t 7am, Elizabeth Reyes lines up at a designated street corner, called la parada, next to a Brooklyn highway overpass. As the sun rises higher, drivers pull up with offers shouted from the window in Spanish: house cleaning, dishwashing. It\u2019s hours before an employer finally arrives with the opportunity she\u2019s waiting for: construction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cQui\u00e9n tiene tarjeta?\u201d Who has a card? he yells out. He\u2019s not referring to immigration documents, but a certification by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha). When Reyes yells that she does, the driver replies, \u201cVamos,\u201d and motions for her to hop in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Immigrants make up more than half of more than 200,000 construction workers in New York City, and about 40% of those immigrants are undocumented. But it wasn\u2019t until the last few years that more women began joining the industry, and the numbers are growing every day.
Like many other immigrant women working in New York\u2019s construction industry, Reyes, a 51-year-old former schoolteacher from Ecuador, had to elbow her way in. She landed her first construction gig by pleading with her male roommate to bring her to his job site, where workers were installing floors. After observing them for a while, she convinced them to let her try it and ended up getting hired on the spot. \u201cI always remember my boss\u2019s words: \u2018Wow, you\u2019re not big and you\u2019re not muscular, but you\u2019re very, very determined,\u2019\u201d she says.
At the free construction safety classes run by non-profits like Queens\u2019 New Immigrant Community Empowerment (Nice) and Brooklyn\u2019s Worker\u2019s Justice Project, women occupy nearly half the seats \u2013 a dramatic increase from five years ago, when hardly any women signed up, staffers say. \u201cThe demand is so high that we started doing some women-only trainings,\u201d says Nilbia Coyote, Nice\u2019s director.
The main draw is the pay. Whereas a cleaning or restaurant job might pay below minimum wage, construction work can pay $20 an hour or more. Some women say they prefer construction\u2019s morning-to-afternoon schedule, which better aligns with their children\u2019s school days. Others see it as an opportunity to build a professional career, or simply find the work more exciting. Then there\u2019s the network effect. \u201cOnce a woman is in one of these job sites, more and more women feel the aspiration that \u2018if Juanita can do it, I can do it\u2019,\u201d says Ligia Guallpa, the executive director of the Worker\u2019s Justice Project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But construction is a risky job, and even more so for undocumented immigrants, who often work under informal verbal agreements. And for women, being vastly outnumbered on every construction site means more pressure to accept lower pay and mistreatment. That\u2019s why, as more immigrant women don hard hats in New York City, advocates are training them to stand up against exploitation \u2013 and transform the construction industry itself.
Immigrant women entering construction aren\u2019t just signs of an evolving workforce, but a changing world. In the past, \u201cusually it was men who came [to the US] first, while women would stay back home with their children\u201d, says Hildalyn Col\u00f3n Hern\u00e1ndez, Nice\u2019s deputy director. \u201cNow, as the political and economic situation gets worse\u201d in many South American countries, \u201cmore women are coming due to necessity\u201d. And compared with past immigrants, the women are more often younger, educated and coming alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At Nice\u2019s offices in Queens, I meet Jailin Ram\u00edrez, a 27-year-old who arrived by herself just 15 days earlier from Venezuela. There, she had stood out as a female singer of traditionally male-dominated mariachi and ranchera music, but the pay wasn\u2019t enough to support her young children. Now she\u2019s sleeping in a homeless shelter in the Bronx as she hopes to land a construction job \u2013 \u201cwhatever is available\u201d, she says \u2013 to send money to her family back home.
Then there\u2019s Nelsy Suazo, a 25-year-old immigrant from Honduras, who has been living for the past year in a south Brooklyn homeless shelter with her four children and her mother. Before coming to New York, Suazo had worked as a roofer in the small town of Jasper, Texas, as one of two women on a tense and dangerous job site with as many as 80 male co-workers. They called her \u201cmami\u201d and \u201cmi amor\u201d, made comments about her underwear, and taunted her: \u201cHurry up, this is a man\u2019s job,\u201d they would say. She tried to ignore it, reminding herself that the weekly pay was nearly three times more than the $500 she had made working in a kitchen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Texas construction site didn\u2019t have a place for women to change clothes, so Suazo had to use a nearby restaurant. It\u2019s a perennial issue, and more than just a matter of convenience: if women don\u2019t end up changing after work, they could end up bringing hazardous substances on their clothes back home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suazo\u2019s job site also lacked proper safety equipment, including gloves and harnesses, in women\u2019s sizes, so often she climbed ladders and walked on steep roofs without them. Sometimes, like the men, she worked without a helmet. Though it was terrifying, she didn\u2019t dare complain. \u201cI was trying to learn quickly because if you make any mistakes, they don\u2019t give you another day of work. But any mistake can take your life,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One day, she watched one of the men fall three stories after his foot got caught in a ladder as he was carrying tiles without a harness. The man survived, with broken bones. \u201cIt was a horrible sight. I felt even worse because they blamed him,\u201d Suazo says. The man didn\u2019t sue, she recalls, because he was afraid of being deported. Suazo kept silent as well: \u201cI felt like I couldn\u2019t say anything, because I thought I didn\u2019t have any rights.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2018completely different world\u2019
One of the advocates trying to change that is 35-year-old Ang\u00e9lica Novoa, a former English teacher in Colombia who never imagined her first job after arriving in New York City six years ago would be building high-rises, dangling hundreds of feet above midtown Manhattan\u2019s ritziest avenues on swaying suspended scaffolding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Like many other undocumented women in New York City, Novoa initially tried working as a cleaner, but the harsh chemicals were too much for her to handle. Then she consulted Nice, which ended up training her to work on construction sites. Novoa, who has back issues, \u201cnever thought I could do it\u201d, she says. \u201cBut I did it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The biggest issue wasn\u2019t lifting heavy objects but the lack of respect from her male co-workers, who \u201cwould call me \u2018little girl\u2019 or \u2018sweet thing\u2019, even though I told them they should be using my name\u201d, she says. \u201cI would get a lot of invitations from my co-workers: \u2018Oh, do you want to go to the weekend to my boat? Do you want to go in my car?\u2019 And even though I was clear I wasn\u2019t interested, they would keep insisting.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It wasn\u2019t just a question of fitting in; it was a question of safety. Once, while she worked next to a male foreman on the suspended scaffolding, he asked her to stand on top of a bucket so that they could reach more areas without having to reposition the platform. Because she had taken the safety course, Novoa knew the request wasn\u2019t allowed. \u201cI said \u2018no\u2019,\u201d she recalls, \u201cAnd I have a very strong \u2018no\u2019. Luckily, he listened to me, but he never should have asked.\u201d
Today, Novoa is no longer undocumented and works as a staffer at Nice, where she is the director of training and education for immigrant workers, including a construction pre-apprenticeship program reserved for female immigrants (the Worker\u2019s Justice Project has a similar offering). In addition to skills training, the programs seek to shift workers\u2019 mindsets to demand better conditions, Novoa says. \u201cThe world is not gonna end because you lose a job, but it\u2019s definitely gonna end if you lose your life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At Nice\u2019s offices in Jackson Heights, immigrants take classes from Maritza Ortiz, a 60-year-old from Guatemala who started working in construction in 2001 \u2013 a time when she knew of no other female immigrants on the job. Now, Ortiz teaches a popular free, 30-hour, Spanish-language training on Osha\u2019s federal safety guidelines, and a 10-hour New York City-specific safety course, both of which are required to work at major construction sites. Ortiz says her lessons aren\u2019t just about safety guidelines but developing true self-confidence \u2013 vital when refusing an unsafe task or negotiating better pay. The waitlist to join the course is months long.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the Workers Justice Project in Brooklyn, a similar class aims to help women dismantle the gender barriers within their own minds, explains Guallpa, the non-profit\u2019s director. \u201cMost of the women have said, \u2018We\u2019ve been told our job is to do cleaning,\u2019 and some have said, \u2018I\u2019m scared of touching a power tool.\u2019 So we\u2019re breaking their own misconceptions about what they can do as women, so that they can then break it for others.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I meet Suazo on the day she passes her final Osha exam at the Nice training center. She\u2019s beaming: the course has opened up a \u201ccompletely different world\u201d for her, she says. \u201cThey prepare you. They let you know about safety, and your rights as an employee, as a woman.\u201d Next, she wants to learn framing, sheetrock, flooring and electricity, and then join a construction company \u2013 one that will truly respect her. \u201cI want people to know that I\u2019m actually an independent woman. We\u2019re more than machines to make babies,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m capable, I have experience, and I need more opportunities.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Building power at la parada
By training workers like Suazo, advocates are hoping to create enough empowered workers that employers across the city\u2019s construction industry will be forced to improve their conditions. Organizations such as Nice and the Worker\u2019s Justice Project try to refer immigrants directly to a list of vetted businesses who follow the rules, but the list remains small, while the number of jobseekers grows daily.
A more common experience for immigrants is to wait at la parada for informal employment offers, negotiated quickly through rolled-down windows. It\u2019s an exchange fraught with uncertainty: \u201cWhen you are outside, you don\u2019t know anything,\u201d Coyote says. \u201cThere\u2019s somebody who is speaking at you from a truck; they promise you this, and say they\u2019re going to do that \u2013 but it\u2019s literally a coin in the air.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These informal job markets have become even more chaotic with the recent influx of new immigrants. The just-arrived are desperate, says Coyote, which means many of them \u201csay yes to any kind of jobs or any kind of work. And we\u2019re talking about places that pay seven, eight, nine dollars per hour, and that\u2019s an indicator they will probably abuse workers and not provide proper safety measures.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But as more women enter the field, advocates also see an indirect opportunity to raise safety standards for the entire industry. Every woman I spoke with for this story agreed: female construction workers tend to take safety more seriously than men, and the numbers appear to reflect that. While New York City sees about a dozen construction-related fatalities every year, advocates say no female construction workers are known to have died on the job. Novoa speculates masculinity pushes men to take risks and ignore precautions; Ortiz says women have more \u201cself-love\u201d. For Elizabeth Reyes, the worker from Ecuador, it\u2019s simple: \u201cWe are more observant, we are more eager to make suggestions, we\u2019re more careful. At least that\u2019s how I see myself and others,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Two months ago, Reyes was working as a flagger at a construction site, diverting traffic around a scaffold that two men were anchoring in the soil. But Reyes noticed that the soil wasn\u2019t firm enough and tried to alert the men: \u201cI said, \u2018Listen, that\u2019s going to tilt, that\u2019s going to tilt.\u2019 And they didn\u2019t pay attention.\u2019\u201d Minutes later, the structure began to sway. Reyes ran over and grabbed one of the supports to keep it from collapsing, while the men fled in fear. She feels proud \u2013 \u201cWe are the ones who are more aware and more careful\u201d \u2013 and annoyed: \u201cBecause we\u2019re women, we are constantly being devalued in these jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At her current job, she\u2019s making $18 an hour, though she believes that her work is really worth $30. \u201cIn order to keep our jobs, many women feel forced to be friendly and flirty,\u201d she says. \u201cI don\u2019t take that, and this is why I get into these types of situations.\u201d She has a simple solution: fill job sites with as many women as possible. \u201cIf there were more women in the industry, there would be less accidents,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd it makes everything better because you are not there alone.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thankfully, there\u2019s no longer a shortage of willing women at the Brooklyn parada. \u201cA lot of the women, they see me in construction and they already want to follow me,\u201d Reyes says. But with all the recent new arrivals, \u201cit\u2019s less organized, and people just accept pretty much anything, which lowers the wages\u201d. So she\u2019s taken on a quiet mission to help them build power \u2013 referring them to trainings at the Worker\u2019s Justice Project before bringing them to construction sites. \u201cWhenever I meet a new woman, I say, \u2018Here\u2019s my phone number.\u2019 And I always say, you just have to be determined, be willing to learn, and just go for it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n