As apprenticeships take off, unions are in the driver’s seat
When the White House held a summit last month touting its efforts to rebuild the workforce through the American Rescue Plan, Melissa Wells was a featured speaker. An experienced labor leader, she’d recently joined North America’s Building Trades Unions, an umbrella labor organization for the construction industry, to head up its strategic efforts around workforce development and career pathways. She was given a particular focus on bringing a more diverse group of Americans into the building trades. NABTU, Wells told the audience, is “very intentional about how we can create a more diverse workforce.” And the linchpin in that work is union-led apprenticeships. The big idea: As major federal investments like the American Rescue Plan, the Infrastructure law, and now the CHIPS and Science Act start to create millions of new jobs, the country’s unions are at the forefront of efforts to build up the workforce to meet that demand. It’s a position that they, arguably, haven’t been in since the
When the White House held a summit last month touting its efforts to rebuild the workforce through the American Rescue Plan, Melissa Wells was a featured speaker. An experienced labor leader, she’d recently joined North America’s Building Trades Unions, an umbrella labor organization for the construction industry, to head up its strategic efforts around workforce development and career pathways. She was given a particular focus on bringing a more diverse group of Americans into the building trades. NABTU, Wells told the audience, is “very intentional about how we can create a more diverse work
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