Remarks by Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su at an Event on "Shaping the Future: K-12 to Careers in Manufacturing" (As Delivered)

Buckeye, AZ
June 5, 2024

Good morning, everybody! And thank you so much for your patience. Thank you for being here. I'm really delighted to see you all.

I want to say a very special thank you to Jacob Allen for the amazing tour that you did. Also, for showing what is possible for young people. You are truly impressive, and even in the little bit that I've gotten to see today, thank you and I cannot wait to see what you are going to do for your community, your family, and for our country. So thank you very, very much. And thank you to everybody who is creating more and more opportunity for young people like Jacob.

I do want to acknowledge Mike Russo, who I just saw yesterday in Washington, DC. So the fact that I've seen him twice now in one week shows me that I'm doing my job right!

We are so honored at the Department of Labor to fund and support the work that you are doing, especially to scale the important initiatives that we are talking about here today: tried and true models for how to connect people to real opportunity.

And of course, to Doctor Spurgeon, to West-MEC, to your beautiful campus, thank you for hosting us, thank you for your generosity, and for letting us highlight just how significant work can be and how impactful it can be with the right leadership and right partners at the table and the right investments that are being made. Really appreciate you so much.

And congratulations to both of you on Arizona's first Gateway Apprenticeship Program, which is very, very exciting. So I wanted to just share a little bit about how what we are talking about today is really both a moment of tremendous opportunity and long-term growth in this country. Because it is very much a proof point of President Biden's vision for how we create a stronger country. And that starts with investments, significant investments, in rebuilding roads and bridges, in making sure that industry, including manufacturing, can be done here in the United States, and that clean energy and clean air are not just luxuries, but something that everybody can have.

And federal investments can help to drive those things and make them happen, not just to create those things but to create good jobs as we make those other things possible.

So that brings us to this conversation about how those good jobs can become opportunities for Jacob and so many others across the country.

So in Maricopa County alone, this administration has announced over $15 billion in advanced manufacturing investments. And you all are seeing what that looks like—whether you are a company that has added investments of your own, whether you are West-MEC who sees a greater need for what you're doing than ever before, or whether you are among the many partners that we've talked to who see that only by working together are we going to be able to connect people to all the many jobs that are being created.

And so I just wanted to say one thing about how I see our workforce system. I see our workforce system as infrastructure too. It's roads and bridges that connect people to the good jobs they want and need and employers to the people they want and need.

But as you all know, that workforce system has also had some of its challenges. It also needs some repair, it needs some rebuilding. It's got some potholes. It's got some cracks. We heard earlier today. Sometimes the pre-apprenticeship programs don't seamlessly connect to actual apprenticeship programs. That is broken infrastructure, and we need to fix it.

And so much of the work that we are doing, and the conversation we are going to have right now is about how to build that strong infrastructure that I call the country's "opportunity infrastructure."

For too long, we've heard that training programs for jobs that might materialize and skills that might be needed was a way of doing workforce development. Not on our watch.

We've heard that some communities just don't have the skills and therefore, we've counted them out of opportunity. Not on our watch.

The problem is not a lack of skills; it's a lack of infrastructure that is connected to every single community to provide them with the opportunities that are in their community.

That is something we are very excited to highlight today—how that is happening here and how this vision of really investing in America, the President's Investing in America agenda—is providing even more opportunity for us to do that and to do that really well.

And we know that apprenticeship programs and pre-apprenticeship programs are really the superhighways of that workforce infrastructure.

So career and technical education, as it has already been said, like the work that's being done here at West-MEC, are really a vital part of that opportunity infrastructure. And CTE districts are not just one-off programs. They really do give us the opportunity to scale the way we need to in this moment.

So all the pieces fit together here. I say this all the time. I repeat it a lot. A good training program doesn't end in a job search. It ends in a good job. And that's the kind of interconnected infrastructure that we seek to build. And we can only do that with the partnership of everybody here in this room.

So let's talk about the partnership, let's bring people together to highlight what the interconnected opportunity infrastructure of this country could look like.

Delivered By
Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su