Photo by Scott M. Allen/Wikimedia Commons

This year opened with the murder of a Minnesota woman by ICE agents. Last year closed with a workplace murder of an American woman tradesworker, also in Minnesota. This is not mere coincidence. The same forces that devalue women’s lives and organize to attack us in our neighbourhoods are at play in both the killing of Renée Good and the life and death dramas that women are prey to in our construction workplaces.

Amber Czech, a young American welder, was murdered at work in November 2025 by a coworker: struck in the head with a sledgehammer in a premeditated act of violence. For those of us women who work in the trades, that incident hits very close to home. A case of clear, unrepentant murder like that of Czech or Outi Hicks is only the tip of the iceberg of physical and sexual violence at work. In dangerous trades, a less impulsive misogynist would make the death look like an accident.

Most of us have dealt with harassment, and many of us have faced death threats or actual assaults from our fellow workers, and often have to leave sites or make career detours in order to keep ourselves safe.

I met a tradeswoman who was intentionally burned by an older man who gave her a wet rag and then told her to touch electrically live machine parts with it. I met a woman who was imprisoned under the floorboards by hazing coworkers, another who was locked in a closet, and a friend of a friend who was shocked, likely on purpose, by a coworker who hated her and flipped a breaker while she was up in a lift. One woman I met had a coworker, supposedly a union brother, who repeatedly tried to run her over with a pickup truck. Most, if not all, were working on unionized sites, which suggests that unions are not effectively protecting their female workers or taking their safety seriously as a workplace issue.

Make no mistake, a murder like this is an act of political violence, no less so than the Polytechnique Montréal massacre. There is still a concerted effort to keep women out of the fields of construction and engineering, and especially the skilled trades. The fact that Czech was, by all accounts, very successful as a welder, was teaching at her old high school, and, from photos, looked confident and strong—this is all salt in the wound for a certain type of misogynist male worker, and they will do whatever they can to crush such women, up to and including murder.

And the toxic men are succeeding at nearly shutting women out. In Canada, those employed in the construction sector are primarily white, cisgender,........

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