Museum And Gallery

 

 

 

Interview: Artist, construction worker Susan Eisenberg

 

On Equal Terms: Women in Construction 30 Years & Still Organizing at the Adams Gallery at Suffolk University.

 

By IAN SANDS | February 9, 2009

 

In 1978, the federal government under President Jimmy Carter put forth timetables and goals aimed at increasing the number of women and minorities in the construction industry. The Department of Labor predicted that under the new federal guidelines, the percentage of women in the construction industry would grow exponentially, so much so that by the year 2000 a quarter of the total construction workforce would be women.

 

The estimate was so far off base, it didn't even come close to reality. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of women in the construction and extraction industry in 2007 averaged out to a measly 2.7 percent. In Boston, the figures are even more dismal. A recent Transportation Equity Network study found that in 2006, the percentage of women in this city's construction industry equaled just one percent.

 

In order to shine some light on the inequality – as well as call attention to the strong, talented tradeswomen who wire this country's buildings, lay out piping systems, and fabricate metals – the local artist and poet Susan Eisenberg, herself a pioneering tradeswoman who came into the business in 1978, has unveiled On Equal Terms: Women in Construction 30 Years & Still Organizing at the Adams Gallery at Suffolk University. The exhibit features poetry, found materials, sculpture, audio, and photography and was previously on display at the Women's Studies Research Center gallery at Brandeis University, where Eisenberg is a visiting artist scholar.

 

On Equal Terms highlights how unaccommodating the construction industry has been towards women, then and now. One of the pieces, a life-size bathroom shack outfitted with crude, misogynistic graffiti, calls to mind the difficulties women have had in obtaining access to better bathroom facilities on the job. But the exhibit is not without its lighter moments, from an area where gallery goers can try on hard-hats in the mirror, to a collection of T-shirts from women's trade groups across the country. We chatted with the artist by phone last week about the contradictory nature of her exhibit as well as her own experience as a trailblazer in her industry during the Seventies.

 

Much of the work you've done over the course of your career as a poet and artist has been to do with labor issues. Tell me about how you got on this tack.

I come out of the construction industry. I worked 15 years as an electrician on union job sites in this area. I came into the industry in 1978 at the beginning of affirmative action when there were high expectations that women would begin to enter the trades, and that the industry would change. That really didn't happen.

 

I was trained as a poet and did theater before I came into the trades. Understanding what that experience was through the arts was just something that was always part of what I did. So I had a chapbook come out when I graduated my [electrician's] apprenticeship. So that's sort of a role that I played and part of how I understood the experience for myself. I myself can't imagine doing this kind of work. I quite like sitting in an office without risking bodily harm every day.

 

What was it that attracted you to the trades?

Well I think some of the reasons that I first got into it were incredibly naïve. One thing is I liked the idea of working outdoors, but you know in the winter that's really not that pleasant a thing to do. So it's somewhat how it looked to me on the outside. But one thing that I really understood much better from the inside was how much intelligence and creativity and ingenuity it takes from people who are on the ground on the construction site that makes buildings go up safely and looking right. I think there are a lot mistakes in the plans of architects and engineers that are corrected on the ground. I think that's not very well understood outside the industry, but it's certainly very clear when you're working on a jobsite.

 

Your current exhibit is called On Equal Terms: Women in Construction 30 Years & Still Organizing. What inspired you to put it together?At a certain point it became clear that there was such a discrepancy between the numbers of women in the trades and what had been expected. One had to either explain this one of two ways. Women aren't interested or capable, which was the kind of official understanding. Or you had to say there must be some obstacles here that aren't being addressed. Which to me seemed more like what made sense from the stories that tradeswomen had.

 

So I began to do work in 1991, interviewing women who, like myself, came in early on in affirmative action with high expectations of changes in the industry, and gathering their stories to put together another framework and that became a book called We'll Call You If We Need You: Experiences of Women Working Construction (1998). And in the process of working on the book, there were poems that came out of it, and a radio piece, and other things. And some of the material was very difficult so I decided at somebody's suggestion that I would kind of get it out of myself by doing a small installation that went to the AFL-CIO George Meany Center for Labor Studies in Silver Spring, Maryland. It was an early version of the Adams Gallery exhibit.

 

When I realized it was the 30th anniversary of these affirmative action guidelines coming up, I proposed it for the gallery at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis and I got a grant to work on remaking it and expanding it for what became On Equal Terms.

 

What are the different kinds of workers that are represented at the Adams Gallery?

I picked five trades to interview for the book — electricians, ironworkers, painters, plumbers, and carpenters. That's sort of the core of where the interviews come from. I feel like that gave a range of the kinds of construction work out there. They have kind of different issues. What I was trying to understand with the book and with the exhibit is that while people have very different experiences there's some whole that holds them all together. So that someone might not encounter many problems, or someone might encounter a lot of problems. But they're part of the same tapestry.

 

And I really love working in installation because it accommodates contradiction. I think there's something particular about the experiences women have in the trades that just can be very contradictory. People can have wonderful experiences or horrible experiences – even on the same job or at the same company. And I think installation lets you experience contradictory things at the same time. You know, you move from where you stand, and you're in a very different environment. So I felt like it resonated with that.

 

Your exhibit celebrates the affirmative action guidelines passed down by the federal government back in 1978. What distinguishes this moment from that of the "Rosie the Riveters" of WWII, those women who in great mass entered the industrial trades in the absence of men?

These came from executive orders from Jimmy Carter and even though some people say it was the same or that it blended into the "Rosie the Riveters" of WWII, I think there's something distinct about what affirmative action did. It really [was] built on the '65 Civil Rights act, but it said it's not just that women can do this work if nobody else is around to do it, but that women can do this work as their own job, and they're as equally entitled to it and able to do it. And I think that's really a shift in how we understand gender and work. And we're not totally up to that.

 

We kind of have these legal changes and our culture and our reality doesn't suddenly shift to meet that. But there's something different to rest on. So I think that's worth celebrating.

 

Tell me an early experience you had on the job that shaped you.

I was in a class where there were five of us who graduated together in the first group of women from the electricians union here. I think four of us lived in Jamaica Plain or JP/Dorchester and we'd carpool to school two nights a week for four years. You worked 40 hours-a-week, and then you had classes two nights a week. So that was really helpful in terms of having a support group so that even if you had a horrible time or partner or boss or job, you know, there was somebody. We really pulled each other through. So that was a significant thing for me.

 

I think there was a lot of support — there was certainly a lot of opposition at first — but there were also people who appreciated that we cared about the craft and worked hard. I hope that comes through, that there's a lot of fun to the work. I wanted the installation to have a sense of that fun. Even in the bathroom shack, the first thing you see is a piece of graffiti from a job I was on: "Got A Problem? Call 1-900-WHO-CARES." Which I always found hilarious — that it's a 900 number and it's the wrong number of numbers. So there's a culture there that's kind of fun.

 

One of the pieces up at the Adams Gallery is a bound collection of court documents, which are the testimonies of women gathered during investigations into the construction industry under Mayor Dinkins in New York in the early nineties. Those interviewed reported latent harassment they'd undergone while on jobs. One woman testifies that she was groped on the job. Did anything ever come of this investigation?

 

I would say no, nothing really came of that. The findings and recommendations were published but not until the very end of the Dinkins administration. And then the next month Rudy Giuliani became mayor and it wasn't carried forward. So that was one of the things that compelled me to work on this installation. Not only is the material in it very moving, but it's an example where people took a huge risk to step forward and speak up and that really wasn't respected by policymakers who invited them to do that. To kind of follow through to make the changes that they could themselves see needed to happen.

 

One of the most powerful pieces from On Equal Terms is the bathroom shack. Inside a viewer will find the kind of graffiti one might find on a job — the lewdest of all being a sketch of the lower half of a woman's body and a piece of gum for a vagina, with an extinguished cigarette hanging from the gum. Was that a shack that you took off a site or did you recreate it for the purposes of the exhibit?

It was sort of a composite of things from different people's experiences that were all documented, and a lot of that is very recent -- from cell-phone photos someone had taken on a job very recently. The bubble gum and cigarette graffiti in the bathroom shack came from someone in New York's experience. The whole idea of bathroom access has been a long issue for tradeswomen [early on women were often not provided separate bathroom facilities while on jobs].

 

Is that still an issue — inadequate bathroom facilities, that is?

Well, people have a whole range of experiences. For some sites that might not be an issue. For some sites, it might be that you're on a high-rise job and there's a bathroom set aside for women. But lets say it's on the ground floor and you're working on the 20th floor [men, meanwhile, typically have access to bathrooms every few floors]. And you've got to be a productive worker. . .or sometimes they're not clean or there's not water to wash your hands. So there's a range of issues.

 

 

What do you suggest be done to bring up the percentage of women going into the trades at present?

One could enforce the policies that already exist, that would be a huge step forward. Any developer or owner that's doing a development project can do their own affirmative action on their site, affirmative hiring and monitoring. There's a lot of people who could play a significant role. So that would make a big difference.

 

Obviously you need to bring a significant percentage of women into apprenticeship classes and training programs to shift the numbers and that's not happening. I think that supporting young women who are in vocational technical schools would also be a great thing. There seems to be a lot of interest from their teachers and counselors to do that. So that's very encouraging...

 

The original guidelines were very expansive...it's much more about the follow-through. [We need] to make sure women get full training, so they can graduate at junior level and be capable mechanics; and make sure there's not discrimination in hiring on jobs, so that women really do have the same employment experiences. Construction work goes up and down — that's a problem for everybody — but you want it to be equally a problem for people.