She’s a Live Wire for a Labor Cause : Crusade Waged for More Women Electricians

During most of her working life, Lynn Dabney, a 36-year-old Los Angeles journeyman electrician, has groused about being the only woman on the job.

Most women in construction know the feeling. In an era of countless feminist advances, the proportion of women in the building trades has lingered at around 2% for at least a decade. Contractors are still sexist and unions are still clannish, critics say.

Dabney thinks she has found an answer, though. It lies in the earn-while-you-learn apprenticeship programs that operate in unionized trades like hers. These programs, she says, have to stop waiting for women to apply and instead begin aggressively recruiting them.

That is what Dabney spent most of the year trying to do in a one-woman campaign that coincides with burgeoning federal government efforts to put more females in construction jobs.

Armed with a grant from a university labor-management program, Dabney spent the summer beating the bushes of Los Angeles, looking for women who might be lured into electrical work.

She hit YWCAs. She hit layoff-plagued aerospace plants. She hit agencies that offer temporary work to young people. She hit the docks where loads of women applied for a sparse number of longshoremen’s jobs.

Everywhere she went she spread the gospel of the five-year apprenticeship program jointly operated by a group of Los Angeles County electrical contractors and her union, Local 11 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

Apprentice electricians work for about $8 an hour during the day, take classes at night and eventually graduate to journeyman status, which pays $24 an hour on unionized projects. While the bulk of electrical work in Los Angeles construction is performed by non-union workers, who are paid in the $14-an-hour range, union workers claim a substantial share of large commercial projects.

The results of Dabney’s labors: In August, 24 women applied to the Los Angeles electrician apprenticeship program. By contrast, in March there had been just five. The number of minorities rose from 53 in March to 113 in August.

In the greater scheme of things, this was small potatoes. The 24 women who applied in August represented less than 7% of the 357 total applicants. And only three of the 24 passed the exam to qualify for apprenticeship.

Still, in the world of women and construction, even baby steps are appreciated--a point Dabney will make today in New York when she presents a report on her efforts to the Samuel Gompers Union Leadership Award Forum, which funded her work. The program, which encourages union members to study labor issues, is sponsored by the City University of New York’s center for labor-management policy studies.

Dabney, who grew up in Minnesota, began working as an apprentice electrician at a Pennsylvania steel plant at age 24 and came to California when the plant shut down. She said that studying the issue of female and minority participation in the building trades made her more conscious of the relationship between sagging union membership and a lack of union “outreach” efforts.

“A lot of people say to me, after I’ve told them about the apprenticeship program: Why didn’t I know about this? I say, well, most people who hear about it already know somebody who is in the local. Now we’re trying to reach out.

“I think the labor community, the skilled trades, have been based on keeping within ourselves, keeping our trade secrets to ourselves to make ourselves strong. Now the opposite is true: We need to reach out to the community to make us strong. It goes perfectly with the union rallying cry of the ‘90s, which is organizing the unorganized.”

Fortunately for Dabney, this concern happens to also be close to the heart of Elizabeth Dole, the secretary of labor. Within weeks, Dole is expected to release new Labor Department regulations strengthening requirements for more female participation in apprenticeship programs and in major construction projects performed by builders who receive federal funding.

In addition, Congress is close to approving an amendment to the federal Job Training Partnership Act which would allocate $6 million over four years to create a network of demonstration programs aimed at training and employing women in non-traditional jobs.

These efforts are a welcome recognition that most job training segregates women into lower-paying jobs, keeping single women with children trapped in or near poverty, said Kim Otis, a staff member of Non-Traditional Employment for Women, a New York organization.

“If you take a woman on welfare and teach her how to be a secretary, you’re not doing anything for her,” said Otis. “When you teach her how to be a construction worker you’re leading her to a job that pays $40,000 a year.”

Dabney’s report said the Los Angeles electrical apprenticeship program is relying mainly on applicants who come through the door, or meet staff members at school and community presentations or happen to see the limited brochures that the program mails out to about 250 local organizations. While the apprenticeship process is far more open than it was a decade ago, most new apprentices still come to the program through a family or friend contact who is an electrician, she wrote

The program needs to hire a recruiter, broaden the literature it distributes, sponsor classes to help increase the exam passing rate, provide sensitivity training sessions for management and union staff members and organize more appearances before community groups, she said.

Paul Manning, senior consultant to the Los Angeles office of the state Division of Apprenticeship Standards, said Dabney’s suggestions for more outreach were appropriate. “The electricians are doing it, but they have no one assigned to it full time,” he said. According to the most recent state survey, 21 of the 570 electrical apprentices in Los Angeles--3.6%--were women. Blacks made up 6% of the apprentices, Latinos 23%.

Marty Hunt, the head of the labor-management electrician training trust, said he disagreed with many of Dabney’s criticisms. “I think we’ve made some great strides in trying to get people interested,” he said. But he acknowledged that the industry is desperate for more trained electricians because union members are retiring faster than new apprentices are signing up.

That was a point Dabney wanted to drive home one day last month when she drove to Main Street, south of downtown Los Angeles, to try to sell the notion of apprenticeship to members of the Los Angeles Conservation Corps, which employs young, jobless adults temporarily in community cleanup projects.

“I might not look like an electrician,” Dabney said as she stood in front of five men and three women, one holding a baby, “but I am.”

She was wearing a hard hat and overalls filled with pliers, a screwdriver, tape measure and a line tester. She showed her audience how to strip a No. 12-width wire and cap the ends with a wire nut. She had them use a pipe-bender to make a 90-degree bend in a half-inch piece of insulation pipe. She bemoaned the fact that only the men asked questions.

Finally a woman raised her hand.

“Is it real hard for a woman to do that work?” she asked.

Dabney sighed, weary of being asked the same old question but glad to step onto the soapbox.

“You have special problems,” she said. “It does take more effort for a woman, but the rewards are greater. When you make a decent wage, you have choices you don’t have right now. There are other options besides college or working at McDonald’s.

“Any woman can do it because I did it.”