Shi Greene, 31 years old
Local 79 Mason Tenders – Apprentice for 20 months and Journeyworker for 3 years
I am a member of Local 79, Mason Tenders. Our jurisdiction is demolition, fireproofing, general clean-up, mason tending, and scaffolding.
For the last five years I’ve been employed by Turner Construction. Before joining the union, I was an office manager at a plumbing company on Staten Island where I was making $13.00 an hour. I was a single parent with two children and travel to Staten Island was very expensive. I couldn’t get to daycare on time after work, so I kept getting hit with additional fees and threats to take my son out of daycare. I was on my last limb. I found out about the Pathways 2 Apprenticeship (P2A), a pre-apprenticeship 4-week boot camp that leads to a union apprenticeship, through the mother of my child’s friend. She was an apprentice in Local 79 at the time. Once I graduated from P2A, I attended a Local 79 event where they looked at 1,000 applications, interviewed all those people, and accepted 100 people. Even though I learned that I was applicant #536 out of 1000 and wasn’t sure I did well in my interview, I got in. Five years ago, I started the apprenticeship, which is 4,000 hours long and can take 2-3 years to complete. As soon as you complete 4,000 hours of work and 500 hours of school training, you become a Journeyworker. I worked so many hours in a short period of time that I finished in a little under 20 months.
When Pathways 2 Apprenticeship found out about my story, despite the felonies I had gotten at a young age, they were still eager to bring me into the program. Shortly after, I became a peer mentor, helping others navigate the program and then in addition to my main job in construction, I started teaching classes with Pathways 2 Apprenticeship.
When I was 18, I wanted to be a corrections officer. I took the civil service exam and I scored within the 95th percentile. Right before I went away for the academy, I got my first felony charge. I fought to do the right thing, but I didn’t come from a “do the right thing type of place” so I was always caught up with something. Now, I get to go into Rikers Island with P2A and teach classes. Maybe I didn’t get to become a corrections officer, but I think that this is more rewarding because I actually get to teach inside the jail. P2A helped 3 people get into Local 79 before they even made it out of Rikers Island. I just want to say that I am so thankful for P2A, what it stands for, and the opportunities that I’ve gotten to have through the program.
I like my job because of the financial security. I like that I know that I can provide for my family. I like all the perks that come with it in terms of the future.
As far as working, I love the fact that I’m always learning something new. As a laborer, we get to learn a little bit about every trade. My favorite thing is that I’ve being able to take all the skills I’ve learned on the job and fix things around the house. I want to eventually start a business doing something related to labor work.
I’ve been able to achieve a lot since I started working with the union. I bought my first house at 30. I took my first trip out of the country at 30.
I took my kids out of the country for the first time at 30. I opened two businesses because I was able to have that extra income to do the things that I really wanted to do. I did a radio show with Brian Lehrer from WNYC on safety, which was a dream come true. I got to speak and I got to be heard. People still mention hearing me on the show two years later. That was a huge accomplishment.
One major benefit of being in a union is that we are trained a lot more. There are jobs that are called open shop jobs. Open shop means some individuals are union workers and some are non-union workers. I noticed that there were non-union laborers that I worked with side by side, but they had way less safety knowledge than I did. I have the peace of mind knowing that we are well-trained and safe on the job.
I have made many lasting friendships through my union.
If I can be completely transparent, I grew up in foster care, so friendships were really difficult for me to hold on to. I think all of my friends now are from the union. I don’t think I even had any friends prior to this. Everyone at P2A feels like my brothers and sisters. I also made a lot of friends on my worksites. I have a friend here who works with a different general contractor company. We became friends through this job-site and even had Thanksgiving together. I never celebrated holidays because of the foster care thing, but this year I’m hosting my first Thanksgiving at my house. It’s all my union family and we’re calling it Friendsgiving. I’m excited about that.
Local 79 is amazing in terms of diversity and there are a lot of working women.
On this job alone, 6 of the 25 workers are women, which is not a normal thing at all. Usually there’s just 1 female for every 30 guys. The ethnic diversity is about the same since I came in, but it was already pretty ethnically diverse. There are a lot of Spanish speaking workers and a lot of black workers in this union.
As a female laborer on the job, it gets a little frustrating because there is lot of very physical work and the first assumption is that you can’t do it. Because of that, you either get pushed away to something easier or they’re trying so hard to protect you that they end up hurting you. I’ve had some encounters on the job that were very uncomfortable, but I feel like those situations were handled properly when they were addressed. I joined Turner Construction and they’ve taken care of me ever since. Not everyone gets promoted to be a supervisor like me, especially not this fast. There’s a push to get women into supervisor positions, especially with companies like Turner.
I would tell a young woman thinking about joining this career to do it, just do it.
Every time a woman sees me in a hard hat, we end up talking for the next 15 to 20 minutes. I feel like its very necessary to have more women on the job.
Being more diverse would make construction a lot better. I would encourage any woman who is not afraid to get their hands dirty to come into union construction.
Next year I’ll probably put in my application to instruct at the Local 79 Mason Tenders training school. As a Journeyworker, you can work as a part time instructor at the school for the apprentices.
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