BE4ALL: A Place for Everyone in Sheet Metal

By / Jessica Kirby

A joint initiative between SMACNA, SMART, and the ITI is focused on recruitment, retention, and ensuring the best candidates understand they belong in sheet metal.

The Belonging and Excellence for All (BE4ALL) initiative might just be the sheet metal industry’s most effective and progressive recruitment tool. Launched in December 2021 as a joint effort between SMACNA, SMART, and the International Training Institute (ITI), it seeks to answer age-old questions around work culture and belonging, while benefitting the signatory sheet metal industry in many ways.

Some of its intended positive impacts include reshaping the industry’s work culture so that contractors attract and retain the best and most skilled workforce possible, regardless of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or nationality. It also helps contractors and Locals work together to meet the real-world demand for the best and most qualified workforce available for the industry, without quotas or other arbitrary demands on companies.

BE4ALL is guided by two diverse committees. One comprises contractors, their management representatives, chapter executives, and SMACNA leaders from the United States and Canada. The SMART committee has a similar structure involving International and local union leadership and Local members, including a journey-level sheet metal workers and an apprentice. The leadership and committees for both organizations, along with ITI, meet quarterly to plan and coordinate BE4ALL activities across the industry.

BE4ALL’s efforts address one of the industry’s most pressing needs: recruiting skilled workers now and into the future. The initiative includes the ability to tailor and target programs and strategies to ensure that particular groups have what they need to reach the universal goal of belonging. The work of belonging will sometimes require difficult conversations, but it also requires treating one another with dignity, respect, and compassion. It requires seeing our common humanity in other people.

Donna Silverman and Louise Medina are staff liaisons to the SMART BE4ALL Committee. Medina has been a sheet metal worker for more than two decades and is now the SMART Director of Special Projects.

“As a woman of color who has faced many barriers throughout my career, I feel it is important to get the message out to membership that we need to change the way we say and do things to make others feel like they belong,” she says.

Silverman agrees, noting that unions should be a welcoming place for all people because that what the signatory workforce stands for. “Taking part in this initiative will work toward creating an environment where every member will feel like they belong.” she says. “This will increase productivity and solidarity, which will help improve retention.”

Jennifer Lohr, vice president of Fisher Balancing in New Jersey, was excited to join SMACNA’s BE4ALL Committee. “I am passionate about our trade and the work that we do,” she says. “If there is a way for members to be a part of this amazing industry while being able to learn, work, and grow in an inclusive and positive environment, I want to be a part of that effort.”

Lohr says it is important for contractors to care about and be a part of BE4ALL because it is imperative to the trade’s survival. “We need people of excellence, and in order to fill the void left by retirees in the industry, we need to cast a large net and bring in all of the best talent,” she says. “The problem is, if we bring in this new talent and they aren’t treated with dignity and respect because of our biases—implicit or otherwise—we won’t retain the next generation of sheet metal workers.”

But before industry members can pursue the mandate, everyone must understand the parameters and objectives, beginning with one simple question: What is the difference between “belonging” and “diversity and inclusion”?

According to the BE4ALL initiative, understanding the difference begins with exploring the terms diversity, inclusion, and belonging.

Diversity means that everyone, regardless of their race, gender identity, age, or other identity strands, is invited to participate in and benefit from the industry. Inclusion means that everyone has a seat at the table and has a way to make their voices heard. Belonging goes much deeper than diversity and inclusion. It means that when people come to the table, they feel that they can bring their full, authentic selves, including all parts of who they are as human beings. It is also about building the table together, co-creating, and transforming the industry to ensure it remains relevant and competitive with all hands on deck.

As important as it will be to understand what BE4ALL is, it will be equally necessary to understand what it is not. It is not about blaming or shaming individuals or granting special treatment to one segment of the membership over another. The initiative is for all members and contractors, the emphasis lying on every human being experiencing belonging, and it is clear this isn’t the case for some groups.

At the 2022 Partners in Progress Conference, Executive Vice President of SMACNA Western Washington Julie Muller and Northwest Regional Council president Tim Carter described how the two organizations worked together to address diversity, inclusion, and belonging in their areas. Facilitated by Dushaw Hockett, founder and executive director of Safe Places for the Advancement of Community and Equity (SPACEs) and BE4ALL facilitator, Muller and Carter detailed the ways they came together to shift the culture, so every person feels welcome.

“We’ve seen a dramatic reduction in the wash-out rates for women and people of color apprentices because we raised the bar in diversity, inclusion, and belonging,” Carter says.

Specifically, they improved the quality of training and support provided to apprentices to ensure that every person had what they needed to perform at the highest standards of excellence. The results were immediate.

“This approach reinforced two things,” Muller says. “This work is not about lowering standards, and the work of belonging does not view people as inadequate or deficient. It sees talent and potential in all human beings. It is our job to nurture it.”

But there is still work to be done.

The program’s success rests on acknowledging barriers to contractor buy-in, which could simply be broaching unfamiliar territory. “Contractors have done things a certain way for a very long time, and some don’t feel like there is anything wrong with how we have been doing things,” Lohr says. “Contractors will tell me that they feel they are being influenced for the purposes of bringing in more candidates rather than the best candidates. We must explain that BE4ALL is about trying to bring the best people into the trade.”

One reason SMART members may not yet feel connected to the BE4ALL initiative is that they don’t understand why the program is necessary, since there has been recent progress in this area.

“While we may have made some progress with respect to diversifying our membership and getting the message out, we still hear from members in underrepresented communities, such as women, members of color, or members from the LGBTQ2S+ community, who experience prejudice on the job and do not feel there is a place for them as a sheet metal worker,” Medina says.

“The benefits from BE4ALL are that when every sheet metal worker feels a sense of belonging in our union, we will be able to retain more members, which results in our union becoming more competitive,” Silverman says. “We will be able to meet the workforce needs when our contractors request workers for all of the construction projects we know are coming down the pipeline.

“To sustain pension benefits for retirees, we need to keep attracting workers to the unionized sheet metal industry. BE4ALL also will enhance union solidarity among our membership, which benefits everyone.”

In 2022, BE4ALL began implementing its four-part agenda that included assessment—surveying and interviewing leaders across the industry to better understand their hopes, wants, needs, and fears related to the BE4ALL work. The second step was awareness, which involved conducting SMACNA, SMART, and ITI leadership training sessions focused on strategies for reducing bias and increasing belonging. The third step was alignment, which will see all three organizations converting the assessment findings into concrete action steps and meeting quarterly to explore ways to collaborate. In 2023, the groups will act on implementing their action steps.

But BE4ALL is not a quick fix project. Over the next few years, the initiative expects results in five key areas:

1. Expansion – expanding and diversifying the pool of people from which the industry recruits.

2. Recruitment – proactively recruiting new workers, both bargaining and non-bargaining, into the industry.

3. Training – equipping the workforce with the skills, tools, and values they need to be successful.

4. Retention – creating the type of work and business environments where people want to stay and where they can imagine a long career of service and contribution.

5. Advancement – helping workers climb the “ladder” into leadership positions or other opportunities.

It is truly forever work, because to transform an entire industry it will take years, plus ongoing maintenace. However, the committee plans to set annual benchmarks to ensure measurable goals and progress.

But none of it is possible without labor-management cooperation to prioritize these efforts, coordinate the messaging, take proactive steps to prevent jobsite issues, and promptly address issues as they arise.

“Communication is key to maximizing the potential of BE4ALL, and building strong communication channels between labor and management is a great start,” Silverman says. “Labor and management can meet and start having these discussions about issues specific to their local area and how they can work together to address them.

It is also important to include JATCs to ensure everyone is on the same page. With each conversation, the discussion about topics that are often uncomfortable will get easier, and the partnership will get stronger.

“When we do this important work together as a team, it will not get lost in the cracks,” Lohr says. “It will remain front and center until we have accomplished our goals in bringing in the brightest and best our country has to offer.”

Ideally, BE4ALL will work itself obsolete—that is, in a perfect world everyone would treat one another like human beings and an initiative like this would be unnecessary. To reach that goal, the industry must first collectively address barriers, including biases and stereotypes that everyone has internalized, most of the time unconsciously.

“These biases and stereotypes may stem from the places where we grew up, or the schools we attended, or the families in which we were raised, but they must be addressed,” Medina says. “BE4ALL is the pathway for how we get there.”

Learn more at pinp.org/resources/be4all ▪

Jessica Kirby is editor-publisher for Point One Media, a small but sturdy family-owned trade magazine creator representing some of North America’s best construction associations. She can usually be found among piles of paper in her home office or exploring British Columbia’s incredible wilderness.

Be4all Calendar 2023

This 2023 BE4ALL calendar is a tool for your members/employees/ colleagues to learn more about the different cultures and faiths that make up our ever-evolving industry. Each month highlights several important holidays/ observances your peers may take part in and even a few that might be less familiar. In addition to noting the exact date of the observance, an explanation of that particular day’s significance and history can be found directly below the calendar.

Please download, print, and post this calendar in a public space, such as a break room, lunchroom, or other communal meeting areas. By doing this, we hope you can use this resource to start meaningful conversations that will enable you to learn more about your colleagues and develop a new understanding of the different cultures, ethnicities, and faiths that make up the sheet metal industry. If you want to learn more about a particular day, scan the QR code so you can travel to the BE4ALL calendar page where you can learn more about the history and tradition associated with a specific observance. ▪