![]() ![]() ![]() One guy ran a business advising rich people how to avoid paying their contractors altogether. They believed we were looking for any opportunity to rip them off. It didn’t take long to realize that rich people as a class generally had no regard for the value or skills of tradespeople. It was the rich clients who tried to skip out on paying. You had the feeling that the bill got paid even if dinner was rice and beans for the next month. The working class folks who lived in the Mission and Excelsior neighborhoods of San Francisco, the ones who were scraping up the cash for the remodel or just to feed their kids, always paid their bills on time. ![]() I joined the collective in 1977 and immediately began to form stereotypes of clients. Wonder Woman Electric found its clients through word of mouth mostly. Sometimes they thought our labor should be free and they didn’t have to pay us at all. And sometimes the client thought they could pay us less because everyone knows women are worth less than men. In that case, the building owner, who might never have hired women, would be shocked to see us on the job. Sometimes we worked for general contractors who knew our work and hired us as a subcontractor. We did exploit the stereotype that women are easier to work with, cleaner and neater (we made a special effort to keep our worksites clean). Sometimes it was because people preferred to hire women to work on their houses. Who knows why people requested a contracting company named Wonder Woman Electric? Sometimes it was just to see women working as electricians we were exotic. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |