Chauntee McDonald walks briskly through Terminal 1 at O’Hare International Airport. She points out the new glass panels on the Helmut Jahn-designed roof and the exposed HVAC systems that she and the team at Power Construction are working to replace.

“It feels rewarding — those long days and long hours are worth it,” said McDonald, a union laborer journeywoman with Power Construction. She said she particularly enjoys working with her hands, as well helping to build things that will stand the test of time.

“Construction is fun,” she said. “I like the physical aspect of it. It’s different pretty much every day. And just being a part of change and the historical aspect of it, too.”

As a Black woman, McDonald represents two groups that are underrepresented in her industry, which has long been dominated by white, male workers. In the Chicago area, about 8% of construction workers are Black, and less than 5% are women, according to one report. Sources say those numbers have stayed stagnant for decades.

With President Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill — signed into law in November — promising to bring scores of new construction jobs in the coming years, McDonald and others are hoping for a reshaping of the construction industry.

“This is generational changing investments,” said Manny Rodriguez, executive director of Revolution Workshop, a pre-apprenticeship carpentry training program on Chicago’s West Side. “We’re coming out of a pandemic, and we had the George Floyd incident and the racial reckoning that our entire country had to face. If we cannot figure out how to make construction more equitable now, we will never figure it out.”

Rodriguez said the billions of dollars potentially coming to Illinois for roads, bridges, rails and airports will also include money for training new workers.

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