Women’s Bureau Head: Go For Green And Non-Traditional Jobs
WASHINGTON (PAI)--With the number of “green jobs” in the U.S. projected to grow by 52% by 2016, the new director of the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau is urging female workers to go for those jobs -- and for non-traditional jobs, too.
And, as attendees learned at the May 19 luncheon where Bureau Director Sara Manzano-Diaz spoke, sometimes those two categories overlap.
“The Bureau of Labor Statistics says green jobs are the highest-paying jobs of the 21st century and that’s where we want women to be,” Manzano-Diaz told the session, arranged by Wider Opportunities for Women (WOW).
To help women achieve that jobs goal, she added, the bureau advocates moves for workplace flexibility for both sexes, and partnering with local green jobs-creation efforts to insure woman workers are fully integrated into their programs.
Those efforts include on-the-job training for “green” construction and energy self-sufficiency jobs in Vermont, increasing the number of women in green jobs training run by Detroiters for Environmental Justice, “a partnership with Kansas City’s YMCA to develop outreach, re-enlistment and training to engage unemployed women in energy efficiency jobs” and working with Oregon Tradeswomen to create support for women who need unions’ building trades training to participate in the green economy.
“We’re trying to create a pipeline to get women into the green economy,” Manzano-Diaz said. But that pipeline must lead somewhere, and not be a dead end, warned WOW Executive Director Joan Kuriansky.
“Not every green job is a good job,” she said -- a point that union speakers often make in other job-creation forums. “Some provide good benefits and good wages. But we also have to make sure there are career ladders in these fields so that workers, especially low-income workers, can move up to self-sufficiency,” Kuriansky added.
The green jobs, speakers said, can also be non-traditional jobs, at least for women. Non-traditional jobs are in occupations that are less than 25% female. Those occupations employ only 7.2% of all working women, and pay, on average, 20% more than comparable occupations with overwhelmingly female gender ratios.
Kuriansky noted some of those green and/or non-traditional jobs for women could be in road-building, since the Transportation Department must “set aside 1%” of its highway spending “for hiring and outreach for women and minorities.” She added one of the first green jobs she learned that women filled was in converting sludge into recyclable material/compost at Washington, D.C.’s Blue Plains sewage treatment plant.
But the shining example for the group of how a “green job” can help female workers came from Renee Owens, a young, formerly jobless D.C. woman whom WOW found, trained, and placed, with the Operative Plasterers and Cement Masons.
“Before that, I had no idea where I was going,” Owens told the group. “I had the opportunity for hands-on training and it was in something that I never thought could be possible. They gave me training, education and even construction mathematics -- which was difficult and I struggled with it.” Owens wants to be a cement finisher.
WOW and the union also gave her support, such ensuring the right bus connections from her home to the training center. And at the end, “Last Friday, I got a call from the Cement Masons,” Owens said. “They asked: ‘Where are you?’ Then they said to come on down, they’ve got an apprenticeship slot for me. You guys are a lifesaver.”