Cheryl Purnell was hauling lumber and hammering nails at a west-side work site last month when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a white-owned construction company in Colorado had been unconstitutionally denied a federal subcontract by affirmative action.
The construction trades have been very slow to open their ranks to women. There were no more than a handful of women in the trades until a 1978 affirmative action directive by President Carter, according to a study by Chicago Women in Trades, a not- for-profit group. Now 2.1 percent of the workers on local construction sites are women, though that number rises to almost 7 percent on some federally funded projects like the new post office.
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Chicago Women in Trades is attempting to increase that number by training more women for construction jobs. In fact, Purnell’s one of 20 women who recently graduated from a preapprentice training program offered by CWT. The course’s main instructor, Eileen Kreutz, a carpenter with her own contracting company, predicts this year’s graduates could pass the tests needed to advance into various union apprenticeship programs.
“I know what it’s like to want to crack the trades,” says Kreutz. “Before I was a carpenter I was involved in social work, and it was clear to me that I was in a dead-end job. I always had an interest in the skilled trades. Even as a kid I liked to work with my hands. My family was in the sheet-metal trade. So I decided to make a switch. The women in my class are going through the same kinds of transitions I went through 20 years ago. They’re in jobs which don’t seem to have futures. These are bright women who know what it means to work hard.”
One former student, Diane Kieres, is now Kreutz’s partner. A student who just graduated, Eileen McKenzie, plans on becoming an electrician, quite a change from her previous job as a cashier.
Return of the CTA pass
Oh, they’re not about to give Bottoms any credit. They won’t acknowledge a correlation between declining ridership and abolition of the passes, and they say they were unmoved by the protests. The real reason for bringing back the passes, they say, is that it’s taking longer than expected to install a high-tech fare-collection system that will make passes, transfers, and tokens obsolete.
