As an apprentice at Local 28 in New York, Jennifer Fox Mann feels like she has finally found her footing. "I needed a career," she explains, "and one night at dinner I looked up at my dad and said lets get me into the union." Now Mann is a third-generation sheet metal worker in a family full of tin knockers, which include her grandfather and his three brothers, her father and his brother, " a bunch of cousins," her brother and her husband.
"I guess its in my DNA at this point," she says. Upon filling out an apprenticeship application, Mann enrolled at Nontraditional Employment for Women, a small apprentice type program to teach women basics like how to read a ruler and use a hammer etc.