Laborers to offer union-wide paid maternity leave January 1

Then-Labor Secretary Marty Walsh talks with members of Chicago Women in Trades at their conference several years ago. The Laborers, one of the largest trade unions, are instituting a union-paid maternal leave program to attract and retain women in their trade. | Labor Department photo via Flickr

WASHINGTON —The Laborers will offer all new mothers among their members offering 12 weeks of maternity leave benefits starting January 1. The mothers will be eligible for up to $800 per week, union President Brent Booker says.

With the new union-wide union-paid benefit, “You don’t have to choose between being a mother or being a Laborer,” Booker told the recent Trades Women Build Nations conference in New Orleans.

“We’re looking to the future and we want all members, including female members, to know that we value them, we value their families, we value their children.”

Booker called the leave policy “an effort to bring more women into LIUNA [the Laborers] and better the lives of the ones we already have.”

There is no question building trades unions need more new trainees and more new members and women are the largest group of available but untapped talent. Bureau of Labor Statistics data for last year, the latest available, show women are 10.8% of all U.S. construction workers.

The construction workforce is aging—a trend North America’s Building Trades Unions discussed at a conference at the Laborers’ D.C. headquarters more than a year ago. A top solution to that skills drain is to recruit and train more women, delegates said.

Doing so means not only offering women the high median wages available to trained and unionized construction workers, but accommodating to their priorities, too.

In some Laborers locals, the proportion of women is higher, such as in Portland, Ore. There, one-fifth of Local 737’s members are women, Business Manager Zack Culver told the Northwest Labor Press. The proportion is even higher among apprentices, he added.

Culver seconded Booker’s statement that the new paid maternity leave will help attract new woman members to the Laborers and “will help retain female members who may otherwise leave the workforce when they have children.”

That high proportion in Portland is still the exception rather than the rule. Chicago public television station WTTW, in a story previewing the conference Booker spoke at, noted only 4.3% of employees in construction and related industries are women building trades workers. The rest, counted in “construction” in the federal data, are in legal, administrative and related positions.

“In Illinois, we believe good, union jobs need to be accessible to all workers,” state AFL-CIO President Tim Drea told WTTW. Conference attendees were able to “learn how to address the issues they face in a historically male dominated field and to create change within their unions, communities, and the halls of government. If we are to truly create an economy that works for all, that means building pathways for women, transgender, and non-binary people to succeed and lead in their trades, their unions and their communities.”

Female members of the Laborers “perform the same work as their male counterparts, including asbestos remediation, building and highway construction, and construction of energy infrastructure. Their union contracts ensure they receive the same pay and benefits as their male co-workers,” the union said in announcing their union-wide paternity leave plan.

“We all have unique stories of what brought us to our union homes,” Booker said then. “Some are stories of chance encounters, inspirational stories of escaping domestic violence, heroic stories of being the first woman on a construction job, opening a door to the future that will never be closed again.”

Women have another incentive to enter the building trades, he added: The burgeoning numbers of construction jobs on projects Congress enacted via the infrastructure and jobs act during the Biden-Harris administration. Those projects and those jobs are now getting underway.

“There’s hundreds of thousands of women…who will have the opportunity to have a rewarding career in the trades” as a result of that law, Booker predicted.

Booker made that point, however, before the recent presidential election replaced Democratic President Joe Biden and his vice president, Kamala Harris, with Republicans Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, as of next January 20.

Neither Trump nor Vance have signaled whether they want the incoming Republican-run Congress to repeal the infrastructure law, but they do want to repeal another Biden-Harris infrastructure law, which emphasizes green jobs.

And the Republicans’ platform forecasts cuts in construction workers’ wages through abolition of Project Labor Agreements on federally funded projects.

It also wants to restore and legalize apprenticeship programs run by non-union contractors, as well as religious organizations. Those apprenticeships don’t meet the standards or provide comprehensive training which the Laborers and other construction unions do for their trainees, regardless of gender.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Press Associates

Press Associates Inc. (PAI), is a union news service in Washington D.C. Mark Gruenberg is the editor.