BUSINESS AND TRAINING
wasn't very welcoming,” she says. “She did not want me to be in the
trades at all … she thought there was a stigma.”
Her first job as an apprentice was at a seven-person, all-white,
all-male service shop. As the first female to be employed by the
company, things were tough at first. On her first day, a co-worker
told her boss that Barillas was a “useless piece of garbage” and that
he would’ve rather worked with the worst male in her apprenticeship
class over her.
“I went in optimistically thinking everything would be great, thinking I could
win everyone over,” she says. “But it's a harsh reality to see that you're
really not wanted in the field. I was kind of thrown through a loop. Like, ‘I
just threw all my eggs in this basket, am I sure this is what I want to do?’”
Barillas readily admits she knew very little about plumbing when
she started. She recalls demoing a bathroom and struggling to
break through the tile wall. “Why the hell am I doing this?” she
asked angrily. “We're supposed to fix the plumbing! Why aren't we
just fixing the plumbing?” A co-worker laughed and said, “Where
do you think the plumbing is? You really don't know anything about
plumbing, do you?” When she finally opened the wall and saw all of
the piping, she had an a-ha moment. She was hungry to learn more
and eager to prove herself.
“One time, we were demoing out an apartment over at Belmont and Lake
Shore Drive,” she remembered. “I had to dump out this garbage can full
of concrete, so I'm trying to pick up this can by myself to put in the big
dumpster. My boss was watching me and came over and said, ‘You know,
you can ask for help … we need you to come back tomorrow.’”
“Everyone initially had an opinion about how I would do as a worker;
that I wouldn't be able to handle or do a lot of things,” she says. “But
they saw that no matter what — if I was afraid of something or if I didn't
know something — I tried my hardest to do whatever it was that they
were asking me to do. Once they saw that, they were willing to show me
everything they knew and give me all of their knowledge. That was great.”
She continued working for the company for four years, continuing to
learn her trade and prove herself along the way. She was laid off going
into her fifth year of apprenticeship and remembers her co-workers were
genuinely upset when she left. Even the co-worker who called her a
useless piece of garbage shed some tears.
“It's amazing how people’s views can change,” she says.
In 2006, she began her current job with Anchor Mechanical doing
maintenance at O’Hare International Airport. Today, she is active with
her UA local, serves as recording secretary for the Illinois Chapter
of ASSE International, and was endorsed by Plumbers Local 130 to
sit on the national executive board of the Labour Council for Latin
American Advancement (LCLAA), an organisation composed of
Latino labour leaders who fight for the rights of workers, immigrants,
women, the LGBTQ community, and anyone who has struggled to
have their voice heard.
www.plumbingafrica.co.za
23
Barillas is active, supported, and respected in her field. But getting to where
she is today wasn't easy and she didn't do it alone. In 2003, three years
after she began her apprenticeship, Barillas met Sarah Stigler, a freshman
apprentice accepted into the Local 130 apprenticeship programme.
“When we met, she told me about the Chicago Women in Trades and
their Technical Opportunities Programme; Sarah came in through that
programme,” Barillas explains. “I thought it was really cool. It's a 12-week
programme where ladies basically get a taste of a bunch of different
trades and what they do, as well as education in math and physical agility,
to kind of prepare them to apply to one of the trades. I started volunteering
with her and I've been involved ever since.”
INITIATING CHANGE
According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, full-time female
workers only made 80.5 cents for every dollar earned by men in 2017.
Chicago Women in Trades (CWIT), founded in 1981, “works for women’s
economic equity by increasing participation in well-paid, skilled jobs
traditionally held by men.”
CWIT’s Technical Opportunities Programme (TOP) is a pre-apprenticeship
programme designed to prepare women for construction and apprenticeship
programmes, including plumbing, pipefitting, carpentry, electrical work, sheet
metal working, and more. CWIT offers three 12-week sessions per year,
enrolling an average of 75 women annually. Over the course of each session,
TOP classes meet three times per week and cover math, test preparation,
physical conditioning, and basic construction skills. After learning the skills
needed to test into the apprenticeship programmes, enrollees are able to
sample different trades through focused, hands-on workshops in plumbing,
pipefitting, carpentry, electrical work, sheet metal working, bricklaying, and
more at CWIT’s warehouse on the Near West Side of Chicago.
“If any woman is even considering getting into a union trade, that programme
is the best because it gives a sample — it's like a beer flight and you get to
choose which one you like,” Barillas says. “You'll go to the bricklayers’ school,
meet plumbers, pipefitters, painters; you really get a taste of what each trade
is, and you meet some of the sisters from those trades, which is really nice.”
With Barillas, Stigler, and Lolita Hughes — a fellow Technical
Opportunities Programme graduate and classmate of Stigler’s —
volunteering and leading the plumbing sessions of the TOP programme,
the number of women applying and being accepted to Plumbers Local
130’s apprenticeship began to rise. However, recruitment is only half
of the battle. Retaining women still remains an issue. In some cases,
getting accepted into an apprenticeship programme or getting hired
by a company is a good step, but it doesn’t guarantee perfect working
conditions; feelings of isolation, sexual harassment, discrimination in
assigned tasks, and pointed sexist, racial, and homophobic slurs exist and
remain a real issue.
“Women of 130 is about retention and about support,” Barillas says. “We
don't want people to feel like they're isolated or alone. There’s a stigma
that women can’t do this job, that they're not strong enough. So, some
women get left just doing hangers or sweeping, not really learning the
June 2019 Volume 25 I Number 4