Local 606 Assistant Training Director Janet Skipper (left) and Director Jim Sullivan (right) with "all-American success story" Teresa Alcantar at February ceremony.

Twenty years ago, Teresa Alcantar slipped across the border to escape a life of poverty in Michoacan, Mexico. An undocumented worker with an eighth grade education and no English skills, she soon found her options here were limited too. For three years she labored in the fields of Florida, picking oranges, apples and tomatoes.

Now a United States citizen, Alcantar today is a leader in Orlando Local 606 and a foreman for Buena Vista Construction Company.

"She is an absolute role model," said Local 606 President Jimmie Singletary. "She’s a great example of how a woman can succeed in the predominantly men’s world of construction."

She was honored with a February award by the Florida Board of Education as an "All-American Success Story in Workforce Education." Of 160 nominees, she was one of nine statewide to be honored in Tallahassee. The honor came with a $15,000 award for the Orange County Public Schools.

Though she owes much of the improvement in her life to the IBEW, she did not take the direct route to the local’s door. At 17, she traded backbreaking farm work for the fast food industry and minimum wage shiftwork. Her determination for a better life drove her to English courses and soon she earned her GED. Marriage followed, then a baby and more dead-end work as a hotel housekeeper, a customer service representative and a string of jobs as a retail clerk. But by 22, she found herself divorced, living in a trailer and the sole provider for her daughter. Long accustomed to hard work, she was forced to work up to 80 hours a week to support the two of them.

"I was looking for something to better myself but I had no education," Alcantar said. "I was very afraid of not being able to do things because of my limitations."

A self-described tomboy, Alcantar said she had always had an interest in electronics. And on a strict earnings basis, her research at a vocational center in Orlando indicated higher potential for a career in the electrical industry than fields like carpentry and truck driving. So she enrolled in an electrical wiring class at a local vocational school taught by Local 606 member Dennis Reed, who quickly recruited her to the Central Florida Joint Apprenticeship Training Committee.

By 1996, the first year of the program, Alcantar was making $6.20 per hour, two dollars more than the minimum wage she’d been earning. It was more than she had ever made in her life. In 2001, she topped out of her five-year apprenticeship and graduated as a journeyman inside wireman, one of only nine from the original class of 75. She was the only woman.

Today the wage rate for a journeyman wireman in Local 606 is $17.85. Alcantar said a better life for her daughter, now 12, inspired her through the years of her apprenticeship training. "It’s hard," Alcantar said. "You have to go to work and you have to do the books also. But I wanted it; I had one little reason. Her name is Samantha."

Alcantar, who recently purchased a home in Orlando, is active in Local 606, serving on the executive board and the credit union advisory committee. Each year, she helps promote the apprenticeship program at the Hispanic Business Expo in Orlando.

"She is such a leader and she really knows how to get her crew to work with her so they’re more productive," said Janet Skipper, assistant director, Central Florida JATC who nominated Alcantar for the award. "She’s very structured."

As for the turnaround in her life since she found the IBEW, she said it has improved 180 degrees.

"I went from having nothing to having everything I need," Alcantar said. "Before, there were times I had to think of whether I could buy gas for my car or a gallon of milk for my little girl. Now I own everything I have except my house. It’s the greatest."

IBEWCURRENTS

May 2003 IBEW Journal