I took the test to be accepted into the Operating Engineers Apprenticeship Program. 263 people took the test and 23 passed it. They kept 20 people for the class, me being one of them. It's a 4 year apprenticeship including classroom time, hands on training on a variety of heavy equipment including 2 week intensive field sessions in the summer, and we were supposed to get 1000 hours of work as an oiler during the 4 year apprenticeship. We had one black guy and a Hispanic girl in our class. The Hispanic girl worked every day for the first two years. At that time, any road work in Ohio required minorities as a condition of winning the bids. She counted as two minorities-female and Hispanic, so she worked non stop. None of the white guys got any work in the first two years, but she worked every day. There were white guys two years ahead of us in their 4th year that hadn't been out on a job yet. I gave up on it after the 2nd year, as field sessions came up, and my employer wouldn't let me have time off for them. I couldn't afford to lose that job, and was fed up with the whole minority thing. Yeah, I think I definitely suffered from racism.
