by Sophie Lees / photographs by 3ten 
It’s November and the days are short, so it’s still dark when Billie Lyons leaves her apartment in Rocky Mountain House at 7 a.m. This is her first winter living here and she’s a little worried because the cold creeps into her bones and settles there, making it tough to think about anything other than getting warm. Meteorologists are predicting the coldest winter in a generation, but so far, so good: November or not, the first snow is melting into puffs of white on the gravel and grass, and when the sky lightens it will be deep autumnal blue – the same colour as Lyons’ eyes when they’re enlivened.
Much of the 20-kilometre drive to work takes Lyons through Crimson Lake Provincial Park. The landscape is all foothills and aspens, soft and serene, one of the truly good things about living here. There’s never I much traffic so it’s easy to sink into the wilderness and forget about civilization. But when her grey sedan crests a gentle hill, that illusion is dispersed – down below are the blazing flare stack and pistachio-green vinyl sided buildings of Petro-Canada’s Ferrier gas plant. Lyons pulls into the parking lot and reverses into a parking space. All the vehicles, the majority of which are trucks, face out. This is a back-in facility, a safety precaution in the event of an evacuation.
After she enters the main building, Lyons walks past the office, calling out “morning” to the admin staff, and grabs a coffee from the break room down one of the narrow hallways decorated with safety messages from head office. (If she ever forgets what causes accidents, these posters remind her that haste, frustration, fatigue and apathy are the culprits.) Lyons heads down another narrow hallway and passes through the control room, where a bank of computers, monitoring every pulse of the plant’s operations and equipment 24/7, display numbers and intricate graphs in primary colours. Now she’s back outside, walking to the shop.
The shop has the same queer pistachio vinyl siding as the rest of the plant, and though it was built in the 1960s, it has a temporary attitude, like it’s saying, “Don’t spend too much money on me – I’m not going to be here for long,” It’s a big barn of a building, with a large open space and concrete floors, and like all buildings on site, it’s very neat: everything is tidily in its place. Three tiny rooms – two offices and a neglected bathroom – flank the workshop. In one of the offices, crammed amidst workstations equipped with computers and a touch of personal space, sits Lyons’ desk.
She may have a desk and that desk may be in an office, but Lyons is not a bookkeeper or a clerk. In fact, when I come to visit her, the 24-year-old doesn’t spend any time in the office other than to grab her purse at lunch. And she doesn’t wear pantyhose or polyester suiting or make-up. No, she wears a pair of fire-retardant coveralls over her jeans and layered tees; a bandana covers her strawberry-blond hair to prevent it from getting tangled in her hard hat. Billie is a millwright apprentice, and on her feet she wears a pair of men’s steel-toed boots. “I bought a women’s style once,” she says with a grin. “They were exactly the same as the ones I’m wearing now, except they wore out in a month.”
Funny thing about steel-toed boots. I went to Wal-Mart to purchase the pair I needed in order to visit the Ferrier plant. (Petro-Canada is very safety conscious – one of the many things that impresses Lyons about the company.) I wandered past the men’s footwear first (I was lost) and noticed that an entire wall was dedicated to work boots, with plenty of steel-toed options. But as I trawled the many women’s aisles, overwhelmed by the selection, I couldn’t find a single pair of women’s steel-toed boots. Luckily, considering Lyons’ story, I settled for the smallest men’s size available.
This absence of women’s steel-toed boots seems strange, bordering on ridiculous. Not because women should take to the streets to demand equal opportunity shoe-shopping, but ridiculous because, in the 21st century, neither women’s nor unisex steel-toed boots are available at a shopper’s mecca like Wal-Mart.
Think, for a moment, about those Second World War images of Rosie the Riveter, the woman dressed in coveralls flexing her bicep underneath the slogan “We Can Do It.” OK, she was American, but she was equally a symbol for Canadian women who filled the empty factories when 60,000 men enlisted. Given incentives such as free nurseries and income-tax concessions, more than a million women were working by the war’s end, many on traditionally male turf such as manufacturing and the trades. More than 260,000 women produced war goods, and women accounted for 30% of all labourers in the aircraft industry. Women can do it, so history has proved. But after the war, Ottawa stopped all incentives, effectively pushing women out of male-dominated industries.
Now we’re in the midst of another nationwide labour shortage, one brought on by economic growth and, some might say, poor governmental planning. And nowhere is this shortage more acute than in Alberta, where the provincial government predicts the situation will only get worse. By 2015, it forecasts a human-capital deficit of 86,000 people, with the trades falling 12,000 workers short.
Considering this prediction and coupling it with the potential economic opportunities afforded workers in the trades, you would expect women to be tying on their steel-toed boots in record numbers. And they are: more women are donning hard hats than ever before.
Category: Work
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