Traffic controller jobs in Sydney

[sheepshagger]

ON A perfectly horrid Sydney morning, cars and buses moaning down George Street, cyclists going up gutters, pedestrians on phones going wherever they please, Joanne Murphy is stopping traffic.

She swivels her stop-go sign on a construction site in the sun, frying her pale Irish skin.
''Why don't you get a real job,'' yells a taxi driver, not grasping the irony. Ms Murphy, 28, came to Australia in 2009 after failing to find work at home in Cork. She works six days a week as a traffic controller, one of hundreds of Irish ''lollipop ladies'' on sites across Sydney. They are young, educated and a far cry from the local lads who used to stop and slow cars in the city.

''I have an arts degree and a masters in town planning, and here I am holding a stop-go sign,'' Miss Murphy says, smiling as the monorail chunders above Liverpool Street. ''The money is good, you get to meet a lot of people and work with different girls. The cons are you get a lot of abuse. Sydney drivers are a bit scary. A car once tried to run me over down Sussex Street.''

Her employer, Australian Retro, has almost 100 traffic controllers, 85 per cent of whom are Irish women. ''They are reliable and are willing to work hard and on Sundays,'' says owner Peter Karlsson.

Drivers respond relatively well to them, he reckons. ''If I go out on the job blokes will go past and call me an old b$&%@#d but they wouldn't say that to a young lady.''

The Department of Immigration says 52,000 Irish nationals arrived in Australia in the year to October, encouraged in part by the favourable economic climate. Youth unemployment in Ireland is almost 30 per cent.

Previously, Irish tourists on working visas might have sought jobs in pubs or cafes. Now about 90 per cent of women training to be traffic controllers are from overseas, according to Infront Staffing & Training.

It's nothing less than a revolution, says John Pitt, the Sydney operations manager for Workforce Road Services. The 80-20 split between men and women traffic controllers is now closer to 50-50, he says. Gender stereotypes linger still. ''The women have brought a softer touch to a tough industry,'' he says.
The gender shift has upset some male construction workers, who traditionally migrated to traffic control work in their twilight years. The Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union argues employers are overlooking local workers for ''cheap labour'' from overseas.

But Irish traffic controllers from several companies Fairfax Media spoke to typically earned about $27 an hour, well above the minimum award rate.
Workforce's general manager, Alison Leydon, 29, from the village of Knockvicar, in County Roscommon, says traffic controlling remains man's work back home. She came to Australia seven years ago after studying mathematical science at university. ''My daddy wasn't overly pleased his little girl was now in the middle of a construction site with a load of Australian men,'' she says.

''But a lot of us girls were born and reared in the country so it doesn't bother us being out in the sun or the cold. I suppose we're not afraid of getting our hands dirty.''

http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/lollipop-lass ... 2dpxx.html