Houston, TX
July 28, 2023
Thank you for that gracious introduction, Marc [Morial]. I am so grateful to be in partnership with you as we work to build a just economy and continue the long fight for justice and equality.
And hello, Urban League! Thank you for inviting me here. I’m grateful for the opportunity to speak with you about the values and the common agenda our organizations share.
For over a century, the Urban League has challenged America to better live up to our founding ideals and to reach for the full promise that our nation was founded on.
Being here today, I’m reminded of the words of one of Houston’s very own, the late Barbara Jordan, a trailblazing Congresswoman and the pride of the Fifth Ward.
It was Congresswoman Jordan who said, quote, “What the people want is simple. They want an America as good as its promise.”
“An America as good as its promise.” Let me tell you what that means to me, and my vision for the Department of Labor.
My parents immigrated here because they also believed in the promise of America, that if you work hard and you play by the rules, you’ll have the opportunity to build a good life.
For years they worked minimum wage jobs to get by.
But when I was six years old, my mom got a job working for L.A. County -- a good union job with predictable hours, paid sick leave, a secure income, health benefits, and pension.
That job gave our family a path to the middle class and the security to sleep a little easier at night.
That’s why I believe that good jobs change lives. Because that’s what it did for my family. It brought the promise of America into closer reach for us.
I grew up and became the first lawyer in my family. For the first nearly 20 years of my career, I was a civil rights and workers’ rights attorney.
I believe in the work you do because I have done it too. This is personal for me.
That deep belief in the transformative power of a good job, that is what informs and animates our work at the Department of Labor.
It’s how we’re building an economy from the middle out and the bottom up—not the top down, as our President says.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
First, empowerment. We’re empowering and educating workers and putting them at the center of the Biden administration’s economic agenda, especially those who have been traditionally left out or left behind.
Second, equity. We are building equity into everything we do, including working with our sister agencies to embed equity standards into federal funding opportunities.
Third, enforcement. Believe me when I say we are using every tool in our toolbox to protect workers from wage theft, to keep them safe on the job, to fight discrimination, and to protect their hard-earned pensions, which help families build generational wealth.
We can’t build the inclusive economy we envision until we start closing the racial wealth gap.
In fact, I read a report a few years ago that said that just by closing the racial wealth gap for Black Americans, our national GDP could be 4 to 6 percent higher in less than a decade. So, it’s the right thing to do, it’s also the smart thing to do.
Ending structural racism is good economic policy.
And for me, that starts with ensuring equity for Black workers.
One of the first things I said when I got to the Labor Department was, “What are we doing to uplift Black workers?”
Under President Biden, we’re doing a lot.
As we speak, the Biden-Harris administration is investing $2 trillion in America’s roads, bridges, airports and ports. We want to make affordable reliable internet available in every home, and clean drinking water to flow out of every faucet.
This is the President’s Investing in America agenda. And it is also delivering good jobs. Lots of them.
Our North Star is connecting workers to those good jobs, especially those who have been left out or left behind in the past.
President Biden calls this America’s infrastructure decade.
I like to think of the workforce system as infrastructure too—the roads and bridges that connect workers to the good jobs they want and need and employers to the people they want and need.
Our workforce system—just like our physical roads and bridges—needs some attention too. It’s got some cracks, and some potholes. And it doesn’t connect to every community the way it should.
At the Department of Labor, we are building a workforce system infrastructure that’s going to be as strong as the physical infrastructure we’re building—a system that connects to every community, and leaves no one behind.
As you’ll hear from my friend and colleague [Deputy Secretary of the Treasury] Walley Adeyemo later on: we’re seeing unemployment at a historic low for Black workers.
Labor force participation is higher for Black workers than white workers right now. Yes, Black workers – and especially Black women, are powering our economic recovery.
But as we all know, Black workers still face some of the greatest inequities in our workforce, by almost every measure—by pay, access to opportunity, occupational segregation, and by wealth.
This tells us that we need to do more and be more intentional about connecting Black workers to meaningful employment and good jobs. And we will do this by taking on the structural and institutional barriers that have existed for far too long.
In fact, the Department of Labor has invested $20 million in the National Urban League to partner with labor unions to expand Apprenticeship Readiness Programs—that’s a great example of a workforce program done right. It’s going to help to ensure equitable access to the construction jobs being created from the President’s Investing in America agenda.
It’s developing an open, inclusive pipeline to good jobs in historically underserved communities. The result is a more diverse, more skilled workforce.
That’s one example of many of how we are tapping into the talent and potential of ALL communities to build our country.
We are just getting started. There’s more to be done, and we’ll get it done together.
Now, let me close by acknowledging that I know it’s one thing to talk about equity. It’s another thing entirely to make it real.
I am asking you to keep us honest. To hold us accountable to these commitments. You know me. You know my team. Our door is open.
While we build and repair bridges across the country, we can and must also build the bridge for individuals to real economic security, the bridge for families to the middle class, and the bridge for all of our communities to an America as good as its promise. So let’s build. Together.
Thank you.