Remarks by Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su at the Council for Tribal Employment Rights

Tuba City, AZ
August 7, 2024

Hello everybody.

Good afternoon. It is so wonderful to be with you all from Washington DC. Thank you so much to Chairman Wheeler and I just want to thank the Counsel for Tribal Employment Rights for really setting such a high standard in terms of safeguarding tribal employment rights and the incredibly important work you're doing especially around how to make sure that everybody can have a good job. There are few things that are more fundamental than that, and I'm proud to be a partner to you in that work.

We know that the work that you all are doing, and the work of the Biden-Harris administration has really helped to move the needle, really helped to advance progress, including for Indian country.

And I just want to say a little bit about how we measure that progress. More often than not, we measure progress through data, right? Through the collection of information. We collect a whole lot of data to understand different things. Every month, I go out and talk about data, about the number of jobs that have been created in this country. There's actually been almost 16 million jobs created in the United States since President Biden came into office. That's the most…

Yes, thank you…. that's the most under any president in that same amount of time. We also have jobs data that shows us that real wages for working people are actually up. Wages have gone up faster than the rate of inflation which means there's more money in working people's pockets. We also have data about the amount of investments that are being made by President Biden and Vice President Harris in all communities, including – and I think you all know about this—but over $32 billion dollars from the American Rescue Plan Act, just directly for tribal communities and native peoples. And that is the largest direct federal investment into this community in history as well.

So there's lots of data that gets collected about a whole bunch of different things. Yet, for years and years, data on unemployment, data on jobs, data on wages — as it affects native peoples — has been lacking. And when I first got to the Department of Labor, we did not break out the data that we got every month for Native Americans and Native Alaskans. We just, we didn't do that, and I know that it's so important for us to know — we have to know what's happening in communities —  in order for us to address the various issues. So, I worked with my team, and now every single month when the jobs data comes out, there's data specifically about American Indians and Alaska Natives. They're published at the same time.

So, one of the things we know is that we need to do better at the quality of that data and by working directly with communities. That's the only way to do it, right? To get it right. Because a lot of times we try to collect information from people who may not necessarily trust the people who are asking the questions. And so, when we're working in collaboration with communities, we can, not only collect more data, but we can also collect more accurate data. So, that's a commitment I made to you, that we need to make sure we do that work.

But because of our now reporting on collecting that data separately, we know a number of different things. Now all of you know that already, But you also know that if we don't have data collected and publicized, then the proper resources aren't always given to the communities, right? The proper policy responses are not given unless we actually have the accurate information.

And so, putting out that data every single month is really a big deal. It's a big deal because some of what we found was actually really devastating. At the height of Covid, we saw the at unemployment for Native Americans was double the national average. You remember how high it was for everybody during that time, right? It was particularly devastating for Native Americans and Alaskan Natives.

It was so bad that my agency told me that in order to put out that data separately, they had to change the entire chart. They had to make a new chart to demonstrate just its impact. Added to that, again, this is something that you all know and this is why the work that you do is so important, we also found that for American Indians and Alaskan Natives the labor force participation rate was lower than the national average — so higher rates of unemployment and also lower labor force participation rate.

We have to do better than that, right? We have to make sure that we are making the proper investments in order to ensure that everybody who wants a good job can get a good job. And data is not just about numbers, it's about real people and about real communities. And they really underscore the urgent need for continuing investments and policies that are intentional about reaching all communities.

So, I often advise the President on, not just about jobs and how to create jobs but the types of jobs that we want to be created. Because as you also all know, not all jobs are equal, right? And a job, a good job, is one that allows somebody to make a decent living. To be able to come home at the end of the day and be with their families. To be able to save a little bit so that they can feel a sense of greater security. And a job where they know they're going to come home healthy and safe at the end of their workday.

And so our commitment is to really create good jobs in all communities. For example, I often talk about Cecilia Bull Chief who is a member of the Crow Tribe in eastern Montana. She now lives in Seattle, but Cecilia was a single parent and she knew that she needed a good job. So what she did was she joined an apprenticeship program to become a glazier. A glazier is somebody who installs glass windows on buildings, a job she didn't even know existed before she got to that program to do the training to do it. And as you also all know, people can't do jobs they don't know exist. So as she learned a trade, she also was learning and earning while she was in that program. And so needing to be paid while you are being trained is also a really important part of people really being able to take advantage of various opportunities. And so immediately, upon entering that program she was making double what she was making before. And after graduating she got a big union job that allowed her to support her family. And as her kids grew up, she was very proud to point out all the various buildings on the skyline that she had actually worked on. And today, two of her children, her oldest children, are also part of that union, doing good union jobs. And her youngest just graduated college and is about to go to medical school. So the other thing we know about good jobs is that they not only support individuals in that moment, they also help to build intergenerational wealth and to combat inter-generational poverty.

So, I want to say one thing about what we are doing in this moment that is very relevant to your work. The idea here is that, you know, we often talk about how communities need to train for jobs, but I think thinking about barriers as just initial training is too narrow because what it does is it makes it seem like the reason why people don't have access to those job is that they just don't have skills. And I reject that idea. I think that what's happened is that we haven't actually created the infrastructure that ensures there is good job creation in every single community and access to those jobs within that community. So one of the things that we really believe in this administration is that the investments that we are making should build up communities, not just by building the physical infrastructure, not just by repairing roads and bridges, not just by making sure that everybody has access to clean drinking water and high speed reliable Internet, but making sure that the jobs that are created through those things, go to the communities where those things are being built.

And I know that that is very fundamental to the work that all of you are doing as well. So in this moment, we're making historic investments in infrastructure, right? $13 billion directly to tribal communities just to build up physical infrastructure. $2.5 billion dollars for Indian water rights settlements. I could go on and on with the data, but what I really want to say about this is we also have to invest in what I call the Opportunity Infrastructure. This is the roads and bridges that connect people to the good jobs they want and need, and employers with the people they want and need. And those roads and bridges have also not been as strong as we need them to be. They've not reached every single community, and we can do better this time. That's what a lot of our investments are.

So how many of you are familiar with the Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act, WIOA? Right, many of you are recipients of WIOA grants or work in the workforce space and and are bringing life into those grants by creating programs that really work. Well, one of the campaigns that I launched at the Department of Labor is called, Yes WIOA Can. And the idea is that instead of constantly telling you what WIOA cannot be used for, we want to be driven by the real needs of communities to say, to talk about what WIOA can be used for. So it's not just about training programs. It might be about supporting higher wages in certain industries, right? It might be about ensuring that there's child care or transportation to allow people to get to and from training and to and from jobs. That's what I mean by Opportunity Infrastructure.

And we've also been making a strong investments in community college grants, other ways of supporting this Opportunity Infrastructure through supporting educational institutions, because we know the education institutions are the onramps to this Opportunity Infrastructure, right? And if those educational institutions are disconnected from the system, maybe not training for jobs, training for jobs that don't actually exist, or training for skills that aren't actually needed, or giving out credentials or degrees that don't really help in the workforce, then the system is also not working. So we're trying to build a connected Opportunity Infrastructure that's going to ensure that everybody from every single community can see themselves in the good jobs that are being created. And we want your help in doing that, and I know you're already doing that.

I come and present with you, you know, to you the vision of this, because I think there's more ways that we can create better and stronger connectivity between the various pieces of the of the workforce system. And that's why we're investing more than ever in apprenticeship programs like the one that changed Ceceilia's life and her family's lives. That's why we're investing more in partnerships between employers and communities that help marginalized workers to connect them to each other, right? It's a failure of the system when you have employers who have vacancies - jobs that they need to fill and people who want jobs but we haven't created a connection between them. And that gets us away from just saying that sometimes there's just a skill problem, because I think that that gives communities a really short shrift. That has also largely been used as an excuse to leave certain communities out of opportunity altogether. So this is not a skills gap, this is an infrastructure problem and we need to solve it by building that infrastructure. So please work with us to do that. We're very excited to be able to to partner with you all and to make sure that the Opportunity Infrastructure really does reach everybody.

And key to that is the need for good jobs at the outset. Right? Key to that is making sure we're making the kinds of investments to ensure that good jobs are being created and that prioritizing communities who benefit from those. We don't need to bring in people from outside communities to come do the jobs and then just leave. We need to make sure that people who will be driving on those roads and bridges and who will have to be turning on those faucets for that clean drinking water, that they are the ones can get these jobs. And by the time hiring is needed, it's too late to start to build these programs, which is why the work you are doing in the work that we want to do with you to build that infrastructure right now is so very important.

The last thing I just want to close with saying is that, as you hopefully know and I've heard and experienced over the last three and a half years, this administration is deeply committed to tribal sovereignty and to the nation-to-nation respectful interaction that is really foundational to creating good partnerships. And so, at the Department of Labor we play our part in that, but all of this work we want to be informed by your needs, your challenges, your ideas. And part of our approach to workforce development with a "yes we all can attitude" is that we want you to also be able to use funding in ways that your communities need them to be used - which may not be the same even between tribes, but certainly will not be the same across the entire country.

So thank you for everything that you all are doing and let's keep up this good work. You know this work of building infrastructure doesn't happen overnight. You all know that very, very well. But the fact that it has been not as strong as it needs to be tells us that we have a moment in which at the same time that we're making investments in physical infrastructure, historic investments in Indian Country, we have to also build this Opposite Infrastructure so every single person, every single child who's looking up to their future understands they see a good job, right where they grew up, right where they live and work and a job that will truly change their lives and the lives of their communities.

So thank you so much for having me here.

Delivered By
Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su