On Equal Terms - gender & solidarity by Susan Eisenberg

At a Glance

Metadata	Details
Publication Date	2023-12-01
Journal	Labor Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas
Authors	Sharon Szymanski

Abstract

WelcomeEverything you thought you knewmust be relearned overnight.How to walk.Walk, not trip, over cords, 2 × 4s,used coffee cups, concrete cores,Walk, 40 pounds on your shoulder, acrossrebar or a wood plank: glide,not wobble, not look like the bouncebeneath each bootstrap scares you…How to respond—within protocol—when someone takes your ladder or tools,imitates your voice on the loudspeaker,spraypaints Cunt on your Baker staging,urinates in your hardhat,drives to your homewhere you live alonewith your daughterand keys your truck parkedin your own driveway.—from Stanley’s Girl, Susan EisenbergSusan Eisenberg’s On Equal Terms: gender & solidarity (https://onequalter.ms) is an interactive, digital art installation that documents the pioneering experiences of the first women who entered the skilled construction trades in the 1970s, and the women who followed them. Although suitable for any viewers, I plan on incorporating the installation into my undergraduate courses in a state-university labor studies program with students who are in union-sponsored trades-apprenticeship programs. While the content of this art installation is perfect for labor history and labor studies students or union-based workshops, this virtual installation can make any class come alive. Eisenberg’s art installation represents the experiences of real workers, raises many questions that are crucial to the labor movement as more workers become interested in unionizing, and provides opportunities for delving into related historical, economic, political, and cultural issues.On Equal Terms: gender & solidarity, launched in 2018, is a reconceived digital version of the nine-hundred-square-foot physical mixed-media art installation initiated in 2008. The virtual installation offers an engaging, interactive educational experience. In many ways, Eisenberg’s virtual art project is a visual representation of her well-known and classic oral labor history book, We’ll Call You If We Need You: Experiences of Women Working Construction, first published in 1998 and reissued with a new preface in 2018.1 The stories of some of the thirty women interviewed for this book—electricians, ironworkers, painters, carpenters, and plumbers—are included in the art installation, as are many of the themes that structure the book.The overall purpose of Eisenberg’s digital art installation is to provoke conversations, asking viewers to make connections between then and now, and to imagine what circumstances need to be changed so that all workers might lead decent and flourishing lives in a more humane and just society. The installation provides a historical link between the raw and physical challenges the first tradeswomen faced in the skilled trades, and the similar experiences of women who enter historically male-dominated occupations, and the similar experiences of all working women, and all low-wage marginalized workers. But most significantly, the installation highlights the discriminatory and exclusionary experiences of a first group of women who entered the trades. This can be an eyeopener for anyone who can’t imagine fearing for their life in order to secure a decent-paying job, not having a bathroom down the hall or anywhere nearby, having their car tires punctured as a blatant reminder that you are not wanted at your job, in-your-face sexism and racism, and being the only woman in your “office” (job site). The installation not only presents the physical and emotional challenges these first women faced, but also celebrates the sisterhood, solidarity, satisfaction, joy, and pride that these tradeswomen experienced and that tradeswomen continue to build and share today with their union sisters and brothers. While viewing the installation, one cannot help but ask, “How have circumstances changed for women in the trades, if at all, or, how have they stayed the same?” And “What work still needs to be done to achieve equity for women in the trades as well as for all working people?” To be sure, these questions hold the possibility for potential research projects for labor studies or labor history classrooms, as well as endless discussion possibilities for all viewers.Eisenberg’s unique history within the labor movement adds a rich layer of credibility and respect to her art installation. She was among the first cohort of women to enter the construction trades in 1978 as a union electrician apprentice when President Carter, pressured to open the trades up to women, instructed the Department of Labor to set goals and timetables for hiring females on federally funded construction projects. The goals were intended to increase the number of tradeswomen to 6.9 percent of the entire workforce over three years; this goal was never achieved in construction. As a member of Local 103 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Eisenberg worked for fifteen years on construction sites in the Boston area as an apprentice, journeywoman, and foreman. Her trades experiences, insights, reflections, and overall camaraderie with other tradespeople have resulted in several books, essays, poetry collections, and speaking engagements. On her website she describes herself as a “poet, visual artist and oral historian.” Currently, she is a resident artist/scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center and the poetry editor of Labor (susaneisenberg.com).The construction industry is a significant part of our economy, characterized by high-paying jobs and good benefits, especially if unionized; overall, women covered by a union contract earn on average 22.6 percent more per week than nonunionized women.2 Today, with over eleven million workers, construction represents almost 7 percent of all those employed in 2021. These statistics rank it sixth among the fourteen industry categories for which the Bureau of Labor Statistics collects data.3 Overall, more than three hundred thousand women worked in construction occupations in 2020, the highest number ever.4 Yet women represent fewer than one in twenty of all workers in construction, and at 4 percent of all construction workers, they are significantly underrepresented.5 Today the construction industry is 87.2 percent white, 7.1 percent Black / African American, 1.7 percent Asian, and 38.9 percent Hispanic or Latino (these percentages do not add up to 100 percent because there is a large overlap between white and Hispanic).6 In fact, Hispanic women led the growth for all women entering the trades after the Great Recession.7 Eisenberg’s installation explores the pathbreaking journey of women into this significant, lucrative industry.The opening (or landing) page of On Equal Terms (fig. 1) invites viewers to “wander through these rooms as you might a gallery.” (Given that the installation has twelve rooms, I will discuss only a handful, but hopefully that will be enough to provide the scope and “feel” of the entire installation.) Like a physical art gallery that utilizes various methods to lead visitors in a preferred flow, the site has a large arrow and an “Enter” cue on the first page, and a “Next” cue at the top of every page. (In the top left corner of every page there is also a small hamburger menu that provides a quick link to every room and its contents.) Similar to an art gallery, there are many diversions to entice viewers to abandon the linear pathway. For example, a row of squares on the bottom of the very first page entices viewers to jump in at random. Each square, with a distinguishing photo, represents a theme that is explored in individual rooms in the installation: tradeswomen’s gear as iconography, work/ family issues, graffiti and porn, job deaths and accidents, audio testimonials by tradeswomen on many different topics, and a copy of the 1978 Affirmative Action guidelines. However, I would advise my students to jump to the tenth square/room, the “Curator’s Scrapbook,” and read the short description “About the Curator” for background information about Eisenberg, as well as the “Welcome” section, which provides a brief overview and purpose of the entire project. As Eisenberg states, “The construction industry is both unique and emblematic of larger societal struggles between solidarity and division, between inclusiveness and other-ing. The choice for the industry—in situations of harassment or discrimination—between protecting the high-value veteran employee or the newcomer, is the same across all occupational fields.” She concludes, “As you look and listen, I encourage you to consider what would be required to create a workplace, classroom, community, country where each person is treated—not hostilely, not identically, but—on equal terms.”As with any trip to an art gallery or museum, one can glide through Eisenberg’s installation and leave with general yet powerful impressions, but to use the installation as an educational experience requires a bit of planning. To entice my students, I would have them begin with the room labeled “Stella.” Amazing Stella—a life-size replica of a tradeswoman, in typical coveralls with an iconic tool belt, standing on a six-foot ladder, in a simulated jobsite—was originally created in 1990 for a physical art show and has been adapted for an online experience (fig. 2). She is presented in a clever, 360-degree rotating view. Her braided hair is made from flannel work shirts; her face is a collage of tradeswomen faces; her eyes are fuses; and her lips (viewers/students can decide whether she’s smiling or smirking, and why) are fashioned from green electrical wire. And then there is Stella’s diamond hardhat, which has a room of its own—a pictorial collage of women workers in hardhats of various colors, conscientiously working in different postures, which, according to the information in the “Curator’s Scrapbook,” shows “how capable women are at all aspects of their trade.” I might ask my students, after viewing the entire installation, to return to the diamond hardhat and ask what the diamond hardhat represents to them. Why diamonds?Hanging from Stella’s body are numerous tags—the kind used to label valves—on which tradeswomen have written phrases that represent how they were “labeled or diminished” (fig. 3). The telling tag-messages include “Go home, you’re taking a man’s job”; “We don’t trust women here”; “Cute young thing—fat cow—thunder thighs”; “I’m going to break you”; “Radical Bull-Dyke”; and “Here’s the Quota.” Students might write their own tags—about their own jobs, or what they perceive they might hear as tradeswomen today, or as workers in other nontraditional jobs for women (or men), or as workers who don’t conform to certain gender expectations.The messages on “Stella’s tags” reflect a historical context when ugly stereotyping and threats of brutal violence by men, mostly white, were routinely used to maintain their hierarchy and discourage women from entering or remaining in the trades. Tradesmen feared that women would enter the exclusive male-dominated trades, learn the skills that gave the tradesmen their status, and, indeed, defined their manliness, and diminish or eradicate the economic security and well-being of tradesmen’s families. Overall, women’s presence in the trades undermined the powerful ideology of the “family wage,” which, according to Nancy MacLean in Freedom Is Not Enough, “shored up the place of white men as household breadwinners and the citizens of public life, as it consigned to secondary status not only white female earners but also most men and women of color.”8It can be a lesson for students to contrast the brutally vicious messages on the “Stella tags” as representing particular historical and economic forces with the rather benign but insipid and powerful propaganda formulated by the US government to pull women (mainly married women) into the workforce during World War II, as shown in the film The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter. Today’s students roll their eyes in amazement while viewing Rosie the Riveter, where homemaking skills such as sewing, operating kitchen gadgets, and even filing one’s nails are shown as adaptable to the skills required in wartime factory jobs. Women were needed in these “men’s” jobs and, in contrast to the first tradeswomen, were encouraged to enter the workforce as patriotic, capable, and respected workers. However, what often gets lost in this movie version is the fact that most “Rosies” were low-wage women who always had been in the labor force and jumped at the chance to earn higher wages in the war-focused industrial jobs vacated by men going off to war. In fact, three-quarters of the nineteen million women who worked during the war were already in the workforce or had been previously employed prior to marriage.9 After the war, most of these women didn’t have the option of returning to being full-time housewives. Rather, they were forced to give up the higher-paying industrial jobs to the returning soldiers and go back to those from which they came: low-paying, low-status, more traditional women’s jobs as domestics, waitresses, or cafeteria workers.10But why, in the 1970s, did women become interested and active in entering the trades—historically characterized as men’s work that was too physical, too dirty, and too dangerous for women? A combination of forces—economic, the feminist movement with its emphasis on equity of pay and opening economic opportunities for women, and the role of government—all played a part. The construction industry and the building trades had the reputation of being one of the last holdouts to the entry of workers of color and women—women seeking something better than the low-paying, dead-end, typically female occupations.11 In the 1970s, after decades of post-World War II relative prosperity and an increased standard of living, worker’s wages stalled as forces prevented workers from securing their fair share of increasing productivity. As a result, more married women were pulled into the labor force as the two-income family became essential to maintain expected and familiar lifestyles. Between 1979 and 2018 the average income of middle-income households grew from $57,420 to $69,559. If not for the contribution of the working female partner, the household’s income would have increased to only $58,502.12 And increasing numbers of families were headed by women who were responsible for their family’s well-being. Women, especially those in low-income households, needed and wanted well-paying jobs with benefits to maintain their families. From 1990 to 2019 the share of households headed by single women increased from 17.6 percent to 22.6 percent. If married women who head two-earner households are added in, the percentage of women-headed-households increases to over 50 percent, with Black female-headed households reaching 60 percent.13 The blue-collar jobs in the trades, especially if unionized, became more desirable—not only because a college degree was not required but also because of the good pay and other economic benefits as well as offering unique career opportunities, the chance to perform physical labor, work outside an office, learn new skills, and face new challenges that differed in major ways from more traditional “women’s jobs.” Women saw construction jobs as essential to economic security for themselves and their families, as well as a liberating choice that was being championed by the women’s movement and organizations.One of the first advocacy organizations for women was called simply Advocates for Women. Founded in 1971 in San Francisco, this organization focused on gaining economic power for low-income women and was instrumental in helping them gain access to the skilled trades. Over the next ten years, over ninety-one such organizations joined together to form a Women’s Work Force Network. From this group, a task force was formed for the explicit purpose of getting women into the building trades, especially economically disadvantaged women.14 Also grounded in the women’s movement, United Tradeswomen, a grassroots organization, was formed in New York City in 1979 for the purpose of helping working-class women gain entry into blue-collar, male-dominated jobs. Given that women were typically the only females at their job sites, United Tradeswomen served as a place they could meet, talk, support each other, plan public forums and actions, and learn the ropes about being new members in their unions. Numerous similar support organizations sprang up around New York City and in other cities across the United States.15 In 1974, union women founded the Coalition of Labor Union Women, which advocated for affirmative action for women and men of color as well as offering support and resources for antidiscrimination causes.Today this tradition of collective efforts to get women into the trades by tradeswomen, union and government and For example, in more than percent of those in building trades union are While this percentage is still it is the average and the highest such percentage in the United Women continue to support each other and the about the construction In more than three thousand women the Tradeswomen in it to be the of women construction workers in the And with the to get one million more women into the trades as an hundred thousand construction jobs are there are for significantly, the number of women working by and the I would ask my students to these three rooms next because they continue the of women entering the trades and add a new to the but more standard of labor by and the of the These rooms, with the significant and collective by many different of women, other and labor to secure more for women to gain access to the construction industry.The movement, the movement, the on which women workers seeking access to the male-dominated jobs in the building trades themselves on the The of on or The to the added to the thought that by to the they could it didn’t of working women, labor, the feminist movement, union and other organizations to and themselves on the in President order that women be included in federally work first order only The Equal of more to the This workers the to in as well as to public And then in 1978 President affirmative action As a of affirmative Susan Eisenberg entered the skilled The and for and in the Affirmative Action is included in its with Eisenberg’s written in the in the by the collective efforts required to achieve more the room and stories in women’s own about the faced by women and other workers in the construction in benefits, and The a of fourteen between 1990 and by the New York City on and the New York City of While the are they provide as well as information for anyone research in this for in the might be for students to various and them to the or, for even more students might taking on the various of the different or asking these pioneering women of experienced of and harassment just because they were in it that the that harassment could to a work in of of the harassment as a form of gender a for women working in the trades. In a of tradeswomen and tradespeople by the for Women’s Research more than a of that they are for being a The same that while many women respected and their of almost percent they were to a different standard than their in some aspects of their jobs and that they had to with if not work percent of women of color that they are always or added the to this because it highlights that and part of families and that and that our to families are still needed to help all working as Eisenberg describes in the “Curator’s The presents of written by individual woman about how she was and how her was to come covered in and a Yet how her class to the she was working a her entire to her entering the trades labor, the and individual and collective goals of all workers. the trades were the of working while and support for family and other were not included in women entered the trades, these became of and collective in construction typically requires working at various sites every of with different and as well as of being that with these working is for especially In the of tradeswomen and of those with who were the trades, percent with and percent of while as their However, the also that being a or being not the to leave what they consider a lucrative In fact, almost 60 percent with have not the this reflect the fact that percent of the were in a union and its good pay and The provides the to with students, or have them on to the needs of working the United and relative to other just an one made it three back power by the Stanley’s Girl, Susan is one of the most dangerous In fact, in construction, with all other had the number of in and occupations had the highest number of work However, union construction jobs are significantly than jobs. A by the New York on and that in percent of construction in New York on sites, while in New York percent of were on While the and for construction in New York have increased these are not significant enough to from the “We room of a with various years, from 1979 to on the (fig. on the different the to the stories of the many women who were while woman was while working on a was in the head by a from an to the from a power yet was between and an woman was by her who was in the same and by after being by a The other stories are just as and almost even more so when in this one and security and is for all not just for those working in construction, or other workers need to be by that are up by all workers need to be in what are required to make their and Students might relative to the experiences of the first tradeswomen, what and in racism, and job with different of such as classrooms, and to just a to the collective that of the and affirmative action of the and that women enter the trades, the and was in to the work and of of union their rank and and many other For the first to this were responsible for that were from and many of are workers and that always might research the and educational that achieve this for workers, as well as what need to be made to make the even more This room a in an structure on an construction can on the to what women had to up and pictorial that was in their even when they to the bathroom to get some that they The are too to include In her We’ll Call You If We Need Eisenberg an entire to be that tradesmen with to their just as as women In the about percent of or graffiti to women in their work This room of women ironworkers, painters, and carpenters, telling their stories by various and Each theme three or each about to in women’s and telling and often stories will have students this women work these example, in a woman about how she worked a twelve a and of her all men, would to She was from a that would work with her but would not to However, a to her she to perform a dangerous Her how she was being that she would up and trust to her She life is in your After she the if she would like to go for and in a as a

Tech Support

Original Source

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10829213

References

1996 - Race, Gender, and Work: A Multi-cultural Economic History of Women in the United States
2016 - Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict [Crossref]
2014 - Feminism Unfinished: A Short Surprising History of American Women’s Movements
1998 - Pioneering: Poems from the Construction Site
2018 - Stanley’s Girl [Crossref]