Speaker 1: This is my margin trowl. And you always know a
Speaker 1: finisher because we've we've got him in our back pockets
Speaker 1: sticking out. And it's such a small tool, but you
Speaker 1: just use this all the time when you're pouring concrete,
Speaker 1: ees to scrape your forms, use it to get in
Speaker 1: little corners that maybe your other trials are too big for.
Speaker 1: So you can always tell a finisher by the margin trowl.
Speaker 1: When Liz Nichols was in her twenties, she knew that
Speaker 1: she wanted two things financial stability and to start a family,
Speaker 1: but she had no roadmap to help her achieve those goals.
Speaker 1: That is until the day she met a guide who
Speaker 1: would show her a new world of work. In this
Speaker 1: episode of I'm the Job, brought to you by Express
Speaker 1: Employment Professionals, we'll hear a story about shattering expectations in
Speaker 1: order to find meaningful work. If you want to find
Speaker 1: your next job, or if you're a company hoping to
Speaker 1: grow your workforce, Express Employment Professionals is for you. Find
Speaker 1: more information at express prose dot com. Um Now producer
Speaker 1: Chris Siegel has the story of Liz Nichols. It's early
Speaker 1: in the morning, I'm in Northwest Portland, in a neighborhood
Speaker 1: where new developments are springing up like dandelions. I parked
Speaker 1: behind a beat up old truck, a nine Toyota that
Speaker 1: belongs to my friend Liz. How's work going so far?
Speaker 1: This morning? While most of Portland is waking up, Liz
Speaker 1: has been at work for a couple hours. She greets
Speaker 1: me in her loose, dirty jeans and union hoodie. Under
Speaker 1: her chin, she has what's called a particulate respirator. It's
Speaker 1: like the construction workers version of a surgical mask. Liz
Speaker 1: is a journeyman cement mason, and today she's working in
Speaker 1: a half finished building. There's some sheet metal guys, some
Speaker 1: electricians running wire. But yeah, there's we got just different
Speaker 1: trades people were kind of working around. As a woman
Speaker 1: in the trades, Liz has certainly taken an unusual path.
Speaker 1: Only three percent of people working on constructions sights are women.
Speaker 1: That means for every one hundred plumbers or carpenters or mechanics,
Speaker 1: only about three of them are women. But since she
Speaker 1: was a child growing up in Massachusetts, she's always been
Speaker 1: a bit of a contrarian. This one time, my father
Speaker 1: took me in my siblings to the fire station and
Speaker 1: Waltham because one of my mom's cousins was a firefighter,
Speaker 1: and it was a bunch of guys, and I remember
Speaker 1: very clearly as nine or ten, asking if there were
Speaker 1: any women firefighters, and they said there had never been
Speaker 1: a woman firefighter in the history of wealthy and firefighting.
Speaker 1: And at that moment I wanted to be a firefighter
Speaker 1: really badly. But the expectations that were placed on Liz
Speaker 1: by her family, by society and culture, they had her
Speaker 1: pointing in a different direction. You go to college and
Speaker 1: then magically you figure it out. You go to college
Speaker 1: and you come out and people will pay you good
Speaker 1: money to do things. And so I didn't I think
Speaker 1: twice such as go to college, go to college. I
Speaker 1: wasn't very academically motivated or talented in high school. And
Speaker 1: now that I know, there's all these great jobs out
Speaker 1: there that you don't need a college degree. Four. If
Speaker 1: I could go back in time, if I had a
Speaker 1: time and sheet, I would not have attended college. Liz
Speaker 1: was an English and history major, and while she dreamed
Speaker 1: of a career in writing, she struggled to pass her classes.
Speaker 1: She couldn't stay focused, She'd fall asleep during lectures and
Speaker 1: then have trouble catching up. But she learned one thing.
Speaker 1: The summer before my senior year of college, I worked
Speaker 1: on a fruit and vegetable farm on Martha's vineyard, and
Speaker 1: it was awesome and it was sort of my first
Speaker 1: taste of manual labor. And I loved it. I loved
Speaker 1: working outdoors. I you know, loved feeling strong and muscular
Speaker 1: from busting ass all day. It was a minor miracle
Speaker 1: that she made it through college, she tells me. An
Speaker 1: adviser of hers basically dragged her to graduation day. After college,
Speaker 1: she got by on a combination of gardening and landscaping
Speaker 1: jobs and serving coffee. It wasn't going to make her rich,
Speaker 1: but she was content. She had a good life and
Speaker 1: a loving partner. But then I was suddenly it was
Speaker 1: in my late twenties, and I knew I wanted a kid.
Speaker 1: And that was sort of the aha moment of like,
Speaker 1: I need health insurance, I need benefits, I need a
Speaker 1: wage that will support a family. I've always loved sports,
Speaker 1: so I found a physical therapy assistant program and uh,
Speaker 1: it was a two year program and you'd come out
Speaker 1: making forty dollars a year, which sounded like so much
Speaker 1: money to me at the time, and I thought, Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's something I can do, and I took one anatomy
Speaker 1: and physiology class. She thought maybe this time she'd be
Speaker 1: successful at school. But I ended up trying in my
Speaker 1: car one day after class and realizing that it's you know,
Speaker 1: it wasn't that I was immature, it wasn't that I
Speaker 1: was late. Easy is that I'm just not I just
Speaker 1: don't do well in an academic setting, and that's not
Speaker 1: how I learned. And I dropped the class and then
Speaker 1: really started to panic. To Liz, there was no way
Speaker 1: forward the life where she starts a family, where she
Speaker 1: has financial stability. She couldn't see that life. She spent
Speaker 1: about a year in this cycle, comfortable but feeling like
Speaker 1: there was a hole and she could be doing more.
Speaker 1: But when she least expected it, a short, white haired
Speaker 1: woman named Dolores would walk into a coffee shop Lizza
Speaker 1: is working at and change everything. There was a regular
Speaker 1: customer who was an electrician, and she was a woman,
Speaker 1: and I was talking to her one day and she
Speaker 1: told me about Oregon tradeswoman and she talked about how
Speaker 1: being an electrician had changed her life and the quality
Speaker 1: quality of life. She was able to provide for her
Speaker 1: two children and her partner. And this was someone telling
Speaker 1: me she um worked in construction and made eighty thousand
Speaker 1: dollars a year and had health insurance and would receive
Speaker 1: a pension when she retired. And it just sort of
Speaker 1: like bells were going off, and I was like, that's
Speaker 1: what I want, that's what I want to do. Dolores
Speaker 1: brought the change Liz was searching for. After a Google
Speaker 1: search for Oregon Trades Women, Liz was sold a world
Speaker 1: of meaningful work was starting to open up to her.
Speaker 1: Jobs like welder or electrician, or crane operator or wind
Speaker 1: turbine technician, where all of a sudden, jobs that she
Speaker 1: could see herself doing. Shortly after the coffee shop conversation,
Speaker 1: she signed up for the training with Oregon Trades Women.
Speaker 1: I met Liz a few years ago when she went
Speaker 1: through our program. That's Amy Jane Neil, she runs the
Speaker 1: training program at Oregon Trades Women. The mission of Oregon
Speaker 1: Trades Women is to serve women and girls to think
Speaker 1: about careers and skilled trades. And that's their executive director
Speaker 1: Kelly coopcheck. I met Kelly and Amy at their office
Speaker 1: on a busy street in northeast Portland, located half a
Speaker 1: block from my favorite hardware store. When Liz arrived at
Speaker 1: Oregon Trades Women, she had a lot to learn. Day
Speaker 1: one was like, let's look at a tape measure. If
Speaker 1: someone says five and three, eight's like, you can find
Speaker 1: five and three. It's on the tape measure really quickly
Speaker 1: and hitting a nail with a hammer and not missing
Speaker 1: the nail. You know, there's lots of no tap tap tapping.
Speaker 1: I don't want to hear the tap tap tapping, Like
Speaker 1: swing and hit that nail. But Amy and Kelly recognize
Speaker 1: that for a woman to make it in the trades,
Speaker 1: she needs to have training with a variety of tools
Speaker 1: and not just the physical ones they use on the job.
Speaker 1: Men are better equipped for this male dominated industry to succeed.
Speaker 1: So our program sort of bridges that divide. So we
Speaker 1: equip our students, graduates of our program with tools to
Speaker 1: to fit into this male dominated culture and to succeed.
Speaker 1: Throughout the program, Amy saw Liz transform and she was
Speaker 1: a really different person than that she is now. She's
Speaker 1: got the same heart She's got the same drive, but
Speaker 1: her level of confidence, her understanding of her own value worth,
Speaker 1: and she's ripped now she's strong. After the training, Liz
Speaker 1: was excited to work. The next step for her was
Speaker 1: finding an apprenticeship, only she didn't know what apprenticeship program
Speaker 1: to join. It just so happened that the Cement Mason's Union,
Speaker 1: the tradespeople who make our sidewalks and building floors possible,
Speaker 1: was hosting an apprentice recruitment training, so she thought why
Speaker 1: not and signed up. I spent a week at this
Speaker 1: met Mason's training center where we know built forms and
Speaker 1: we poured concrete, and I was just trying to impress everyone.
Speaker 1: I just really, you know, I didn't know what I
Speaker 1: wanted to do, but I know I knew that I
Speaker 1: wanted everyone to want to hire me. So I was,
Speaker 1: you know, filling up the wheelbarrow twice as full as
Speaker 1: everyone else and running them back and forth. And at
Speaker 1: one point during the class, I smashed my thumb with
Speaker 1: a sledgehammer and was bleeding everywhere and just kept working
Speaker 1: and they didn't notice until I just very casually asked
Speaker 1: for a band it and they saw that my thumb
Speaker 1: was just like black and blue and bleading. Her hard
Speaker 1: work and grit didn't go unnoticed by the leaders of
Speaker 1: the union. At the end of the training, they pulled
Speaker 1: her aside and they offered me a job. They said,
Speaker 1: we want you in our apprenticeship. You can go to
Speaker 1: work Monday if this is what you want. The door
Speaker 1: was finally opening for Liz, a rewarding job with good pay,
Speaker 1: the pieces of the puzzle that she needed to start
Speaker 1: a family. She accepted the job with the Cement Mason Union.
Speaker 1: And then once I had an apprenticeship and it was
Speaker 1: scheduled like Okay, you're going to work Monday, that was
Speaker 1: sort of like I'm gonna walk on the job and
Speaker 1: they're gonna know I'm a fraud. They're gonna know, like
Speaker 1: I've never done anything like this. It's time for Liz
Speaker 1: to go to work. How does she fare on the job?
Speaker 1: Find out after a short break. You're listening to independent
Speaker 1: producer Chris Siegel and the story of Cement Mason Liz
Speaker 1: nichols Um. The job is brought to you by Express
Speaker 1: Employment for Esstionals. One company is on a mission to
Speaker 1: put a million people to work each year. Sounds like
Speaker 1: a big number, doesn't it not to Express Employment Professionals
Speaker 1: seeking a skilled labor position or administrative ortment, and maybe
Speaker 1: you're an executive looking for a career that fits. We
Speaker 1: take pride in connecting the right people with the right company.
Speaker 1: Express Employment Professionals is on a mission to put a
Speaker 1: million people to work each year. Let us help. We'll
Speaker 1: open doors for you to go to express pros dot
Speaker 1: com to find a location near you. Now back to
Speaker 1: the story of Liz Nichols. Before the break, she had
Speaker 1: finished cement mason training and was gearing up for her
Speaker 1: first day at work. I get nervous standing around, like, um,
Speaker 1: you always want to be doing something and grab something
Speaker 1: clean something. Liz feels right at home amongst the various
Speaker 1: trades people putting together this building. While talking with me,
Speaker 1: she continually scans for jobs to do. I ask her
Speaker 1: questions in between mixing concrete, sweeping and priming the floor. So,
Speaker 1: how does work. Do you see a job and you
Speaker 1: just do it? Or were you like assigned to do
Speaker 1: that room? Um? Today, it's kind of we all know
Speaker 1: what needs to get done, so I thought needed to
Speaker 1: be primed and just jumped on it. At one point,
Speaker 1: she leaves me mid sentence to carry a couple fifty
Speaker 1: pound bags of cement over to the mixer. But when
Speaker 1: she first started as an apprentice, work wasn't always this smooth.
Speaker 1: There's this one day we were pouring a section of
Speaker 1: street and there was rebar in the concrete. So you're
Speaker 1: walking on the rebar, you're bouncing on the rebar, and
Speaker 1: we're pouring the concrete, you know, a couple of feet deep,
Speaker 1: and at some point the rebar has covered, so you're
Speaker 1: just walking in the concrete. You can't see where your
Speaker 1: feet are going, and you're balancing on this rebar. And
Speaker 1: I was wearing this backpack vibrator, so we have these,
Speaker 1: you know, vibrators as this long wand and it, you know,
Speaker 1: you dip it into the concrete. You're consolidating the concrete
Speaker 1: around the reb bar, and it's you know, it's like
Speaker 1: this fifty pound backpack I'm wearing. Yeah, this is going
Speaker 1: where you think it's going. And I just tripped and
Speaker 1: fell backwards, just wiped out, laying there like a snow
Speaker 1: angel on the concrete. And my foreman came up and
Speaker 1: he put his arm out to pull me up, and
Speaker 1: I just pulled him down into the concrete and now
Speaker 1: we're boling in the concrete and you know, someone else
Speaker 1: has to come and they help us. So I'm just
Speaker 1: soaked through. And my boss was like, you know, just
Speaker 1: go home. You're covering to night. So I, you know,
Speaker 1: got in my car and I'm just so humiliated. And
Speaker 1: I spent all weekend like they're gonna fire me, They're
Speaker 1: gonna think I'm an idiot, this and that. Despite her
Speaker 1: belief that she would soon be out of work, Liz
Speaker 1: was in for a surprise first thing Monday morning when
Speaker 1: she returned to the job site and a guy from
Speaker 1: another crew came up and said, hey, I heard your
Speaker 1: fall on the concrete and proceeded to tell me his
Speaker 1: first falling in the concrete story. And then I realized
Speaker 1: it was this write of passage. As an apprentice, she
Speaker 1: was the new person on the job, but on top
Speaker 1: of that, she'd be on construction sites where she'd meet
Speaker 1: guys who had never worked with a woman. She received
Speaker 1: a lot of attention. I definitely felt more like I
Speaker 1: was under an X ray, like just walking across the
Speaker 1: job site and feeling like every single person is staring
Speaker 1: at me. Sometimes it just makes me feel like I'm
Speaker 1: a unicorn or and some like mythological creature and some
Speaker 1: of the things that she heard while at work. Let
Speaker 1: me do that for you. Hey, you look good when
Speaker 1: you're doing that. What does your husband think of you
Speaker 1: doing this work? Oh? I heard about you. I would
Speaker 1: never let my wife do this. Oh I'm joking. I'm joking. Oh,
Speaker 1: you can take a joke. I had a foreman once.
Speaker 1: Uh tell me, like, sure, you can handle this work now,
Speaker 1: but your body is going to break down faster than
Speaker 1: our bodies because you don't have testosterone. And if you
Speaker 1: look at the science, like women live longer than men,
Speaker 1: you know, it's just like we're is he even pulling
Speaker 1: that out of So we got into it a little bit.
Speaker 1: We've got into a fight about that one. What she
Speaker 1: could use in those type situations is support from some
Speaker 1: of the guys on the crew. The next day, one
Speaker 1: of my corkers came up to me and said, Hey,
Speaker 1: you know what he said to you yesterday. That wasn't right.
Speaker 1: None of us feel that way. And when I went
Speaker 1: home that day, I just kept thinking, why didn't you
Speaker 1: tell him? Why in the moment, why didn't you stand
Speaker 1: up and say that if you want to be on
Speaker 1: my team. Be on my team. Hopefully the next time
Speaker 1: he witnesses something like that, he'll feel more comfortable saying, hey,
Speaker 1: that's not right. She pushed back against this foreman. But
Speaker 1: Liz doesn't always feel like she can speak her mind.
Speaker 1: If you let things roll off your shoulders, people like
Speaker 1: you more like the crew accepts you. She's cool. Oh no, no,
Speaker 1: she's cool out here that time. Oh she's cool. You
Speaker 1: can you can say stuff in front of Liz, and
Speaker 1: it leads to this awkward place where I want to
Speaker 1: be accepted and I want to fit in and I
Speaker 1: want to feel like one of the crew. But you know,
Speaker 1: where do you draw the line of like, actually, you
Speaker 1: can't say that to me. You can't just pass it
Speaker 1: off as a joke. Experiences like these they touched Liz
Speaker 1: now more than ever after a recent development in her life,
Speaker 1: her dream of having a baby, well, she's accomplished that.
Speaker 1: She gave birth to her son, Shamus nichols Kirk near
Speaker 1: the end of her three year apprenticeship. M my baby.
Speaker 1: I thought I was gonna have a daughter, and I
Speaker 1: thought I was going to raise this little tomboy hellion,
Speaker 1: And I realized if I had a daughter, I would
Speaker 1: dress her, you know, I address her in blue, I
Speaker 1: address her and green. I would very proudly have like
Speaker 1: this gender neutral girl and try and teach her to
Speaker 1: be an empowered woman. And and I had a son.
Speaker 1: She had a son who she knows will eventually grow
Speaker 1: up to be a man. She doesn't have the manufacturers
Speaker 1: instructions on how to raise a sensitive, thoughtful son, so
Speaker 1: she looks back to her experience on the construction site
Speaker 1: for ideas. I'm going to try and teach him to
Speaker 1: speak out if he sees something that makes him uncomfortable,
Speaker 1: to not be um the guy who comes up to
Speaker 1: me the day after something happens and says he's sorry,
Speaker 1: and you know it's not right. I want Shamus to
Speaker 1: be the type of person who, in the moment says, hey,
Speaker 1: that's that's not right. As Shamus grows up, she wants
Speaker 1: to teach him the value of hard work. I really
Speaker 1: want him to it's crying right now. Uh. I want
Speaker 1: him to know that my job is hard but satisfying,
Speaker 1: and that I can provide the life that I'm providing
Speaker 1: for him through that hard work. There was an occasion
Speaker 1: for Liz where her two lives, her life as a
Speaker 1: worker and her life as a mother, came together. She
Speaker 1: was at the end of her apprenticeship and needed to
Speaker 1: take a test to graduate and become a journeyman cement mason.
Speaker 1: I took it this July and I was still on
Speaker 1: maternity leave, so I actually to bring Shamus with me
Speaker 1: to the hall, and the apprentice instructor and all of
Speaker 1: the office guys babysat for me while I was taking
Speaker 1: the exam. So I was building forms and pouring concrete
Speaker 1: and finishing, and then you know, all these guys were
Speaker 1: just mooning over my baby Liz. Past the exam. They
Speaker 1: have a door that they have all the new journeyman's signed,
Speaker 1: and I got to hold Sheamus while I was signing
Speaker 1: the door, and it was this wonderful, full circle moment
Speaker 1: of I got into this trade because I wanted to
Speaker 1: have a baby one day and to journey out holding
Speaker 1: my child. That this job and this you know, living
Speaker 1: wage made possible. It was just a really cool moment.
Speaker 1: That's Liz Nichols, a journeyman cement mason and mother, living
Speaker 1: and working in Portland, Oregon. That was independent producer Chris
Speaker 1: Siegel with the story of Cement Mason, Liz Nichols, and
Speaker 1: that's all for this edition of On the Job from
Speaker 1: a Express Employment Professionals. Find out more at Express prose
Speaker 1: dot com, and you can listen to every podcast this
Speaker 1: season at Express prose dot com slash podcast. This podcast
Speaker 1: is produced by your host, Steve Mencher for Mensch Media,
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio and Red Seat Ventures. You can subscribe
Speaker 1: on I Heart Radio and iTunes, where we hope you'll
Speaker 1: leave a nice review which helps other folks find us,
Speaker 1: and of course you can listen and subscribe wherever you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts. See you next time, On the Job.