Before finding a career in the trades, Anthony Cooper was in and out of jail and dead-end jobs. The union turned his life around, but after a few years working as a journeyman Cooper realized that one of his true passions and skills was as an “apprentice whisperer” — a mentor for up-and-coming apprentices coming from similar backgrounds.
Cooper’s journey has hinged on finding Pathways to Apprenticeship (P2A), a pre-apprenticeship program focused on reentry for those impacted by the criminal legal system. Now he leads a P2A class that functions as both a bootcamp and access point to the construction trades.
“It took me out of the streets. It changed my mind. It made me hold myself accountable,” Cooper said.
P2A describes its mission as “ending the intergenerational poverty that holds low-income New York families hostage.” Since a small group of volunteers founded it as a recruitment program for Laborers Local 79 in 2013, it has grown into its own nonprofit that provides pre-apprentice training for a handful of different trades unions.
While P2A participants attend regular courses, the program gives them some tools to find interim work. In addition to a stipend that its participants get, it provides training and connections for them to go find a flagging job or other non-union work while they get back on their feet and readjust to civilian life.
“We actually open the doors for them. It’s a beautiful thing. It changes the mind, changes the personality, it changes the way you look. We have people who became activists, became leaders in their community boards,” Cooper said.
Cooper, who grew up in Allerton in the Bronx, said his first time getting arrested was around 15. For around the next half decade, he kept getting into trouble with the law, and it wasn’t until he learned he was going to become a father at 22 that he got serious about seeking something stable. Through the Osborne Association, a Bronx-based reentry center, he sat in on a Pathways to Apprenticeship information session and was inspired by Kajeem “Q” Hill, a union organizer who he could relate to.
“He talked just like me, like fresh out the streets. The slang was there that snarl, that hunger. Right? You can still smell the streets on this kid,” Cooper said.
Up until that point the idea of a union “seemed like a myth” for him. “It seemed like something that only a few people could get in — certain demographics of people,” he said,
But that session opened Cooper’s eyes. Hill connected him with a job at a sanitation warehouse where he was sorting garbage to get him going. That job didn’t last long, but it did teach Cooper something about organizing.
The job involved working on top of a tall machine with no harness to sort through trash, which was a safety hazard. When Cooper made a complaint, he was fired, but his union contacts told him that his instinct to stand up to poor labor conditions showed his promise as an organizer.
“A week after that phone call, I got a phone call from 79. And when I tell you my life has changed since then, it’s never been the same,” Cooper said.
Cooper got into Local 79’s apprentice program and got a job doing construction with the union. But after a while working in the field, he began working more closely with apprentices, some of whom seemed to be struggling with the experience.
“I just didn’t feel like they understood the opportunity that they had. And I’m like, ‘Yo, if you came through my program, you would’ve taken this more serious,’” Cooper said.
This sparked an idea in him to volunteer as a mentor for P2A students. After being invited back several times for information sessions, Cooper eventually took on part-time work with the organization, and when a full-time position opened up, he decided it was worth a pay cut to commit himself to his mentor role.
In his role he keeps students accountable and helps them stay in the program as much as he can, but also doesn’t sugar coat the responsibilities of a union job. “It takes a lot of discipline, guts and you just have to want it,” he said.
Now his job entails finding others who came from some version of his background to convey that the union life can be for them too.
“The union is just a whole other world. It’s just a great lifestyle, you know what I mean? it really is. It’s a brotherhood. It’s something that I’m happy to be a part of,” Cooper said.
