Of course, John is the first to say that construction tile setting is not a relaxing hobby. The job can include long days with difficult and dangerous physical labor. She describes an accident in which a pile of bathroom stalls fell on her while she was tiling a bathroom floor."They were kind of tough on me my first day, I'm not going to lie.
Tasks can include cutting tile with a saw, mixing "mud" that is used to level floors, laying tile or grouting in-between tiles. "Saturday it's time-and-a-half. Sunday is a double. But sometimes they won't tell you that we're working the weekend," says John. "[Managers] do give work to people they favor or their friends. They do that. So you have to work around it."
"It's already difficult being a woman in construction, but also being a Black woman in construction is very difficult to do," she says. "They'll draw things in the bathroom. They put like, Trump stuff or N-word stuff. Or they would draw a monkey picture or things like that. They even had, when I was at LaGuardia, Nazi stuff in the bathroom."
MakeIt UnionStrong 💪🏽
MakeIt There is a union for Tile layers in New York? Here you just hire who is the best at a good price.