July 29, 2008

Cheryl Carbis is an inspector with Electrical Safety Authority.

After 25 years in the trade, electrical inspector says she “wouldn’t change a thing”

IAN HARVEY

correspondent

Cheryl Carbis has spent 25 years working as an electrician in one form or another and says she wouldn’t change a thing about her choices.

“It was always about the money and the benefits,” says Carbis who currently works as an inspector with Electrical Safety Authority.

“I’ve got a great pension through IBEW Local 353. I’ve never had to worry about prescription costs and I make great money. I wouldn’t change a thing.”

As a skinny girl of 18, fresh out of high school, going for an electrician’s apprenticeship was an unusual career choice, but Carbis says it was an obvious path.

“I took electrical shop and drafting in high school and did well,” she says. “So I knew it would be something I could do.”

After a shaky start due to the downturn in the construction trades in the early 1980s, when she spent six months rebuilding alternators and motors, she signed on as an apprentice on Valentine’s Day 1983 and hasn’t looked back.

It was a tough road at first, especially because she wasn’t physically robust and attitudes towards women in the trades were still chauvinistic. But over time, she says, she learned to adapt.

“One day on one of my first jobs I was sent to a company to work and the office called in and said, oh we sent you the wrong person, we’ll send a guy up,” she says.

“They wanted to put women out to larger companies I think because we were considered a liability. But my foreman said, ‘Heck, no we’re keeping her.’ ” It was all motors and control work and I was really good at that. So that was great.”

Women too, could be catty. She recalls overhearing a well-dressed woman in an elevator at a jobsite: “She said she’d never let her daughter do those dirty butch jobs.”

Carbis, who was an apprentice and on garbage duty and admits to looking pretty dishevelled in a grotty T-shirt and jeans, turned on the woman and set her straight: “I said, ‘I’m going to be making $50,000 in a couple of years and there’s no glass ceiling for me.’ ”

Finding ways to be part of the crew and getting the job done without the rest of her colleagues thinking they needed to carry her was also important.

“Part of being a good foreman is knowing how to use your crew,” she says. “I was lucky in that I worked for some great foremen. They wouldn’t put a skinny little guy on pulling big wires anymore than they would use me to do that.”

She found jobs she was good at if not better at than her male colleagues, like precision bending conduits and fitting them or using her size and agility to get into access panels or climb structures.

“Carrying a ladder was difficult until one day on the job I saw this little plumber carrying this huge ladder so I asked him, ‘Hey, how’d you do that?,’ ” she says. “Once he showed me the trick about balance it was easy.”

She got her journeyman’s papers and was quickly put to work as a foreman where her organizational and people skills came in handy.

“At first I was so scared, running around like a chicken with my head cut off, organizing the guys, and bending pipe myself,” she says. “Then one of the older guys took me aside and said: ‘You’ve proved yourself to us. You don’t have to kill yourself working so hard. You’re the foreman, run the job. But if you could finish bending the pipe that would be great because I suck at it.”

After a car accident sidelined her in the early 1990s, she went back to school to study electronics and did so well that Humber College asked her to stay on and teach their electrical trades courses which she did, splitting her time there and at Sheridan College.

“I kept my ticket and my union card and I’d work the summers,” she says noting the shift gave her the window to have children.

Then after a car accident she required knee surgery and her doctor advised her to change careers.

“Someone suggested I apply for an inspector job. Today you go through an 18-week training program, but back then you wrote an exam.”

In the eight years since, she’s carved out a new phase of her career and still finds time to be a single mom to her four boys, who range in age from seven to 15 years old.

“My issue now is getting a date,” she laughs. “A lot of guys get scared off when they find I’m in a trade because we’re all supposed to be butch or something. But I can go to high heels from construction boots pretty quickly.”

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