Washington, DC
May 14, 2024
Good morning, everybody! Mary Ellen, thank you so much for that very warm introduction. It was so lovely to speak with you before coming out here about our shared immigrant stories and the point that good jobs really transform lives and do so for generations. So I'm pleased to be here today to talk to you about that and how we are in a moment in which we can make that happen for more people than we have done for a very, very long time in this country.
I know that the best ideas happen when business leaders, unions, mayors, other local officials, and others come together in real partnership. And so I really appreciate you, Mary Ellen, and your leadership in bringing together this group to talk about something that is so core to President Biden's vision for America, which is infrastructure.
But I want to acknowledge a few people before I start. The first are my friends who you'll hear from in just a little bit, Sean McGarvey, President of the Building Trades, and Greg Regan, President of the Transportation Trades Department with the AFL-CIO.
President Biden is "Investing in America," and the workers that Sean and Greg represent are building America.
I also want to recognize San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg. As Mary Ellen said, our mayors are the ones getting things done on the front lines, and San Antonio is one of DOL's "Good Jobs, Great Cities." I'll go back and talk about Mayor Ron in a moment, but San Antonio is really setting an example that is really demonstrating what is possible across the nation.
And of course I want to thank Cecilia Rouse whose brilliant work guided so much of the Biden-Harris administration's initial economic policy from pandemic response to historic job growth and of course now infrastructure investments.
And Suzanne Clark, who you heard from in the video, has been great to work with as well, as we think about how to build resilient supply chains across this country and make sure that economic growth broadly benefits all.
So, as you all know, since even before this group came together about a decade ago, we've talked about the need for infrastructure investments. And President Biden has been doing that.
Now, everywhere I go, I get to see really historic investments taking shape all across the country. Like at Pittsburgh International Airport where we're investing $22 million dollars to modernize the airport's terminal. At the same time, that work is using made-in-America steel, it is creating thousands of prevailing-wage union jobs, and it will generate $2.5 billion in economic activity.
Now that's a theme of something I'm going to talk about, which is that these investments are not just good for workers, not just good for the businesses that get to work on them, but actually power our economic growth.
I also got to visit the site of and people who are creating America's first interstate high-speed rail. This is going to connect California's Inland Empire with Las Vegas, and also built by union workers. And probably like many of my fellow west-coasters, who spend a lot of time on I-15, and I know we will all welcome a high-speed railroad exactly between those two cities.
I also recently toured Atlanta's BeltLine that's improving transportation, creating more green space, as well as affordable housing and reconnecting neighborhoods that have been divided by infrastructure in the past. So we also have a moment to think about infrastructure that connects rather than divides.
So what I'm going to focus on though is a question that people often ask me, which is, "Are we going to have the workforce for all this work?" And of course, the answer to that is yes. If we make sure that these investments create good jobs, and if we focus on connecting the people who have been left out of opportunity for too long to those jobs.
So this brings me to another kind of infrastructure. I think of our workforce system as infrastructure, too. It's the roads and bridges that connect people to the good jobs they want and need and employers to the people that they want and need.
But just like our physical infrastructure, our workforce infrastructure has got some cracks. It's got some potholes. It hasn't been built to reach every community the way that it needs to. And that includes workers and employers.
And we say to that, "Not this time. Not on our watch."
In President Biden's America, we are building a workforce infrastructure as strong as our physical infrastructure. And we're making sure that it's going to reach all communities.
And to do it, we need high road training partnerships. What do I mean by that?
High road training partnerships start with the jobs—the destination. We can't build effective infrastructure if we don't know where we're going. Just like too many training programs in the past had focused on skills that might be needed for jobs that might materialize.
Not anymore.
In the language of economists, high road training partnerships connect the demand for labor with the supply. They involve management and labor sitting down together to plan, to design training that's tied to actual jobs—jobs that are not only going to support a family but uplift an entire community.
For too long, the focus has been on skill deficiencies of workers, rather than on quality of jobs. Not this time.
The panel that comes up after me is going to talk more about and has lots of experience of building these things the right way. But high road training partnerships turn traditional training on its head by starting with the good jobs and making sure that jobs come with sustainable wages, jobs where workers have a voice, jobs where workers can be in a union, jobs where every worker goes home healthy and safe at the end of the day, and jobs where families can get some of what the President calls "breathing room" are in the core of our entire infrastructure.
These partnerships also prioritize communities that have been left behind. I'm talking about women. I'm talking about Black workers, Latino workers, Asian workers, people who have been involved with the justice system, and young people who are not connected to either school or the workforce at this moment.
At a time when our economy is growing and projects are breaking ground all across the country, we have an opportunity to make sure that we build bridges to communities that have not been reached by them for too long. And the high road training partnerships are those bridges.
These programs include Registered Apprenticeships, which we often describe as the superhighways of this workforce infrastructure. And training programs aren't just one-off. They are part of an interconnected system that we invest in for projects today but also will exist for the projects of tomorrow.
I always say this, but I think it's worth repeating that training shouldn't end in a job search, it should end to get a good job.
So I was recently in Milwaukee, meeting with apprentices, who were learning to be electricians. And I asked them how it felt to be in the program. And one of the young men said to me, "I feel secure. For the first time in my life, I feel secure." And that sense of security is what high road training partnerships can provide workers all across our country. And also provide employers, who are struggling with the challenge of how to meet their own workforce needs.
Another part of this important infrastructure is not just the employers and labor, but also organizations like community-based organizations that provide other services that workers need to be connected to jobs. As with policymakers at the state and local level, who when putting out dollars, when putting out opportunity, can incentivize this kind of interconnectedness.
So making sure that workers have supportive services like childcare, like transportation, like the things that get in the way of people being able to get to training programs and get to jobs, not because people aren't willing to work, not because they don't have the skills or can't learn the skills, but because that infrastructure that supports them has not been there for too long.
One example of this is the city of San Antonio. So earlier this year, my team co-led the city's "Equity Summit" which focused on making child care more affordable. Through the summit, we found that nearly 60 percent of workers in San Antonio cannot afford child care in any given week.
Now, the city is working on a budget proposal that's going to help those families with child care needs. Leadership matters, and Mayor Ron Nirenberg's leadership is making a big difference.
We've also kicked off an effort called the LINE Initiative, and this is about creating the infrastructure that allows women to get into good infrastructure jobs. To get it done we are partnering with Mary Ellen at Accelerator for America and implementing it on the ground with Mayor Nirenberg.
And if supporting workers getting good jobs that creates this kind of intergenerational well-being that we talked about isn't enough of an incentive, let me also share another statistic. A study that we did at the Department of Labor found that if this country invested in child care and in family-supporting policies like paid leave the way other comparable economies do in the world, it would allow about five million more women to come into the workforce, and that would generate $775 billion dollars' worth of economic activity in America.
So again, when we do things the right way, it's good for working people. It's good for communities. And it's good for the entire community that you all represent in the infrastructure world. And it's good for our economy and good for our country.
Doing this the right way, as President Biden knows and as I know, when we do right by working people, makes our economy stronger, and makes America stronger.
We're also working to revamp connections with our educational institutions who are a very important part of this roads and bridges that connect people to good jobs and employers to people. And that's investing in pre-apprenticeship programs, for example, in community colleges.
So earlier this year I was with the Community College of Allegheny County, and I met a student named Parker who said that when he was in high school, he never imagined that he would get to do a job with his hands and also get a college degree.
Well now, he's getting to do both of those things. He's getting help from his community college with classes that connect to the job that he's doing in his local community to help build up his degree. And these are jobs in advanced manufacturing, that include clean energy, and so all of that's a part of the infrastructure that we're talking about right now. So we think of community colleges as on-ramps to this infrastructure, and we recognize that four-year degrees are not the only or the best path for people to get to the future and to get to the destination that they want.
To meet this moment of historic infrastructure investments, the moment that people in this room have been pushing for, for some time, we have to make sure that workers have enough infrastructure to get the jobs that they need. And with our high road training partnerships, we know that will happen. There are actually thousands of partnerships like this across the country, I'm sure many of you know about them, and a few of you are building them. If you don't, we've actually created a high road to the middle class map that plots all of these training partnerships and where they are all across the country.
And those training programs are connected to the investments that are being made in President Biden's Investing in America agenda. And since we've created that map a year ago, we've added thousands more dots on the map, which shows that we're not only doing what we say, we're also scaling them in a way that we need to do.
And everybody represented in this room is needed to help us get to that point.
So please join us on the high road. The Department of Labor has created a framework called "Preparing an Infrastructure Workforce" to support you in this work. And I urge you to look at it, in terms of the components of what I talked about, and how each member of the partnership—whether a business, a non-profit, an educational institution, a union, or a government entity—can play their role in helping to build these kinds of partnerships.
So I'm going to close because I know we're all here because we care about these investments are creating opportunity—and intergenerational opportunity—for working people across this country. To talk about a woman named Rose Evans in Ohio.
So Rose was struggling to provide for her kids when she started an apprenticeship program and began a journey worker with the Sheet Metal Worker's Union. And Rose's daughter Diamond saw just what this good, union job meant for her mother and for her family. So she enrolled in a pre-apprenticeship program that was funded by the Department of Labor in conjunction with my friend, President McGarvey, with the Building Trades.
Today, Mom Rose is working on her second infrastructure project funded by President Biden's Investing in America agenda. This one is in Kokomo, Indiana, and today she's working side-by-side with her daughter Diamond on that project.
So when we invest in infrastructure, we invest in families like Rose's and Diamond's. And we create intergenerational change for women, for people of color, for all communities to enjoy prosperity that they're building this country in this moment.
So let's do this right. Let's do this together. Let's seize this moment to build a 21st century infrastructure that is both physical and workforce. This is the opportunity for every single community. And I'm so excited for to continue to do this work with you. The Department of Labor stands with you. We have your back. And thank you so much for your leadership and hard work in all that you're doing. Thank you so much.