SOUTHWICK — Like many children, Luis Gonzalez grew up playing with toy excavators and off-road trucks as his imagination ran wild.
These days, the sand is bigger and the vehicles weigh a couple of tons more. On Thursday, Gonzalez and fellow Westover Job Corps student Edhel Padro, both 21, removed and repaired a universal joint from a dump truck as part of their pre-apprenticeship training at the facility International Union of Operating Engineers Local 98 training session in Southwick.
“We’re working with this real team now,” said Gonzalez, who is from Worcester but lives at the Job Corps Westover center in Chicopee. “It’s pretty exciting.”
Local 98 recently opened its pre-apprenticeship training facility at the Westover Job Corps Center, a US Department of Labor program that provides free job training for students ages 16-24.
The 1,100-member union spanning southern New Hampshire, Vermont and western Massachusetts from Sturbridge to the New York state line does most of the paving and highway construction work in the region.
Members are working on high-profile projects like the new Holyoke Veterans Home and the new Civic Center Garage in downtown Springfield.
The union’s move prompted state labor and workforce secretary Lauren Jones to tour the 35-acre site at the end of Hudson Drive Thursday to mark not only National Apprenticeship Week, but Women’s Day in Learning.
Jones and other local officials met with the trainees, including the young women in the operating engineer program, earlier Thursday at the Holyoke High Dean campus for the Massachusetts Girls in Trades Conference
The conference, Jones said, was an opportunity to expose high school girls and young women like Padro to opportunities in trades accessible through apprenticeships and pre-apprenticeship programs.
Padro, of Springfield, said he has only been in the program for a few weeks learning equipment maintenance.
“And my English improves along the way,” he said.
Local 98 has 30 workers in its apprenticeship program, said training director Nick Girolamo. These apprentices work at workplaces during the week and receive face-to-face and hands-on training one night a week and every other Saturday.
He is often in Southwick, but sometimes works on projects such as gardening at Friends of the Homeless in Springfield or building trails at the Horace A. Moses Scout Reservation in Russell.
New since September is a pre-apprenticeship program with Job Corps that has six students learning equipment operations and eight learning maintenance and mechanics.
While the maintenance students worked on trucks and all-terrain vehicles, the pre-operator apprentices worked in the training center.
Nikita Laik, 21, of Chicopee, operated an excavator leveling the ground to find a line painted on a jersey barrier.
“We created this training course a few weeks ago, now we’re filling it up again,” he said.
Dakota Huntoon, also 21 from Chicopee, has only been in the class for a few weeks. He was driving the dump truck even though he had never driven anything with a stick shift before climbing into the huge beast of a vehicle.
“It’s a great opportunity for us,” he said.
There is a problem, however, Local 98 Business Manager Doug Fay said, because of the strict nature of the state’s lifting license requirements. A license is required before a student can enter anything that lifts material, a license that can take three months to obtain.
So a big digger is fine, but a backhoe or bulldozer is not.
“We lose a lot of training time,” he said. “And what happens is that the student loses interest. We are not against licensing. We just want to be able to teach.”
Johnson said he is aware of the situation and will discuss it with the state secretary of economic development, which handles licensing issues. State Sen. John Velis, D-Westfield, said he is also aware of the problem.
Velis, who used to represent Southwick, also attended the event in Holyoke.
Girolamo said operations engineers are one of the most difficult trades to train. He is working with heavy equipment, so the union needs space and experience. He opened the Southwick training facility in 2019 in a former sandpit.
A section of the Southwick property has a row of parallel telephone poles. For training, dummy cables are run and there are also dummy underground utilities.
It’s about simulating working in the city center without destroying more infrastructure than is being put in there.
The union pays for the apprenticeship training itself through membership fees, according to Fay, the union’s business manager. About $7,000 a week is spent on fuel.
“We just take the number of students we can find jobs for,” he said.
And these days, the demand is high and growing.
“Like everyone, many of our members are old and will retire. We are looking for the next generation. We are diverse, we want to attract women to commerce.”
Apprentices start at $23 an hour plus about $30 an hour in benefits. And rates increase with more experience.
