Funding stream sought for workforce training (OR)

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

By: Josh Kulla
January 22, 2019 1:50 pm

There’s no end in sight to the shortage of skilled tradespeople in the construction industry. That, in short, is motivating supporters of Senate Bill 82 in the Oregon Legislature’s 2019 session. It would direct the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries to establish a new program that would provide supportive services for pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship programs throughout the state. The program would be funded by a pass-through fee attached to certain public works projects subject to prevailing wage rates.

Kelly Kupcak, executive director of Oregon Tradeswomen Inc., worked with representatives of other pre-apprentice groups to help craft the bill. While with the Chicago Women in Trades, Kupcak in 2006 helped push for the passage of similar legislation supporting pre-apprenticeships for women and other disadvantaged groups by linking funding for training in a larger infrastructure bill.

“In Illinois they were able to get enough support from the state Legislature and governor’s office to institute a set-aside from capital improvement projects for pre-apprenticeships,” Kupcak said. “There is this ongoing demand for skilled labor, and report after report that says we can’t meet that demand.”

In some ways, SB 82 is quite similar to the Illinois model. But SB 82 also offers a wide range of support for people receiving training. This includes assistance with the cost of transportation, lodging, child care, job supplies and equipment, and even housing stabilization services.

“We had suggested this is an opportunity to have an assurance of a pool of dollars that would ebb and flow based on demand,” Kupcak said. “If the state has a lot of capital projects on the books, there is an obvious need and a funding stream to get them in. In a lot of ways the model is simple, but it makes sense.”

Money from the pass-through fee would go into a new State Apprenticeship and Training Supportive Services Fund. From there, money would be disbursed to qualifying pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship programs.

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The Answer to America’s Skilled Labor Problem

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

Katherine S Newman, Hella Winston
Jul 24, 2017

Very few policy ideas excite both parties in this period of political polarization. Apprenticeship and the renaissance of technical education is, however, one of them. The Obama administration invested millions to launch a federal apprenticeship office, while President Trump has made it one of his signature ideas as he tries to address the re-industrialization of economically depressed regions of the country.

Twin goals are at play on the right and the left: the revival of manufacturing industries, which are desperate for skilled labor, and the need to develop pathways to good jobs-especially for non-university-bound youth-that technical high schools, community colleges, and training programs have been trying to forge. Virtually everyone in the policy world accepts that we must do more to move the American labor force toward the kind of high-skilled foundation that is common in Germany and Austria.

Despite this consensus, the U.S. is very far behind in expanding apprenticeship and the technical education that underpins it. We currently have 506,000 federally registered apprentices and have allocated $2.7 billion dollars to support them. In Germany, with an economy one quarter the size of the U.S., there are 1.4 million apprentices and the annual expenditure for them is $9 billion. The skill of the German labor force is unparalleled in the world and has helped that country become a dominant force in international trade. Its investment has paid off handsomely.

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