Electricians, carpenters, plumbers, and many more hard-working Americans are members of trade unions.
CBS News Chicago found a nonprofit organization that connects minority candidates with the jobs of their dreams, including one young man who said it helped him find his life’s calling.
Nicolas Gamino said working as an apprentice electrician is more than a job.
“I like wiring,” he said. “You get to see the little details.”
It’s a nonstop education.
“When you think you have a grasp of everything you’re doing, you just get hit with something new and it’s like, wow,” Gamino said.
He said it feels like he’s learning something new every day.
“It never gets old,” Gamino said. “It really doesn’t.”
Gamino found his apprenticeship through Hire 360, a nonprofit that recruits, trains, and connects minority candidates with top developers, general contractors, and trade unions in the construction industry.
“We go out, work with community partners and just talk to a lot of candidates about the great pride that you get in building a building, and the health care, the pension benefits,” said Jay Rowell, of Hire 360. “With the building trades unions, you get paid to earn as you learn as a new apprentice, and so these are really incredible opportunities.”
A family crisis got Gamino thinking about the trades. His mom got very sick.
“She had cancer diagnosed, and it was at that moment that, it was a reality check,” he said. “I always want to take care of my parents. I owe them a great deal. I wanted to do whatever I could to help them.”
And Gamino said Hire 360 has helped him every step of the way.
“They help you figure out where you want to go,” he said. “[And] narrow my options to figure out which trade is best for me.”
The answer for Gamino was the electrical option.
“When you go to any building really, you look up, you see lights,” Gamino said. “I take pride in knowing that I can walk into a building look at that and be like, ‘I know what’s going on there. I know how this works. I know the steps, the process, the hard work that went into doing everything.'”
Related Midwest was a founding community partner of Hire 360. Yanet Garcia, of Related Midwest, said it’s heartwarming to hear a story like Gamino’s where youth identify a career for themselves in the trades.
She said Hire 360 helped Related Midwest identify minority and women-owned businesses as well as local hires “so that we can connect them with our subcontractors on site.”
Garcia said good real estate development is about more than buildings. It’s about building community.
“You can’t build successfully if you’re not building with the community,” Garcia said. “Our inherent responsibility as real estate developers as builders across the City of Chicago is to bring in minority and women-owned business into the fold.”
Gamino said he’s proud to be in that fold. He’s all in.
“I love what I do,” he said. “This is my career. This is the path that I want to follow for the rest of my life.”
When the building he’s working on now is finished, he said it’ll make him really happy “knowing that things I’m doing here will stand for generations to come.”
Since it began in 2020, Hire 360 has placed more than 400 people in every trade union in the Chicago area.
After his apprenticeship, Gamino plans to get a degree in electrical engineering and he said his mom beat cancer and is doing just great.
To learn more about Hire 360, visit Hire360Chicago.com.
