IBEW women obtain union charter status

The sisterhood of female electricians within the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) represents a small minority of the membership but their unique issues have been given special recognition with the inauguration of the first IBEW charter for women.

The women’s committee of Toronto IBEW Local 353 was recently granted that special status, giving the group permanency in the IBEW constitution and symbolizing a new level of concern for the problems they face, said Local 353 business manager Steven Martin in a recent statement.

“Our committee is not only active but vital to the sisters in the trades we have in Local 353’s jurisdiction and to the diverse threads of the local itself,” said Martin in the release.

It’s been a long journey for 353’s Karen Pullen, chair of the women’s committee, a business rep for the local and from 1989 to 2012 a practising electrician working in the commercial sector in Toronto.

“It was a very floundering committee for a few years,” said Pullen. “I remember sitting in a room by myself just determined, I am not giving up.”

The women’s committee agendas cover a broad mix of issues including gender-based workplace concerns, benefits and contract analysis, social outreach and volunteer efforts, recruitment and empowerment coaching, said Pullen.

You have to put an attitude on with your boots every day

— Karen Pullen

IBEW Local 353 Women’s Committee

While the workplace is not as rampantly sexist as it was 25 years ago, many female electricians — there are only 140 of them in a local with a total membership of 11,000 — still find it a rough place to go to work, she added.

The women’s committee is one place they can discuss survival strategies.

“If you have ever worked construction, it is very different from any other type of work,” Pullen said. “The conversations are very rough. The way people speak to each other is an eye opener to women.

“You have to put an attitude on with your boots every day. You have to become somebody else you normally wouldn’t be in ordinary life.

“I probably cried every day going home from work my first year as an apprentice.”

Employment conditions and job security remain issues even though most people think Ontario enforces workplace equity, said Pullen.

Contracts that give employers the “right to manage” workers provide subtle cover for discrimination against female workers, she said.

“If your face doesn’t fit or there is an issue with even one male who is not on board with a woman being onsite,” females can end up on the layoff list, Pullen claimed.

The same thing for pregnant women — thanks to the right-to-manage clause, some women tend to get laid off early and employers can get away with it if overt discrimination can’t be proven, she said, though it’s happening less than in an earlier era.

Asked for comment, James Barry, the executive chairman of the IBEW Construction Council of Ontario, said in a statement every collective agreement in every industry recognizes employers’ right to manage. But the right to manage does not include the right to discriminate, he said.

“If any member feels they have been discriminated against in any way by a signatory employer regardless of gender, race, sexuality etc., it’s the responsibility of our union to investigate the complaint. We will make sure the terms of our collective agreement and laws of Ontario are enforced through whatever means appropriate for the given situation,” Barry wrote.

Over the years the women’s committee has had some successes on wages and benefits issues and continues the fight on others. A campaign to enable new mothers to access a supplementary benefits fund to top off maternity leave provisions was one gain from a few years back.

Pullen said only about 12 or 15 IBEW members attend women’s committee meetings regularly but outreach enables the committee to network through such forums as the group Sisters in Trades and the Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL) — Pullen sits on the OFL women’s committee.

The union held its first IBEW Canada Women’s Conference last November, with 100 delegates in attendance.

“We were able to talk about what is going on in Canada, how we as women feel about our work,” said Pullen. “The fact that we would like to see some language put in our collective agreement that is specific to women in the trade, primarily through layoffs during pregnancy, that is not the time to be laying a woman off.”

Recruiting other women is another major focus of the 353 women’s committee. Members frequently go to schools to sell female students on the trade with honest talk about opportunities, rewards, the training needed — and the sexism they will encounter, Pullen said.

“We’re talking to people, especially young women and older women, telling them about the trade, and keeping their minds open and not to be pigeonholed,” she explained.

“The value of understanding how a building goes up. And the trickle-down effect is you are able to fix your own home and it builds confidence, you can handle situations with confidence.”