At Tech, a union labor of love

LYNN – Joel Kubilis learned on the job when he started working as a laborer 15 years ago, and he wishes he had had the same opportunity he helped give Lynn Vocational Technical Institute students this week.Twenty students from Tech?s various teaching shops spent five days learning how to work with bricks and instructional mortar made from lime and sand, but Tech junior Nelson Barrios and fellow students really learned about how to work hard with other people to get a job done right the first time.Barrios wants to be a mechanical engineer, but he enjoyed the heavy lifting and confined space work involved in constructing a brick “invert” channel in a roughly five-foot-tall concrete sewer pipe section.?I like the hands-on work,” he said.The Tech training is part of a combined effort by the New England Laborers Training Academy in Hopkinton and the state Department of Transportation to introduce high school students to a laborer?s daily work.The academy launched the program last summer and plans to follow up training for high school students around the state with an April 29 job fair.?We?re trying to get some young blood into the unions and the construction industry,” said Rob Jack, who teaches at the academy with Kubilis, a fellow Laborers? International Union Local 609 member.The Tech students were picked from shops around the school to participate in laborers? training week. Tech junior Tatkneeya Smith, who wants to be a union plumber, said laborers? week offered her a good opportunity to learn what it is like to work in a trade.?I like getting dirty,” she said.The students spent almost half the week learning the prominent role safety plays in trade jobs. They put on bright yellow safety vests, safety glasses and orange hard hats and used construction caution signs to set up a worksite safety zone.They carefully assembled bricks inside sewer pipe sections, sloping the brick walls and curving them to provide a channel linking two pipe lengths attached to each concrete section.Tech senior Matthew Cennami squatted inside a section, patting lime and sand onto an insert he built with Barrios, Smith and juniors Joseph Santana and Sergio Linares.?The hardest part is getting the bricks sloped right,” Cennami said.Kubilis said he wrapped up Friday?s instruction impressed with the Tech students? attentiveness and attention to detail.?These are the cream of the crop of the school,” he said.