Philadelphia, PA
July 11, 2024
Wow. Thank you all for being here and let me just say thank you to you, Shakeena. The only thing I want to correct about you said was that you are not a public speaker. It was brilliant.
I hope you'll continue to tell more of your story. I saw you do that off-the-cuff to the new cohort of WINC participants. And we will also continue to tell it because you are why we do what we do. You certainly prove that we should just keep at it because your story is so incredible. Thank you very much.
I don't know if brother Ryan is still in the room, but I want to thank the Building Trades. President Biden is investing in America and the Building Trades are building it. So, thank you for all of the work.
To the Mayor and her team who are also here, we couldn't do these hubs without you and the leadership on the ground.
And I actually want to acknowledge some of my colleagues from the Biden-Harris Administration. Of course, you already heard from Director Neera Tanden who is a visionary leader in all his work that's helping to deliver on the president's promise that we will do no domestic policy without setting workers first. Thank you so much, Neera, for your leadership.
To my colleagues from the Department of Transportation, who are here. Secretary Buttigieg
is not here, but Paige Shevlin who is extraordinary in making sure we that all the money that the of Transport is putting out is tied to good jobs and good union jobs in communities all across the country.
And to our colleagues from EPA who are here. Administrator Michael Regan is not here, but his team is here too. All of us are working side by side, together, to fulfill the president's promise to be the most pro-worker, pro-union president this country has ever seen.
So, it's very, very special to be back here at the Finishing Trades Institute. I was here about a year ago with the vice president, announcing the first update to the Davis-Bacon rules in about 40 years, alongside many of you. So, again, thank you all for breathing life into the rules that we pass. They would not mean anything if not for all of you living them, breathing them, obviously enforcing them. So, I just want to thank you for hosting us here again and remind us of a year ago when we were all together.
The work that you do builds on its own. It's not that we do things one day and we expect it to change, because there's been decades of underinvestment in working people, underinvestment in American industry. And we're turning that around and working with all of you to make that happen. And a part of that is obviously WINC, the incredible work that WINC does. And during Good Jobs Summer, I'll come back to that in a second. I'm very proud to be here to celebrate WINC.
So, back in 2018, the Department of Labor gave a grant to Chicago Women in Trades – Lark talked a little bit about that history – also known as CWIT. That grant helped to kickstart the WINC program that we are talking about here today. It's incredible to see how much that program has grown. That program has grown in large part – and she was very modest about this – so I want to say something to her about this again, because of the leadership of Lark Jackson.
And this is how women get it done – quietly, with energy, with vision, doing all the work behind the scenes – to make sure that a program that was just an idea when you started here is now delivering thousands of opportunities in this city for women, who, as Shakeena said, did not seem themselves in the opportunity and did not even know that such a job was possible.
So, when I think about CWIT – I've been to visit a few times – and I've met many of the women there, who like Shakeena, are now doing jobs in their communities that they did not see themselves in.
Women like Jazz Allen, who after an incarceration, had a hard time finding a good job until she got to CWIT. And now, today, Jazz actually helps to run CWIT. A perfect giving back story about how, when you give someone an opportunity, it's not only something that benefits and uplifts them, they come back and benefit and uplift their entire community.
And that's why the Department of Labor continues to invest in programs like CWIT, like our Tradeswomen Building Infrastructure grants, that is putting tradeswomen front and center in the jobs that we're creating that are helping to build America, because we know the power of these programs to transform lives. And you all are building the future right here in Philadelphia.
So, before I talk a little about the future, I just want to say one thing about where we came from because it's important to know how far we've come and to look at where we were.
So just before President Biden came into office – let's just take ourselves back to 4 years ago.
We were in the midst of a global pandemic with no national strategy to address it.
And, unemployment rates were extremely high.
When we went to the store, we didn't know if we were going to be able to find toilet paper. Everyone remember panic buying? Empty shelves?
That's not what we have in this country anymore. Today, under President Biden's leadership, there have been almost 16 million jobs created in this country since he came into office. That is the most of any president in that same time period, ever in history.
And, the unemployment rate has now been the lowest for the longest stretch – basically in my lifetime – since Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon.
And none of that happens by accident.
These things happen because leadership matters.
And thanks to the leadership of President Biden, we have built and sustained an economic recovery that most people said would not be possible.
And his vision of an economy that's built from the middle out and the bottom up, rather than trickle down policies, which never benefited working people – that is core to what we are talking about here today.
And that's why I launched a Good Jobs Summer Tour to visit cities across the country to highlight the good jobs that are being created in communities and make sure that everybody sees themselves in those job opportunities.
Remember something else from four years ago or so – the promise of an infrastructure week that never happened. Do you all remember the punchline that it became?
Well, we made it real.
Under President Biden, we started investing in America again. And we are now at the beginning of an infrastructure decade. And those historic investments, as it's already been said, are pouring some $17 billion into the commonwealth of Pennsylvania alone, to fix roads and bridges, to make sure that every family that turns on the faucet gets clean water, to make sure that every community – urban, rural, big, small – has access to high-speed reliable internet, and to make things here at home.
So, when the President thinks about these investments, he thinks about jobs. And in President Biden's America, we don't just count the number of jobs, we look at the quality of those jobs. We want them to be good jobs, jobs where people can sustain a family, jobs that will uplift a community, jobs where – as the president always says – a mother can look her child in the eyes and say, "everything's going to be ok," and mean it. We want them to be good union jobs. That's right. That matters too.
And so, the work before us is to make sure that we connect people to those good jobs and employers to people. That's our workforce development system. And I think of that 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 they want and need. And I call that our nation's opportunity infrastructure.
But that infrastructure, like our physical infrastructure, has also had some challenges over time. It's had some cracks. It's got some potholes in it. The mayor mentioned a highway that was actually built in a way that discriminated against certain communities. Our workforce system has for too long also done that. Its not reached every single community the way that it needs to.
Too many training programs of the past have trained for jobs that might exist, for skills that somebody might need. Again, as the Building Trades know really well, that's no way to build a training program. It's not an effective training program if there's not a job at the end of it.
It's like a bridge to nowhere. And then, why would anybody want to get on it? Nobody wants to get on it. Not because they don't want to work, not because they don't have drive, not because they're not motivated, but because it's not a bridge that leads them somewhere. And, so we are rebuilding that workforce infrastructure. We are building a real opportunity infrastructure in this country that will meet the needs of all communities.
And that opportunity infrastructure begins with employers. It begins with demand. It begins with what employers need and the skills that they need. And that demand side is important, and it begins with working with employers to make sure they're signaling what they need because by the time they need to hire, it's too late to start a training program. It's too late to bring trainees in.
And so, starting with employers is really important. The most effective training programs have labor and management at the table together, have employers working with unions – labor and management – talking about the skills that are needed, building up programs, recruiting people for them and making sure that the people who go into jobs have the best skills that they can get in order to do those jobs right.
One of the important things about our hubs is that we want to be very clear, that for communities that have been told before that, "you don't really have the skills to do this work, we're not sure you can do these jobs," that's not the message that we have. That's actually not even true. Because for so many communities that have been left out in the past – communities of color, women, women of color, single mothers, people who've been formerly incarcerated – the reason why they haven't gotten jobs is not because they lack the skills. It's because we haven't built the roads and bridges to connect them to those jobs. Not this time. And not in President Biden's America. And not here in Philadelphia.
So, here are just a few ways that we're changing that, including by naming Philadelphia a workforce hub. The geographic and economic hiring preferences that have been alluded to, that have been mentioned, is about creating a demand for communities that have been left out in the past. That's one way that we are doing this. Making sure that economically disadvantaged communities get the good jobs that are coming to Philadelphia.
Another is investments in apprenticeship programs. You know, I know, that apprenticeship programs are the gold standard for connecting people to good jobs in their communities.
And that's why, today, the Department of Labor has announced the largest one-time competitive investment in apprenticeship programs, $244 million across the country, to expand apprenticeship programs, bringing the total since President Biden came into office to somewhere over $730 million. We believe in apprenticeship programs, you have made them work, and we're investing in them like never before.
The third way we're doing this is, you've heard President Biden say that when the federal government invests, we can draw in private investments. We can get the private sector to believe, to come in, to put money in. And that has happened in the Investing in America and that has also happened with the opportunity infrastructure.
Through the non-profit, Everybody Builds, which is a non-profit built by contractors, by developers, and by unions, there is now money through the Construction Trades Career Fund, with support from JP Morgan Chase, to provide those supportive services that we've already heard of: child care, transportation.
Again, people are not missing out on jobs because they don't want to do them. They're missing out on them because they can't get to and from them. They're missing out on them because women still bear the primary responsibility for child care and other kinds of care because they don't have the child care infrastructure to support them. So, supportive services to make sure people can succeed in jobs and get to job training programs is really key, and that is also happening right here now in Philadelphia.
So, this hub has to reach all communities, and to do this right, we need everyone at the table, which is why I am so delighted to see all of you in this room. We need employers and industry associations.
John, thank you so much for your words. Rob, thank you for your work. The vice president and I were so proud to come out and visit you and the working men and women on the I-95, who repaired that in record time.
Because when you want a job done right, you want a union contractor, a union worker, on the job.
We need union leaders like all the ones I'm looking at – the carpenters, the electricians, the painters – everybody here in this room. Unions have to have a seat at the table, and in President Biden's America, we will make sure that that happens.
We need workers, we need community-based organizations, we need government leaders, and yes, we need women.
So, let me close with this. Women's labor force participation rates for prime age workers has been the highest ever over the last three and a half years.
In 2023, women's labor force participation rate was the highest we've ever seen. In May, of this year, we broke our own record.
So, women, and in particular women of color, have powered this nation's economic recovery. So let that just sink in for a moment. That's why programs like WINC are so important, because women want to do it, they can do it, and as Shakeena said, women can do anything when given a chance.
It's our job to make that chance is available to every single woman in Philadelphia, throughout the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and across this country.
So, I'm very proud to build this opportunity infrastructure with all of you.
Let's roll up our sleeves, and let's build together.