Construction workers Annie Betts was sitting in a north Queensland pub when a bloke from the John Holland Group came in and asked the barmaid who the best cleaner in the area was. The barmaid pointed straight to Annie, and the building site administrator off ered her a job on the spot. Fifteen years later, Annie still works on construction sites. Not bad for someone who’s 64.
Annie says she’s has done everything from driving senior management to appointments and the airport and back to cleaning building sites. Sometimes, when it’s quiet, she gets to work as a tradies’ assistant, and her work has taken her to many parts of Queensland and even into New South Wales.
The site Annie currently works on is a bauxite processing plant in Gladstone. It has about 850 workers, which is pretty small, Annie says. Despite her age and gender, she says working in a traditionally male environment has never caused any problems.
“The blokes are cool,” she says. “You become really good mates. You might work with them on one job and then not see them again for fi ve years, but then you fi nd yourself working with them
again. It’s really good.”
Annie says she could never go back to anything else. She loves the work and the money’s great. “Besides,” she says, “the bosses have told me I can’t retire.”
Getting a job in construction wasn’t as easy for Charlotte Busby. After getting her rigging and dogging ticket in 2005, it took her three years to convince a company to take her on.
A rigger’s major role is to assemble, install and position the machinery and equipment used to lift and shift the materials used in the construction of bridges and buildings, and they work with cranes, cables, pulleys, winches and ropes. They also work closely with crane drivers.
“I’d go out to construction sites and ask them for jobs and they’d laugh at me and wouldn’t give me a go,” Charlotte, 45, says.
Keen to leave factory work behind her, Charlotte completed a six-week Women in Civil Construction course. As part of it her group visited the Redcliff e site in Brisbane where the Houghton Highway Bridge was being constructed. She confi dently asked the building crew lots of questions about its construction and as a result was off ered a two-week work placement. She obviously impressed the bosses because she was off ered a job with the Albem engineering company. That was 18 months ago.
All electoral matter is authorised by Paul Howes, National Secretary