by
Helena Worthen
Chicago Labor Education Program
University of Illinois Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations
Suite 214 The Rice Building
815 West Van Buren Street
Chicago, IL 60607
312-996-2623, fax 312-413-2997
hworthen+at+uic.edu
and
Rev. Anthony Haynes
Director, Building Bridges Project
The Chicago Interfaith Committee on Worker Issues
1020 West Bryn Mawr
Chicago, IL 60660-4627
733-728-8400 x18, fax 733-728-8409
revhaynes+at+nicwj.org
With the assistance of:
Jocelyn Graf, Research Assistant, Chicago Labor
Education Program,
Marisol Cruz, Graduate Student at Eastern Mennonite
University; and
Stefanie E. Smith, DePaul University student (class of
2004)
ABSTRACT
Traditional job training programs may increase the number of workers and skills of workers but they are not intended to change the internal relationships of the workforces in which these workers are employed. Such systemic changes are more likely the result of organizing than training. The Building Bridges Project, started in January 2001, in Chicago, is a church and community based training and organizing project. It has two goals. The first is to increase community access to unionized building trades apprenticeship programs; that is, bring minorities into a high-wage, traditionally white union workforce. The second is to ensure that local construction projects are completed using union labor. These goals address the lack of good jobs for people from minority communities in increasingly hard economic times, the historic exclusion of minorities and women from high-wage union building trades jobs, and the prevalence of sweatshop construction companies operating within these same communities. To the extent that this project has succeeded, it has encountered resistance as well. These resistances are the focus of this study overall, while this paper looks at the experience of those graduates of the first two classes who applied to building trades apprenticeship programs. Based on a year of observations, interviews, participant action, and an ongoing strategic planning process, this study demonstrates how a simple training program can, if unfolded to its logical next steps, challenge a broad set of relationships.