job? It’s not the kind of post people expect a woman to fill.
A No, it’s not. I’m the first female to hold that job in Kansas City and in Missouri. I’ve been in construction a long time.
Q How did you get into it?
A I was going to KU and I got up there and decided it wasn’t for me. Came home and heard an ad on the radio trying to get more minorities and females into the construction industry. This was 1980, when President Carter was pushing for affirmative action.
Q How did you get trained?
A I did an apprenticeship program with the cement masons.
Q How much does it cost to get into an apprenticeship program like that?
A Nothing. It’s all paid for by private dollars from labor management. So it makes a lot more sense for some people than taking on huge debt for college — it’s become people’s highest debt after home mortgages.
The programs are three to five years and when you start out you start out on a 50 percent scale, which is about $14 to $20 bucks an hour.
And you start right out getting health insurance and a pension, which not a lot of people get anymore.
Q You spend a lot of time speaking to young women about construction jobs. What is your message to them?
A That there are great opportunities for women in construction. Our numbers for women are very low. Our goal for females in Kansas City, Missouri, is 2 percent, and we are meeting that, but just barely.
Q Wow. Two percent is the goal?
A Yes, it’s low. It’s so sad.
Q Why do you think it’s so low?
A If you look at what it is across the country, it’s 3 1/2 to 4 percent. That’s low, and we are still lagging.
I think we haven’t done a good job of letting women know that they can do this job. Construction is a great job for a woman, especially if she is trying to provide health insurance, a pension and a livable wage for her and her family.
Read the full interview at http://www.kansascity.com/.
Sunday, October 14, 2012
Repost: Pioneer tradeswoman to read at Queen Anne Books
Queen Anne-based author Hadiyah Joan Carlyle will read from her memoir Torch in the Dark: One Woman’s Journey at Queen Anne Books, 1811 Queen Anne Ave. N. on Thursday, Oct. 18 at 6:30 p.m.
Carlyle’s book tells the story of how she, as a single mother, was one of the first women since World War II to enter the trades as a union welder. Beginning in a Jewish immigrant neighborhood in New Jersey, the story moves through San Francisco’s colorful Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s to arrive at last at Fairhaven Shipyard in Bellingham. For Carlyle, welding became both a path to self-reliance and economic survival and a metaphor for healing from early childhood trauma. “As one of the first female welders in the West Coast shipyards, Carlyle paved the way for women working in the trades today,” comments Arleen Williams, author of The Thirty-Ninth Victim.
The story of Carlyle’s journey offers inspiration for anyone struggling with issues of abuse and oppression. In addition, the book provides perspective on the culture of the 1960s and 1970s. “No one has even come close to the depth and detail of the sixties that Carlyle reaches,” says Jack Remick, author of The Deification and Blood.
Activist, hiker, grandmother, Carlyle is the mother of Washington State 36th District Legislator Reuven Carlyle. More information about Torch in the Dark is available at www.torchinthedark.com.
Read the original article at http://queenannenews.com/.
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