Coryell heads the Metropolitan Regional Council of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, one of the region's largest and most powerful construction unions with 12,760 members.

"I've helped so many," Coryell said.

Union carpenter Shenecqua Butt isn't buying it. She and Tanya Mitchell were two union carpenters who testified last month at the first public hearing of the mayor's Advisory Commission on Construction Industry Diversity. The commission meets again next Wednesday in City Hall.

The June hearing began with emotional testimony from the pair, surrounded by fellow female carpenters who came in support. The women complained that they were harassed on the job and had gotten only scattered days of work after they advanced from apprentice to journeywoman.

"You can't go to your union for support because they just don't care," testified Butt, a member of Local 1073 of the council.

A union-sponsored support group for women carpenters, Sisters in the Brotherhood, hasn't met for more than a year, said its current leader, Maureen Olivant.

Coryell didn't attend the June 25 public hearing or respond to an Inquirer request for comment, nor did he attend sessions organized by the building trades on the issue. And his union was one of the few that refused to provide minority-participation statistics when asked to do so by City Council.

A week after the hearing, Coryell did call reporters into a meeting July 1, where he complained about the women who had complained about him and defended his diversity efforts, saying the union unfairly takes the brunt of criticism that should really be directed at contractors.

Contractors hire and pay the carpenters. "They have to help them more - make sure they get the training. The contractor has to be willing to have diversity and minorities - to bring them along," Coryell said.

A reporter later received a letter, dated July 2, from a contractor criticizing the women's work.

"Some of our men asked not to be partnered with them because they were 'slower and not pulling their own weight,' " unable to load bundles of insulation into buildings, wrote Edward J.F. Dougherty, an official at Tedco Insulation Co. in West Chester, where the women worked in 2006.

Dougherty said that Mark Durkalac, a union official, asked him to write the letter shortly after the June 25 hearing. He said he doesn't normally write those kinds of letters and "wouldn't have written it if I wasn't asked," he said in an interview.

Dougherty said the women were good workers who came on time and worked hard. They simply couldn't lift the bundles, so when he cut his crew from 30 to nine, they were laid off.

In his letter, he wrote that he would not ask them back.

"If a carpenter can't do the work, then it's 'See you later,' " Coryell said.

Butt told The Inquirer that she had worked for Tedco for two or three months, was laid off for a week, then was called back for several more months - proof, she said, that her work had been adequate. Dougherty confirmed her account.

Butt insists she can handle the work.

"I'm very strong. I can probably carry Mr. Coryell up and down the block," she said.

Coryell, in his defense, also asked David Gannon, a representative for Carpenters Local 1595 in Montgomery County, to describe what happened when Gannon included the women in a crew to work at Peco Energy Co.'s Limerick reactor. Gannon reported that Butt and Mitchell were among 10 or 11 of 80 or 90 local carpenters who failed to pass a required safety test. Other women also failed the test.

The council's territory stretches from Virginia and Maryland up through the city and its surrounding counties into the Lehigh Valley, including some members in New Jersey. The union's pension fund is one of the owners of Philadelphia Media Holdings, owner of The Inquirer.

Some locals in the council are organized by geography, others by trade, such as cabinetmaking.

Coryell said the tough economy means many residential carpenters, including members of Local 1073, cannot get work.

Indeed, Dougherty said he laid off his own son and is not accepting apprentices because of the slowdown in residential construction. "It's the commercial work that's keeping us going," he said.

Coryell pulled out his statistics: Union carpenters had 197,720 hours of residential work in 2007, down from 457,825 in 2006. This past January, residential carpenters worked 10,812 hours, a third of what they had worked in January 2006.

Butt and Mitchell entered the union through a Philadelphia Housing Authority program to give residents a chance to learn trades while working on Housing Authority projects.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development cut funding to the authority, and as a result carpenters worked half of the hours on housing projects in 2007 that they had the previous year, Coryell said.

"These girls got caught up in that," Coryell said.

Butt isn't buying it.

"Stop making up lame excuses," she said. Many men have steady employment, but "all the women are temporary employees. Instead of bickering about this, you need to find these women work. Ask Mr. Coryell, can Shenecqua Butt get a job?

"I know discrimination exists. I'm not expecting things to change overnight. All I want to do is work."