Thursday Sept 19th at 11 am ET
Thursday Sept 19th at 11 am ET – Nearly every project that comes to Appalachia promises jobs. However, the promise of new jobs is where the conversation should start, not end. Who is getting the jobs? How do we ensure the jobs are good jobs? And how do create opportunities for local workers?
A close examination of workforce and local hiring are a core component of community benefits. Given the barriers to local hiring that exist in many rural communities, engaging with workforce considerations as early as possible in project development is of particular importance.
Thursday Sept 19th at 11 am ET – ReImagine Appalachia’s Amanda Woodrum and Stephen Herzenberg gave an overview of components to include in community benefit negotiations to ensure that projects are:
- Creating more local jobs and ensuring workers in those jobs receive living wages.
- Ensuring our workforce reflects the great diversity of our community
- Creating opportunity for disadvantaged workers, targeting residents from the county’s poorest neighborhoods.
- Building career pathways out of poverty through on-the-job training opportunities and support for pre-apprenticeship programs.
Specific priorities that were discussed included goals for apprentice utilization, pre-apprenticeship and wrap-around support that can be written into community benefit documents. We’ll discuss the importance of getting the details right to set local communities and workers up for success.
Diverse local hire is only one aspect of creating a “gold standard” of community benefit agreement. Any good community benefit vision should start with a coalition of labor, racial justice and environmental stakeholders. When you have these key stakeholders at the table, you have the foundation for an agreement that includes:
- Meaningful community engagement and project input,
- Labor and safety standards for job quality purposes,
- Access to those quality jobs for disadvantaged communities through targeted hiring practices and paid on-the-job training opportunities for apprentices and/or pre-apprentices
- Environmental and public health provisions
- Measures for accountability to meet these goals.
Event notes and resources
This conversation included the release of a first draft of a paper we are working on to capture findings and recommendations to ensure workers in local communities have access to the jobs at new projects.
ReImagine likes to introduce our work in draft form to solicit any comments or feedback to ensure that the work is impactful and useful as possible. To that end, whether or not you were able to attend the conversation, you are welcome to review the draft brief that accompanied the webinar. You’ll see many participants have already engaged in the draft – thank you! You’re also welcome to email comments directly.
Notes from the chat:
KRC and the Illinois EPI wrote a report titled Hiring Local On Transportation Infrastructure Projects In Pennsylvania Employment, Economic, Fiscal, and Training Impacts where they estimated the jobs, wages, training investments NOT created in PA because the painting subcontractor on an Andy Warhol bridge refurbishment project came from Florida. Not a single painter with an identified state of residence came from PA.
Studies like this show what we already know – that hiring locally increases the long term economic and community impacts of new projects.
The group made note of a recent change to the OMB’s guidance rules around local hire – effectively removing a Reagan-era rule which prohibited the use of federal funds for local hire preferences. There are some caveats but still a big step for local hire. You can read about it on the Department of Labor website or on the Local Opportunities Coalition website.