By Joe Maniscalco

That’s for daddy’s work!

IBEW Local 3 apprentice Natalie Rivera returned home after her first day on the job as a union electrician still in her hardhat and hi-viz vest and the image just did not compute for her then two-year-old daughter.

“She was very surprised about it,” the former claims analyst tells Work-Bites. “Even kids that young are seeing things through a certain kind of lens. My husband wears hi-viz for his job, but I was like — ‘No, this is mommy’s stuff.’”

Fellow third-year apprentices Joanna Kokosis and Mary Linn Gil say they’ve each experienced similar reactions to their line of work. Despite efforts to bring more women into the Building Trades, women still represent a minuscule percentage of workers on construction sites today — roughly somewhere south of four percent.

“On my job, I’m the only female electrician,” Kokosis says. “There’s another woman that’s on site — but in another trade. We’re the only ones.” When people learn Gil is working construction she says they often give a quizzical look and say something like, “Oh, you work…in the office?”

All three women are part of a larger group of IBEW Local 3 apprentices — seven women and one man — who last year started creating WireWomen: Lighting It Up - What It’s Like to Be a Female Union Electrician. It’s the latest children’s book from the pro-labor publishers at Hard Ball Press, and it aims to teach girls and boys alike that women are indeed working construction — and someday, they can, too.

“I thought about it from my children’s perspective,” Rivera says. “When we were writing the book, that was part of the exposure I wanted my children to have about any opportunity or anything that’s challenging. Whether my kids come into the local or not — whatever they choose to do with their lives — they know what it is to work hard and achieve a goal.”

Delightfully illustrated by artist Setare Arashloo with additional input from labor studies Professor Sharon Szymanski and Local 3 Journeywoman Erin Sullivan — WireWomen — Lighting It Up captures IBEW Local 3 women at work throughout the Big Apple lighting baseball stadiums, illuminating the subway, bringing the Rockefeller Christmas Tree to life — and lots more.

“We’ve been at all these job sites that kids love like the Museum of Natural History,” says Gil. “We are everywhere — and it’s just gonna keep on growing.”

The entire WireWomen: Lighting It Up project grew out of Professor Szymanski’s “Women, the Economy and the Trades” course at SUNY Empire State College’s Harry Van Arsdale Jr. School of Labor Studies — a course of study that’s part and parcel with IBEW Local 3’s intensive five-year apprenticeship program.

“If you get a Local 3 electrician you know they have a college degree,” Professor Szymansk says. “The union really values education — you cannot become an apprentice unless you go through the program."

In that class of 20 apprentices, eleven of whom where women, students kept asking the same question, though — “Why aren’t more women in the Building Trades?”

“And the response that kept coming up,” Professor Szymansk says, “was because young girls don’t know that it’s a possibility.”

Flipping The Switch

Rivera, Kokosis and Gil all came to the union through an organization called NEW — Nontraditional Employment for Women — a pre-apprentice program aimed at helping low-income women break into, and succeed, in New York City’s unionized Building Trades. The organization graduates nearly 300 students annually, but it’s got its work cut out for it.

“No one really knows how to get into the union without NEW,” Kokosis says. “If they don’t know about NEW, how do they go about it? For little girls, they don’t know they can do this. It’s 2022 and things have gotten better for everybody but still…that’s when we decided that we should make it a children’s book — to show little girls that they can do this kind of work and [our] experience can be their experience as well.”

Like Rivera, part of the impetus for Gil to help create WireWomen — Lighting It Up came out of her desire to educate, enlighten and empower her own child. In this case, her young son.

“How do I explain to my son what mommy does at work?” Gil says. “It’s easy to explain now with the book — it’s very engaging. This is what mommy does at work!”

“We pull wire with the strength of an elephant tugging

out tree trunks, we climb ladders with the agility of a

mountain lion scaling a peak, and we read blueprints

with the wisdom and inquisitiveness of an owl. We use

our extraordinary powers to build and light up our city.”

Hard Ball Press Publisher Tim Sheard believes in order to build a more just society, children need a “vision of a better world” and the “tools to fight for it.”

“WireWomen: Lighting It Up offers a glimpse of that world, in which women are treated with equal respect and are offered the training for any job that they wish to master...and enjoy,” he tells Work-Bites. “In this case, it is a children's book about the challenge and the joy that women find working as electricians. While the book is meant for girls and young women, boys will learn from it as well — that women can and should work side-by-side with men in any trade or academic occupation.”

The IBEW Local 3 apprentices also wanted to be mindful about appealing to parents as well as the next generation of trade unionists.

“I was a claims analyst for ten years,” Rivera says. “Local 3 is a second career for a lot of people. I noticed this was true for other women, too — more so than with the guys.”

More Rewiring Needed

NEW says it has placed women in more than 3,000 industry careers over the past decade. And NABTU — the North American Building Trades — now reportedly sponsors more than 175 apprentice readiness programs nationwide for underserved communities including women, people of color and veterans. The organization’s annual “Tradeswomen Build Nations” conference, meanwhile, has grown into the largest tradeswomen gathering in the world, regularly attracting thousands of participants. This year, the 12th Tradeswomen Build Nations conference takes place in Las Vegas, Nevada from October 28-30.

Retention — due in part to persistent issues surrounding maternity leave and other fundamental supports Professor Szymanski says “weren’t part of the male consciousness when there weren’t any women on the job sites” — remains a significant obstacle to further progress, however.

But it shouldn’t. As the student-authors behind WireWomen: Lighting It Up argue “working conditions improve for everybody when women come on the job.”

“Not only do we bring up the quality of work for women,” Rivera says, “those things are also then matched for the men as well. They benefit as well — we’re all in the same unit.”

Some old school attitudes endure on the job, nonetheless.

“I’ve been with journeymen who really didn’t know how to work with me,” Kokosis says. “But I’m a person. For the most part the new generation that’s coming in understands it more and accepts it more than what the older generation does.”

It’s an especially frustrating situation for a group of workers whose fervent trade unionism animates every page of WireWomen: Lighting It Up.

“We’re actually trying to change Local 3 for the better,” Gil says. “Bringing women into the field is to help Local 3. A lot of men were really proud of the work we’ve done [on this book]. At the end of he day, we all do the same work — men and women. We’re breaking barriers. We’re dedicated. We fought so hard and put our hearts into it. We’re trying to make everybody union.”

Today, all of the “WireWomen” are working on high-profile construction jobs — Rivera is helping to build out Disney’s new headquarters on the West Side; Gil is on a project for Microsoft in Midtown; and Kokosis is part of the team installing post-Hurricane Sandy generators inside the Baruch Houses in Lower Manhattan.

Every job they do is a point of pride and a source of inspiration for their families — WireWomen: Lighting It Up is an opportunity to shatter preconceived notions and inspire generations of trade unionists yet to come.

“People have a limited idea of what electricians do in general,” Rivera says. “I did, too. But now, even my daughter knows more about tools at five than I did when I was first came into the union.”