Making matters worse, the Trump administration and his allies in Congress are working to undercut strong standards. The administration announced that it would not require federal contractors receiving coronavirus funding to comply with long-standing anti-discrimination protections that mandate that they take affirmative efforts to hire women, people of color, veterans, and people with disabilities.
All companies supported by federal infrastructure spending must create good jobs, regardless of whether they receive grants, loans, loan guarantees, or tax credits. In order to do so, federal policymakers must include protections in any major infrastructure investment to ensure that all subsidized firms comply with the following requirements:. All jobs supported through the infrastructure package should pay decent wages and provide essential benefits.
Moreover, too often, prevailing wage rates are set at levels that undercut high industry standards and sometimes even pay poverty wages. Prevailing wage and benefit protections should apply to any future infrastructure spending. In addition, Congress should adopt reforms enacted by several cities and states to ensure that when significant numbers of workers in an industry join together in unions, the collectively bargained wage rates can become the prevailing wage rates.
In occupations and geographies with low levels of union membership, prevailing wage rates often fall below the living wage needed to sustain a family.
Raising minimum pay and expanding benefits protections would build on the work of President Barack Obama, who established minimum wage and paid sick leave protections for those working on federal contracts.
Finally, policymakers should enact protections to ensure that publicly supported workers receive fair scheduling protections, extended paid family and medical leave, and access to quality and affordable child care. All workers—no matter their race, gender, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or veteran status—should have access to jobs funded through an infrastructure package and should receive fair compensation from their employers.
Congress should require the administration to restart anti-discrimination reporting and enforcement for all recipients of coronavirus funds. In addition, it should provide funding for the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs—which is charged with enforcing these protections—at levels sufficient to support targeted investigations into sectors with significant pay disparities by race, ethnicity, gender, and other factors, as well as reviews of employee movement from entry- and mid-level jobs into higher-earning positions.
Infrastructure investment that supports registered apprenticeship and paid training programs could help workers obtain high-paying jobs with opportunities for career advancement; ensure that industries are able to build a pipeline of highly qualified workers; and push back on actions by the Trump administration to erode apprenticeship standards and block local hire agreements.
Lawmakers should require that apprentices participating in programs that meet federal and state Registered Apprenticeship standards perform at least 15 percent of their hours on large infrastructure projects.
Lawmakers should also require that projects adopt a targeted hire initiative to establish hiring requirements and partnerships with community groups, so that affected groups—such as local residents, women, people of color, workers with disabilities, and other disadvantaged individuals—are able to access these jobs. In industries and regions with few established Registered Apprenticeship programs or where established apprenticeship programs have little capacity to fulfill necessary training, any infrastructure bill should ensure partnership with the public workforce system and provide funding to labor-management intermediaries in order to develop apprenticeship or paid work-based learning programs.
All workers who want to form a union should be able to do so. Despite enhanced protections to ensure that contract workers know their rights and to prevent companies from using government funds to fight the efforts of workers to form a union, workers seeking to unionize typically face an uphill battle.
Subsidized employers are free to use their own funds to fight organizing efforts and often engage in sophisticated campaigns to prevent workers from forming unions. Moreover, President Trump repealed protections that ensured that service contractors provided workers employed on previous contracts a right of first refusal.
All companies receiving federal infrastructure funds should be covered by existing collective bargaining protections for contract workers, and successor contractors should be required to provide a right of first refusal to workers.
In addition, companies receiving federal support should be required to comply with the Protecting the Right to Organize Act. It's a long list, but here are some of the highlights:. Data released by the Labor Department on Thursday showed more than 16 million people are still receiving some form of unemployment benefit, now more than a year into the pandemic.
What's that all add up to? Economists say that if employers need workers so badly, they would raise pay. So far, that's not happening. Over the next several months analysts will watch intently to see how the labor market adapts to the biggest changes since after World War Two, when millions of soldiers returned home and wartime assembly lines shut down.
It may be the end of summer before there is any real clarity. Or, as Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester put it on Wednesday, as vaccinations rise and more schools return to in-person learning, "We'll get to that better equilibrium in the labor market between supply and demand.
The US has more jobs than it can fill. Fixing the immigration system could boost the economy. One immediate solution is simple: Bring in more foreign workers. The US needs roughly 10 million people , including low-wage and high-skilled workers, to fill job openings nationwide — and only 8.
At the same time, workers are resigning in record numbers. Supply chain bottlenecks are even threatening to ruin Christmas. In a normal year, the US welcomes roughly 1 million immigrants , and roughly three-quarters of them end up participating in the labor force. In , that number dropped to about , And under the current circumstances, welcoming more low-wage foreign workers could address acute labor shortages in certain industries, helping hard-hit areas of the country recover while staving off higher inflation.
The industries currently facing the worst labor shortages include construction; transportation and warehousing; accommodation and hospitality; and personal services businesses like salons, dry cleaners, repair services, and undertakers.
All four industries had increases in job postings of more than 65 percent when comparing the months of May to July to the same time period in , according to an analysis conducted for Vox by the pro-immigration New American Economy think tank. Immigrants make up at least 20 percent of the workforce in those industries.
Informal economy workers have suffered during the pandemic: On average, 1. Tony Rader, senior vice president of National Roofing Partners, said his construction company — which provides commercial roof maintenance and repair services across locations nationwide — is one of those struggling to hire enough workers to meet sky-high demand.
In the absence of willing and available American workers, the company has hired temporary immigrant workers on H-2 visas. So, too, have many other employers in the roofing industry, where immigrants make up 29 percent of the workforce and there are more job openings than job seekers.
But economists worry the worker shortage is so drastic that it will threaten economic growth overall and perhaps lead to higher inflation.
We could be looking at a time where we rebuild some of those wage standards. Betsey Stevenson, a University of Michigan economics professor, agrees that many workers are reluctant to return to their jobs. She noted that in-person service workers, like waiters, see their jobs as especially risky during the pandemic. We made it difficult to evict people. We made food stamps more available.
In her view, many businesses might adopt different norms during the pandemic, and that could result in more worker bargaining power. The ones who adapt to that are going to be the first ones to get workers back.
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