Morgan Bosch creates group to promote community and inclusion
When Morgan Bosch walked into a conference attended by 5,200 tradeswomen in New Orleans in September 2024, she felt oddly uncertain.
“At first, I was quite nervous, actually, because I know how to work around men,” says the Crane and Hoist Equipment Operator grad (class of ’17). “It’s rare that I get to work with another female.”
But following one of the final events at Tradeswomen Building Nations, Bosch, an all-terrain crane operator with Mammoet, was inspired to do something about that feeling.
The subject of the session was “building a sisterhood” within a trade union. Soon after she returned home to Edmonton, she took to TikTok (where she has more than 36,000 followers) with a proposal that would go well beyond a union to create a sense of unity.
Her idea, YEG Blue Collar Women would be a place where female tradespeople could share and compare experiences. Or seek guidance. Or just make plans for a group hike in Edmonton’s river valley with likeminded people. Mostly, though, it would be a place where women could comfortably claim their space in a career in which they remain a minority.
As far as interest may go, “I thought there’d be, like, 20 tradeswomen,” says Bosch.
Not quite two months after that post, membership stood at more than 800, all from Edmonton alone.
Jill of all Trades
To help increase representation, Jill of all Trades introduces self-identified female high school students to the prospect of rewarding careers in the skilled trades. The day-long event, held at NAIT’s Main Campus, offers hands-on workshops opportunities and provides information for youth in a number of trades – one being Crane and Hoist Operations. Morgan Bosch joined the November 2024 event to share her experiences with aspiring tradeswomen.
Learn more about Jill of All Trades and apprenticeship education at NAIT
A personal change in perspective
There was a time when Bosch would never have expected to claim that space for herself. After high school, she’d taken a year off and a job as a waitress, with plans to pursue a career as a teacher. Her dad proposed another path, starting with a summer job as a labourer at Mommoet (where he works, too), helping crane operators with preparation for lifts.
For one thing, he pointed out, the money would be far better. And, he suggested, who knows where it could lead?
Bosch wasn’t sure. “I was thinking, ‘No way.’ That's not at all what I thought I could do. [But] I tried it out and loved it. It was such fun, working with my hands.”
Three months later, she started apprenticing. She’s been there ever since, now in her ninth year.
“I love my job,” says Bosch. She also loves travelling around the city and seeing all the ways that she’s contributed to it: putting up the bones of buildings, raising power poles, erecting cell towers. “I'm super excited one day to show my future kids this is what mom built.”
Along the way, she’ll inevitably share her perspective on women doing such work. Bosch unabashedly celebrates her own version of femininity. “I love the colour pink,” she says. That once had an impact on her views on who does what in the workforce.
“I really believed in ‘pink’ jobs versus ‘blue’ jobs,” she says. That is, “until I actually got into the career myself. And [now] everything can be a pink or a blue job.”
“I know I'm capable”
Bosch also takes pride in proving that point to others, which she finds herself still having to do. With less than 8% of trades jobs being occupied by women, there are times when she strikes clients as an unexpected presence.
“Some days when I drive the crane to site and I'm the only person there, the client will say, ‘Where's the operator?’ And I'm like, This is all he's got. I'm literally the only person here. And they're terrified!” says Bosch.
That may have caused self-doubt early in her career but no longer. “I know I'm capable,” says Bosch. “My company knows [and] my union knows I'm capable – which is why they send me off [to] my jobs. But it's a lot of fun to prove a client wrong every single time.”
That sentiment is at the centre of her efforts to reach out to women in the trades, and bring them together. Already, YEG Blue Collar Women has become a safe space in which peers have helped each other with exams, pointed one another to new career opportunities, or just regularly ask advice that men simply can’t give female colleagues.
That is, in a practical sense, the group is working. But on an emotional level, it’s also had an impact. “Every single time we leave a meetup,” says Bosch, “my heart is so full.”
The meetup may be helping to foster other feelings as well. The nerves Bosch noticed at that conference seem to have remained in New Orleans.
“Our last shutdown that we were on, we had six women in the lunchroom with us, which is amazing,” says Bosch. “I've never been on a site with that many female crane operators.
“And it was just such a cool feeling.”