Trades Council Features Women On New Website But Not On Their Leadership Board

The Building and Construction Trades Council of California, one of the largest and most influential labor organizations in America, has a spiffy new website. 

The hero image shows a Black woman in a hardhat.

Scroll down further and you’ll find other women featured prominently in all three photos in the website’s “key issues” section.

There’s even a video, titled Women Building The Nation, promoting an event that took place in ***checks notes*** 2015, on why the building trades are ripe with great career opportunities for women.

Any casual browser of the website would come away with the impression that women are at the core of the Trades Council. That women are empowered and in positions of power. Yet, what’s most striking about the website is the contrast between the women on the front page and the images that appear when one clicks on the page listing the organization’s leadership. 

There are five executive board officers. All of them are men.

The all-male leadership is particularly troubling given that the The Trades has long battled issues of harassment and discrimination of women. Writing in The Hechinger Report, Caroline Preston documented the experiences of several California tradeswomen who endured frequent abuse, including being “groped while sanding a vessel,” and watching as “men drew labia with chalk on metal beams on a job site and asked for her opinion on the drawings’ accuracy.”

These experiences are not the exception, but the rule, according to a recent survey of 2,600 tradeswomen nationally, which included hundreds of tradeswomen working in California. The survey found that most tradeswomen reported experiencing “gender harassment directed at them personally while working in the building trades,” facing “sexual harassment directed at them personally while working in the building trades,” and encountering “porn/graffiti that was disparaging to women while working in the building trades.” Moreover, nearly half of tradeswomen believe that “they are held to a different standard than their male co-workers and face discrimination at work.”

The all-men, no-women approach also stands in sharp contrast to other leading labor organizations, both in California and nationally. The National AFL-CIO is led by Liz Shuler. Sara Nelson leads the Association of Flight Attendants. Deborah Burger is co-president of National Nurses United. She’s also the president of the California Nurses Association. Meanwhile, former state lawmaker Lorena Gonzalez sits at the head of the powerful California Labor Federation. 

To put the all-male composition of the Trades Council Executive Board in perspective: If the Trades Council were a publicly held corporation in California, and if the executive committee were the corporation's board of directors, having five men and zero women would violate a bill passed by the California legislature and signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2018 (unrelated to the main point here, except for the most dense among us, the legality of the law is currently pending in California courts). The Women on Boards legislation is grounded in the evidence that female representation in organizational leadership matters for improving profitability, value-creation, and the quality of organizational governance. More critically, ensuring diversity at the highest levels of an organization is vital for promoting equity in the workplace, including closing salary gaps for workers and ensuring that everyone is treated with respect and dignity at work. 

“The amount of sexism I’ve had to overcome has really well equipped me for doing this work,” Carol Kim, the business manager at the San Diego Building Trades Council, recently told the San Diego Union-Tribune. “We really do have to be twice as good as the next guy to be considered on par.” 

Kim’s observations take on added weight in light of the fact that she is the sole woman listed as a leader of one of the 47 unions and trades councils that comprise the membership of the broader California Building and Construction Trades Council. Earlier this year, there were two women listed as holding a union leadership position, including Kim. Today, one of those women is gone, and her seat is now listed as “vacant”.