PORTLAND, Ore.—To paraphrase Daniel Webster’s description of Dartmouth College, the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau “is a small agency, sir, and yet there are those who love it.” The Women’s Bureau has existed for more than a century, and it promotes working women and their equality on the job. And there are those who love it, too.
One is Courtney Newberg, a journey-level Ironworker with Local 29 in Portland, Oregon. If it wasn’t for the Women’s Bureau, and more particularly for the Women in Apprenticeship and Non-Traditional Occupations (WANTO) grants it administers, she wouldn’t be where she is: Making good money in a job she enjoys, with a union that accepted her.
And when driving around downtown Portland, saying proudly, “I built that building.”
Those who don’t love the Women’s Bureau or its grants, though, include President Trump, a confirmed misogynist, and his partner, Elon Musk. They want to kill the bureau—and much of the rest of the Department of Labor—and the grants with it.
So one leading grant recipient, the organized labor-backed Chicago Women In Trades, anticipated that move. It marched into federal court in the Windy City earlier this year, seeking an injunction against closing the Women’s Bureau and cutting off the money, and got it on April 15.
“The problem of equity is far from solved, and pretending that institutional barriers don’t exist won’t make them disappear,” explained Jayne Vellinga, executive director of Chicago Women In Trades.
It was a WANTO grant to Portland’s Oregon Tradeswomen’s pre-apprenticeship program that let Newberg, then unsure of what career to follow after having lost a summer camp job, enter the Ironworkers’ pre-apprenticeship course.
“I was driving by and saw a construction site and I thought ‘I can do that,’” Newberg said in a telephone interview with People’s World. “I want to build buildings.”
After the 8-week pre-apprenticeship course, for which she was paid, Newberg entered the union’s apprenticeship program. It took six-and-a-half years because the building trades are highly technical, but that appealed to her. Again, it was all paid. And the course “set me up” to, after graduation, to walk onto job sites the Ironworkers sent her to, and fit right in.
Data centers. An extension of the Multnomah County Courthouse. New buildings at the Oregon Health and Science University. Newberg helped build them all, and more.
Follow the same path
And thousands of women are following the same path, in what is still an overwhelmingly male-dominated industry—4% female nationally and 10% female in Oregon—thanks to the Women’s Bureau and its WANTO grants. By contrast, women hold 70% of all minimum-wage jobs nationwide, thanks to past and present discrimination by exploitative employers following stereotypes.
Newberg helps other women along the path to the building trades wherever and whenever she can. “I want to give something back” to the union, too, she says. Its leaders are very receptive, she adds.
But now those grants, which totaled $6 million in calendar 2024, to ten non-profit organizations nationwide, are threatened with elimination by Trump, Musk, and Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. So is the Women’s Bureau.
Eliminating the Women’s Bureau is part of the Trump-Musk opposition to anything related to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives. DEI aids women and minorities, particularly people of color, in advancing in the job market, closing the income gap, and breaking various glass ceilings. One of Trump’s first executive orders banned DEI, and Musk is carrying that out with a vengeance.
As a result, “the big fear is that all these women who want to get into” construction and other occupations usually closed to women “won’t be able to do so” without the money, advice, and practical ways to overcome barriers to entry into the male-dominated field, says Newberg.
“I don’t know if I would have gotten in if it wasn’t for the Oregon Tradeswomen,” who used WANTO money to train her. “I’m trying to be a mentor” to women who want to follow that brings women into. “We have a women’s committee in our union, and its goal is recruitment and retention” of women, especially since they’re a great untapped pool of talent and since male construction workers are aging.
“We know just how difficult it is for women to access these high-paying jobs,” including the pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship courses in the building trades, adds Jessica Ramey Stender, the policy director and deputy legal director for the Portland-based Equal Rights Advocates.
Increasing apprenticeships may be one of the few points where both Trump’s Republicans, including Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a former Oregon mayor and congresswoman, agree with congressional Democrats.
Left unsaid: The fate of the Women’s Bureau, the WANTO program, its grants, and their clients. In Trump’s prior term, he favored apprenticeships run by the anti-union, anti-worker Associated Builders and Contractors, the lobby for low-ball non-union builders. Its apprenticeship program is much shorter than the course unions run and less comprehensive.
Problems are tough to solve
And even when women break through, that’s not to say everything is A-OK on the job, both Stender and Newberg admit. Stender says she hears of “harassment and discrimination in the workplaces” in construction. For a journeyperson such as Newberg, there’s often “a lack of opportunity for training and advancement,” Stender adds.
And sometimes there’s a lack of accommodation, too. The Laborers are one of the leaders in overcoming that, instituting union-paid family and medical leave for all their members on job sites, starting this past January 1.
Other construction unions have bargained with union contractors for more flexible schedules for all workers so new parents can have quality time with newborns and toddlers without worrying about losing jobs and pay. “We had people who” entered the pre-apprenticeships seeking “second or third careers,” says Newberg. Others “were right out of high school.
“Now they’re all successful, and they’re well-paid.”
“But it’s still tough” for women on the job, she admits. “The stereotype is still that women have to work twice as hard to be noticed. If I show up on a new job, the men” in the rank and file “often assume ‘What am I doing here?’ Part of” the job “is learning who those people are, with rigid views.
Newberg makes another point: The industry needs new people, and working women are the obvious pool of available talent.
But that point hasn’t hit home with Trump, Musk, and their followers. They’re trying to kill the Women’s Bureau and the grant programs by ordering the bureau and the grant recipients to certify their programs do not promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.
“It is hard, given the scale of the attacks from this administration on working people generally and on the Constitution of the United States, to keep track of specific ways” Trump and Musk undermine workers, Stender said in a phone interview. “So we have to focus on the very real attack on women” at work and elsewhere. “This administration is trying to relegate women back to second-class status.”
Chicago Women In Trades, the organized labor-supported grant holder in the Windy City and one of the oldest organizations for women tradespeople, anticipated that. Aided by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and others, the Chicago group sought and received a federal court injunction against such shutdowns on April 15.
“The court issued a preliminary injunction that will further allow Chicago Women In Trades to challenge the enforcement of key provisions of the anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion executive orders” that threaten both the Women’s Bureau and the grants, Sabrina Talukder, the Lawyers Committee’s senior counsel, said in a statement.
Trump’s anti-DEI “executive orders target the very nature of its mission,” Talukder said of the group. “The critical work of Chicago Women in Trades for dismantling barriers for women, and especially women of color, in the skilled trades, can continue without threat of enforcement for the time being. We are working to secure a permanent injunction for our client and for other similarly situated organizations that receive federal funds.” Women of color are 70% of the group’s clients.
Injunction in hand, the grants can keep flowing and the groups “can proceed without fear of retribution or censorship,” Talukder stated.
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