The Sisters of Elevator Union, Local 8: L.J. Dolin, Jennifer Stafford and Debra Tudor

	Debra Tudor has no illusions about why she was hired to become a probationary helper by an elevator construction and service company. The interviewer made it very clear when she applied for a job to help build San Francisco’s Moscone convention center: “We have to hire a woman,” he said. “Can you read a tape measure?” That was the entire interview. Tudor, the single mother of a young daughter, could do far more than read a tape measure-she’d previously spent four years as a certified motorcycle mechanic and service manager. But that brief interview proved to her that only affirmative action requirements at the huge construction project got her onto the first rung of a nearly all-male trade in a good-old-boys industry. For 12 years Tudor jousted with the men who dominate the trade. After she was laid off in 1992, she filed a grievance charging discriminatory practices. An arbitrator who ruled in her favor described the industry this way: “The evidence makes it abundantly clear that the trade of elevator constructors has traditionally been predominantly male, and probably exclusively male until about the time [Tudor] was hired in 1981.”
	Even today, the numbers confirm the arbitrator’s characterization. There are about a dozen women working actively in elevator construction and service, out of a workforce of more than 900 in the Local 8 region, encompassing much of California, Nevada and Utah. In addition, there are fewer than 80 minority men among those 900-plus workers. Nationally, the Department of Labor says there are 29,000 male elevator workers; in the women workers column, the Department has simply an asterisk. San Franciscan Jennifer Stafford’s first interview for a job in the elevator trades was about a sentence longer than Debra Tudor’s. She was asked three questions: “Can you identify tools?” “Are you afraid of heights?” “You know you’ll get dirty?” Damned right she knew her tools. No, she wasn’t afraid of heights. And you’d have to be quite a fool not to realize that people get dirty working on elevators and escalators. Stafford, the single mother of one young girl, had cleaned houses to make ends meet and was at the time on Aid to Families with Dependent Children. But, with her sister providing free babysitting, Stafford went to a free evening trade school, getting 1000 hours of experience in an assortment of trades. For the year and a half she’d been in the program to try to bootstrap herself out of welfare, she had been the only woman taking the course. Each class they’d learn something about one or another of the construction trades-electricity, sheet metal, plumbing, carpentry. It was Stafford’s trade school teacher who spotted the posting for a job at Westinghouse (now Schindler) Elevator Company and suggested she apply for a job as a probationary helper. She dressed up in her best suit, applied her makeup, gathered up a briefcase, and went down to the company’s headquarters, where the savvy interviewer spotted her for a woman and hired her on the spot.
	In Stafford’s case, the elevator company needed a woman to meet affirmative action requirements for a San Francisco State University job. The only way you got in the door as a woman or African American was-and is-through affirmative action, she says, adding that she’d probably still be on welfare if the company had not had to meet affirmative action goals. Now one of three tradeswomen at Otis Elevator Company-out of 250 workers in the Local 8 area-Stafford campaigns for affirmative action because “other women should be given the opportunity to do what I did.” Despite her skill with tools, Stafford has had to face frequent jibes from co-workers about how she got hired. “You’re only here because you’re a woman,” they say, to which she answers, “You’re only here because you’re a son of the boss” (or SOB, as even some of them call themselves). She says the majority of Otis’ workers “are kin to someone in the workforce at Otis-it feels like a family reunion instead of a workforce”-and she’s observed a similar proportion at the other big companies she’s worked for. It’s an observation that hasn’t escaped any of the women who somehow manage to get hired in the trade. Tudor, for instance, says that nepotism was rife at Westinghouse/Schindler when she worked there, and that at one time nine of the people on the company’s roster of about 70 had the same last name. Both Tudor and Stafford survived their initial probationary periods relatively unscathed, but for L.J. Dolin-No. 1 in grade point average among the 200 men and women graduating from her Army mechanics school at Fort Jackson, S.C.-getting her foot in the door was no “gimme.” The spunky young San Franciscan spent five years beating on doors trying to get hired in the industry. Even when Dolin got that coveted first job as a probationary helper with a timely phone call-after she’d heard of an affirmative action goal at a San Francisco Redevelopment Agency job-the company did everything it could to keep her from gaining a permanent foothold in the potentially high-paying trade. For months she was laid off every third week, giving the company its rock-bottom minimum of female affirmative action but depriving Dolin of the hours she needed to successfully emerge from probationary limbo. Twice Dolin had to start over again to accumulate the hours needed to pass through her probation and rise to the status of union card-carrying “helper.” Once she came within hours of accumulating the required time. Her union’s business agent said it was the first time he’d seen a probationary employee treated that way by any company, but the union was powerless to do anything to help her.
	Today, Dolin has her union card, but she has no illusions about why her employer has kept her on the payroll. She, like the other women in the union, is frequently “bicycled” from job to job-from the Oakland City Hall project to a job in Martinez and another in Blackhawk and then to the massive new San Francisco Airport expansion project. “When their affirmative action goal is completed, or almost,” she says, “they switch you to somewhere else to show your female face for a while. Without affirmative action, I have no doubt I’d never have been in this business.” Although the elevator companies have begun to recruit women for some jobs, the women workers insist that they are doing so only because compelled to by government mandates and legal challenges. The prevailing attitude reminds Tudor of a comment from the foreman at her first job site: “Too bad you’re not a black girl. You’d count as two for those people who come around and count minorities.” Dolin’s experiences as a second-class worker have left their mark. “I’m very mad that I’m starting my career at 37. I tried to start it at 30 and could have been vested in our pension plan by now.” But her competence and mechanical training were no guarantee of job security. All three women, who have lobbied public agencies tirelessly in a personal campaign to open up their closed trade, speak of the many indignities and deceptions they have had to negotiate while trying to earn an honest buck. Their first major victory came against their own union, which as one result of a lawsuit changed its union cards, replacing the “Bro.” (for Brother) with “Bro./Sis.” (That union card, said one woman, “is the only thing we can show that keeps us from being invisible.”) The union ultimately cooperated with the women in successful lawsuits and grievances against a number of elevator companies. The women are happy with the confidential settlements, but money was never the point, says Tudor. They wanted something more valuable: “We just wanted to work.” Some of the hostility these three women faced came from individual co-workers: vandalism, ostracism, sexual harassment. One woman asked to be transferred to a job in four feet of mud at the San Francisco Airport to escape harassment at her previous job site. Tudor had to move after a scary incident when her car’s tires were pierced with elevator parts in the middle of the night. The incident occurred hours after it was announced at a union meeting that she had filed a gender discrimination grievance against her employer.
	Despite such individual harassment, it is the systemic problems in the industry that worry the three women most. They cite a litany of abuses, such as the companies’ refusal at times to accept applications from women, even when they are sent by certified mail. Women are frequently relegated to the dirtiest, heaviest jobs, like escalator work, or to menial tasks like “flag girl” or getting the coffee, sweeping the floors, carrying out the trash. Tudor spent years asking fruitlessly for more training in elevator work, the kind of training that all workers need to advance in the elevator industry-and which they traditionally get on the job. Elevator maintenance slots are considered the “good jobs” in this business. But, after 12 years, Tudor was laid off because she didn’t have the experience in elevator maintenance that her company had refused to give her. That was one of the factors cited in her successful grievance for her layoff, which the arbitrator called “capricious” and “arbitrary.” There’s no doubt that Debra Tudor, Jennifer Stafford and L.J. Dolin would never have become the skilled tradeswomen they are without affirmative action. But there’s also little doubt that without far more vigorous enforcement of affirmative action participation goals, there won’t be many more women getting the same chance they got to prove their value as steady, mechanically skilled and proud workers in the elevator trade. That’s the vision-and the fear-that has driven the sisters of Local 8 to battle for the rights of their daughters to prove themselves in “a man’s world.” Their fears have not been lost on their daughters, either. When Proposition 209 was passed by the voters, Stafford’s daughter asked her a question that showed how well she understood the dynamics of the elevator trade: “Mom, are you going to be laid off now?”