National Harbor, MD
July 24, 2024
Hello everybody! Thank you so much to SelectUSA and the Department of Commerce for putting together this gathering, and I'm so glad to be here with you all.
I know one of the biggest concerns that business leaders have today is finding the workers that you need to build the workforce, to make sure that businesses succeed.
So I hear this question all the time. I hear people say, "My needs are growing, how do I ensure that I find workers with the right skills when I need them?" Or more generally, "Are there enough workers for all the jobs that we're creating?"
The department that I lead, the Department of Labor, is the agency that makes sure that America's workforce is highly skilled, well trained, and can connect to the good jobs that are being created in communities across this country.
In fact, in this fiscal year alone, the Department of Labor will invest $6.8 billion in our nation's workforce system. And here's the part that I want to make sure that you hear from me: we've been really reimagining what that system can do and what it should look like.
What I can tell you is that thinking about this issue as just one of skills is too narrow. We need to think about this as building infrastructure, an interconnected system that connects people to the good jobs they want and need and employers to the people that they want and need. And this is what I call our nation's opportunity infrastructure.
And just as strong as physical roads and bridges and ports and high-speed internet and electric grids, just as the physical infrastructure benefits your ability to build your business and to prosper, the opportunity infrastructure is also critical for that.
Employers need to be signaling what you need as part of this critical infrastructure, doing this well before you need to hire, because as you know, by the time you need to hire, it's too late to think about where you're going to find workers.
So since President Biden came into office, the US economy has added 15.6 million jobs and the unemployment rate in this country has been the lowest it has been for the longest stretch since the 1960s. I don't need to tell you that this tight labor market also means that workers have more choices and employers are responding by doing more to both recruit and retain.
All of this is fundamental to President Biden's vision for a strong economy.
In President Biden's America, we know that those two forces, economic growth and worker well-being, are not in contrast or in competition. They go hand in hand. We know that when workers do well, businesses prosper, our nation is stronger, and our economy grows.
You'll hear from my other colleagues who are at this conference in the Biden-Harris administration about the historic investments that are being made in fixing roads and bridges, and making sure that every community has high speed reliable internet, in ensuring clean drinking water, in modernizing airports, in building electric vehicle charging stations and making sure that we have a physical infrastructure to support the enormous investments that we ourselves are making, and the private companies are making, too.
So I said that our workforce system is a form of infrastructure, but just like our physical infrastructure, our workforce system has not been built in the ways that we need it to work. It's had some cracks. It's had some potholes. It has not been driven by holistic employer needs in the way that it could be, and it does not connect to every community in the way that it should.
For too long, the narrow view of workforce development as just more training for specific employers has not brought in the full talent pool that is possible. And too many training programs teach skills that might be needed for jobs that might materialize. This is like a bridge to nowhere. People don't want to get on because, why should they?
Training programs shouldn't end in a job search, they should end in an actual job.
And we have also heard people don't have the right skills as a reason to leave it entirely out of the workforce in the past: communities of color, women, those who've been justice impacted, young people who are disconnected from school and work. And people have been left out of opportunity for too long, not because they lack the skills, but because we haven't built the roads and bridges that connect them to good jobs and opportunities in their communities.
Not this time. We're doing it differently.
In the opportunity infrastructure, as an example, Registered Apprenticeships are the superhighways and many of you know about Registered Apprenticeships. Many countries have done this better than we have done in the United States. Registered Apprenticeships aren't one-off training programs tied to single employers. They are part of an interconnected system that benefits entire industries.
They are a tried-and-true way that employers get the skills that they need, and they are a steady pipeline to make sure that skilled workers come out with exactly the skills that employers are looking for.
We can help connect you to that system and we can help you to build effective apprenticeship programs. That's what we do at the Department of Labor.
And in the past, Registered Apprenticeships have been largely associated with blue collar jobs and they've helped build the most skilled workforce for construction work: carpenters, electricians, plumbers, pipe fitters and more.
In the Biden-Harris administration, we are expanding and modernizing and diversifying those pathways in all kinds of sectors. From financial services to battery manufacturing, to clean energy, from software development, to teaching, to cybersecurity, and we're making sure that those jobs are open to people from all kinds of backgrounds.
So let's look at an example. Let's just talk about semiconductor manufacturing for a moment. Semiconductor chips, as you all know, power everything from satellites to cars to smartphones. And the president's Chips and Science Act is helping companies expand its operations in the United States with billions of dollars in federal investments.
And my team is working with this industry to build out the superhighway that is Registered Apprenticeships, to expand them to fill jobs that are needed in the semiconductor industry.
Now we have funded an organization called the National Institute for Innovation and Technology. If you all are in the industry and have not heard of it, you should know about them, because what that organization is now doing is working with industry leaders from Virginia to Arizona, to help make sure that we build a seamless interconnected system, to get workers the skills they need to connect to the jobs in the semiconductor space.
The same is happening in the clean energy sector through the Inflation Reduction Act. As you all know, right, we are investing in clean energy in this country like we haven't done ever, in history, and the Department of Labor has worked closely with Treasury to make sure that the requirements of the IRA, which include prevailing wage payments, which include apprenticeships, are not just responsibilities but are opportunities that are being created.
To build opportunity infrastructure, we need everyone at the table because this only works when we work in real partnership, between employers with unions, with working people, with community-based organizations, with their educational system, right, the K-12, Community College, and four-year college system, with state government, local government and more.
I call these High Road Training Partnerships. They start with industry, and when I say industry, I mean both employers and workers—labor and management—we have to think of industry not just as the employer side of the equation, but as the workforce too and it starts with them coming together to plan for training that's tied to actual jobs.
And in these partnerships, Registered Apprenticeships, pre-apprenticeships, community colleges, supportive services, those that provide childcare and transportation, for example, all work together to make sure that workforce training is not an end in itself, but is what is creating the opportunity and the connections that are needed.
The other thing about High Road Training Partnerships, and I've seen this over and over again, is that they produce workers with the right set of skills at exactly the right time, so much so that new employers want to get in on those partnerships and so investing in the High Road, building that High Road, investing those kinds of partnerships is the way to answer that pressing question that so many employers and companies have about how they're going to have the workforce that they need.
So help us to help you. There's a connected system that can benefit you and meet one of the most pressing needs that employers have. Join with us, connect with us, help us build our nation's opportunity infrastructure around all of America's employers and workers.
That's how we'll create good jobs in the United States with the skilled workforce to match. That's how we continue to seize this historic opportunity that I know you all are looking at and trying to figure out how to be smart about your role in it.
The talent is here, let us connect them to you. You don't have to start from scratch and you should not be building one-off programs.
Be part of this opportunity infrastructure, let us build the High Road together, thank you so much I look forward to our partnership with you on a continuing basis.
Please reach out to us to help you do that. Thank you so much.