Women in Skilled Trades Encourage Others to Join the Workforce
Date Posted: September 24, 2019
Posted In: Ideas, Workforce,
From NJBIZ: Ironworker Lissette Rossi can be on the same job all week, constructing the skeletons of buildings at 50 feet in the air with her union Local 399 in Camden. Still, after three days feeling comfortable with the height, she might, as she puts it, “get the heebie-jeebies.”
“You can’t be scared of heights, but you gotta respect them,” she said. “If you’re used to it, I say ‘get down.’ I let it check me every day because I respect it.”
Ironworking is a dangerous job. The highest Rossi has ever been suspended was 180 feet on site at the Ben Franklin Bridge, and she’s lost a good friend to a fall. Still, it’s her passion.
“I know it sounds cliché, but it’s true,” she said. “I do what I love, and I love what I do.”
Rossi is one of the few women ironworkers in New Jersey. In total, she said, there might be seven. Women make up 1.6 percent of ironworkers and 3.4 percent of the construction trades workforce, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Those 3.4 percent are laborers, painters, construction and maintenance workers, carpenters, pipelayers, plumbers, pipefitters, steamfitters, and electricians, along with their first-line supervisors, construction and building inspectors, and construction managers.
But as a valuable part of the workforce, women can help close the growing gap in skilled labor in the U.S. For every four people who leave the trades, only one replacement is supplied by an apprentice program, according to Go Build America.
One woman, an expert plumber in Staten Island, N.Y., wants to flip the script. Judaline Cassidy runs Tools & Tiaras, a summer camp for girls 6 to 16 to explore trade work and open their minds to opportunities in traditionally male-dominated trade professions.
Cassidy held her summer camp at the American Standard headquarters in Piscataway in August, and 10 girls and teenagers attended.