Amber Czech was murdered at work. Tradeswomen say it could have happened to any of them.

Content warning: This story contains graphic depictions of violence.

Last Tuesday should have been an ordinary workday for 20-year-old Amber Czech, who worked as a welder at a manufacturing facility in Cokato, Minnesota. 

She loved her craft and taught welding at her old high school on days she had off. But she was also a rarity. Women make up just 6 percent of welders in the country, and, as with other male-dominated occupations, it came with the risk of isolation and bullying. 

It was a reality of the job that for Czech turned deadly. While she was at her work station that day, a man she worked with walked over to her, picked up a sledgehammer and bludgeoned her to death. He later told law enforcement he simply did not like her and had been planning to murder her for some time. 

As the news spread across social media, stories poured in on Instagram and TikTok from tradeswomen expressing their anger and frustration. Over the last week they have shared their own experiences of working with men who threatened them, made sexual advances or joked about their incompetence. They pondered how their story could have ended differently, how their life could have ended like Czech’s.

Angie Cacace, a carpenter from North Carolina, was one of those women who was deeply saddened by Czech’s death. “It hit me pretty hard. I probably have cried about it every day,” she said. “I’ve had altercations with men on job sites so I know that exists.”

Despite the issues she’s faced in the industry, Cacace loves the work and credits carpentry with helping her buy her first home. Now she operates a successful remodeling company. 

In 2019, she co-launched a media company and, more recently, a magazine called Move Over Bob, aimed at showing the possibilities of tradeswork to girls in high school and community college. Only about 4 percent of tradesworkers are women, but if they can find their way into the field, the jobs, which do not require a degree, offer middle-class wages, pensions and other benefits that are often not available in women-dominated industries like caregiving or the service industry. 

But Czech’s death has Cacace questioning the workplace she’s urging girls to enter.

“She did everything that we want these girls to do. She did a high school welding program. She went to a community college,” she said. “It’s just a sharp reminder that there’s just a lot of work to do and figuring out how to better advocate and make sure that these young women are safe.”

Czech’s death has opened up a wound that never really closed for tradeswomen. In 2017, 32-year-old Outi Hicks, an apprentice carpenter, was murdered at her workplace by a coworker in Fresno, California. Her death sparked similar outrage and helped spur programs like the “Be That One Guy” campaign, which includes training for bystander intervention in the workplace. 

“But there’s a whole host of incidents that have occurred between the Outi Hicks horror and what just transpired,” said Rita Brown, president of the National Association of Women in Construction (NAWIC). “Change has been slow, and clearly it’s not enough.”

In 2023, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) published a report detailing the harassment women and people of color continue to face in the construction trades. It included accounts of sexual harassment liked groping and lewd comments, as well as racist incidents. In 2021, a survey conducted by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that more than a quarter of women tradesworkers who responded said they were “always or frequently harassed” for being a woman.  

While there are several programs developed by women and trades organizations to promote a safer and more inclusive workplace, there is no real federal policy or legislation that provides adequate protections, advocates say. Instead the work has happened at the grassroots level. 

Now organizations like NAWIC are calling for construction companies, unions and the industry as a whole to enforce stricter workplace standards. “It is incumbent on all of us that are in leadership, that are in any kind of place of power in the ecosystem of the construction industry, to enforce this zero-tolerance policy,” Brown said. 

The Tradeswomen Taskforce, an advocacy group, plans to draft a resolution, which they want these same organizations to adopt, that promotes a safe workplace for women. 

Amy Roosa, who works in risk control for the construction industry, said that workplace violence should be treated as a safety hazard. “It’s a ticking time bomb at the end of the day that this is going to happen to a woman,” she said. “It’s really up to the leadership team and even safety professionals to treat this like a workplace hazard.

“We need to have an intervention process. We need to have clear reporting. A woman needs to know that when she comes up and says, ‘I have a concern’ or, ‘He’s threatening me,’ that it’s taken seriously,” she added.

At the same time that tradeswomen are urging more to be done to address gender-based violence in the workplace, the Trump administration has curtailed resources. 

Last fall, the Tradeswomen Taskforce and Equal Rights Advocates, a nonprofit focused on gender justice in workplaces, won a $350,000 grant to address gender-based violence in the workplace. The Trump administration abruptly canceled the program, alongside four other grants that aimed to eliminate violence and harassment in the workplace. 

Part of the work would have involved helping women navigate how to file complaints or lawsuits, something that is difficult to do on a worksite because they either don’t know the proper channel to elevate a complaint or could face retaliation, said Janelle Dejan, co-chair of the task force. “Things that we do in these advocacy organizations is try to create a safer space,” she said. This includes a place where people can report anonymously or without being ridiculed for having a concern, she said.  

Other safeguards that were in place to help women report abuse are no longer functioning, according to Connie Ashbrook, also with the task force. “The EEOC has been squelched,” she said. 

Up until October, it didn’t have enough commissioners to issue decisions because the Trump administration fired two of the Democratic commissioners and the general counsel. One of those commissioners, Charlotte Burrows, wrote the report on women’s harassment in the trades. That report has also disappeared from the EEOC’s website. 

“It just feels like, at the same time, that we’re really digging deep to work on this problem, the government is taking tools away from us,” Ashbrook said. 

In the days since Czech’s death, tradeswomen from across the country have rallied in support, donating thousands of dollars to her family’s GoFundMe and wearing blue to work in her honor. 

In an industry that has not figured out how to take care of them, they are taking care of each other.