I joined just to relay these two wee bits. Im in the IBEW and was working 2 sites for 2 foremen. One didn’t do my hours bc he thought my main foreman was doing them. So I was missing 8 hours from 2 months of checks. I took my apprentice to the break room and told him to just fuck off while I checked my hours. I had to tell him again to sit down and not organize things bc I’m trying to teach him something along the lines of “when you are missing hours you stop everything to sort it out”
Another time I had a second apprentice and got the monthly safety doc to go over with them, one of them had already gone over it the day before he came to my site. I asked him if he wanted to keep pulling wire or sit down for 10 minutes for story time. I had to tell him it was rhetorical and sit down and take a 10 minute break while I read the safety doc to them.
I fucking love teaching apprentices how to look after themselves and take every extra bit of time for themselves they can from the company.
i aspire to be this cool some day :rat-salute:
she’s more than a hero, she’s a union woman
:rat-salute:
I’m planning to start the apprenticeship before too long myself actually. It’s just going to be painful when I do, it’ll be a ~$5 an hour paycut from what I make now, and it’ll take 3 or 4 years just to get back to my current pay. It’ll be worth it in the long run, I know, but I haven’t been able to pull the trigger on it yet
If I had people like you when I was in the union (different construction union) I might still be in it. Everyone I interacted with sucked except for one of the teachers who I still think back on his lessons
IBEW seems to have a lot of good folks at least where i am. and i credit a lot to one of my journeymen. He was very much a brother and taught me how to look after myself. One foreman gave him a backhanded compliment one winter morning and when the foreman left he gave me the hand sign to wrap things up. This was at 10am. We left and got 8 hrs because of a bit of disrespect. He also stuck up for me when i started presenting fem at work and another electrician from another shop asked what was with his apprentice.
