Making Strides One Brick at a Time

JOURNAL: ISSUE 2 - 2012

Article by Ed McMenamin reprinted below with permission of Suburban Life Publications: www.mysuburbanlife.com/features/x219194911/Making-strides-one-brick-at-a-time

Tim Aikens [39-year member and President of Local 56 Illinois of the Administrative District Council 1 of Illinois] graduated from York Community High School on a Friday in 1972. The following Monday, he was working as a Local 56 apprentice for an area mason.

The career decision was quick, but one that lasted.

"My dad was a union house painter," said Aikens, 57. "He didn't really want me to go into that. So I sought another trade, and one of the families that lived in the neighborhood, (the) dad was a mason contractor."

His mason apprenticeship took three years, and in 1975, he was a trained union member – known as a journeyman – and started taking jobs.

Days would begin early at 7 a.m.

"Your foreman directs you where you're going to go," Aikens said. "He places you within various areas of the project. You move all day long. It's repetitive and it's heavy material, and you just go. Normally, you take a coffee break at 9:30 or 10 a.m., for 10 minutes. It's pretty regimented; you go back to work. At 11 a.m., you take a half-hour lunch. And at 3:30 p.m., you're done."

Once set to a specific task for the day, the work can be repetitive. But the different jobs are varied, from welding to using the saw, to putting down the first bricks that set a layout to placing bricks "one on top of two" on the line.

"There's a vast realm of work," he said. "And the bricklayer — he can do it."

He found steady work with a contractor for about eight years, he said, doing mainly commercial and industrial projects. And he started a family.

Then the early 1980s recession hit.

"It was really hard times in '81, work was really slow," he explained. "I was off for quite a while. I did whatever I could to survive. I ran out of unemployment, ran out of health insurance."

But good luck returned, and he got in with a new contractor who provided him with steady work for the next 20 years.

"I was with him from '81 to 2000 and I never missed time," he said. "I worked year-round."

Aiken moved his way up to foreman, and then superintendent of several projects, he said, including an expansion of the DuPage County Jail housing.

"It was a very, very good living and self-gratifying, and the member service form the union provided very good benefits," he said. "I always loved it and if I had to go back to laying brick on the wall tomorrow, it wouldn't bother me in the least bit because you miss it."

In the last several years, Aiken has transitioned into union work and is now the president of the Bricklayers Local 56, based in Elmhurst.