Audrey Hudson, journeywoman

This is an exciting day to be a pile driver. Pile driving entails a lot of different types of work, really big things to small things. Today we are working on a very small project, but it has a big impact. We are cleaning a form. Normally you put oil on it so the concrete won’t stick, but the type of work we’re doing today, we can’t use oil. So we have to make it nice and clean by hand--sand paper and elbows. It has to be very clean, because wire cable is going to go down in the channel we’re creating, and it has to be able to roll freely back and forth.

What we do is peel back the front row of the deck, yank out the old pile. Then these big muncher machines come and munch it up, and a barge comes to take it away. We put in a new row of pile and put back the deck, and it is all secure for even bigger giant cranes to roll on down.

When I first applied for pile driver job in Los Angeles, about eight years ago, I thought it was about driving, and I brought my DMV papers. After 15 minutes, I realized what they meant by driving pile. I got sent out with 9 journeymen, and I was the only female. They told me to go where this guy was chopping allthread with a chop saw and all kinds of sparks were flying. I thought my hair was going to catch on fire. That first week they really put me through the wringer. They made me carry their stuff, walking on the scaffolding, while they were jumping up and down trying to make me fall, but they got me ready. Then at the end of the week they said, “You did all right, girl. You are going to be a pile butt.” The other day I put together a 225-ton crane. Another day I went out on a barge driving jet pile on the water like the hard-core big boys.  (Note, Pile drivers Local 34 wants to make it clear that the initiation behavior Hudson describes would not be tolerated by the union in Oakland.)