Organized Labor

By Robert L. Balgenorth
President,
State Building & Construction Trades Council

Dubya and his Neanderthal budget staff have done it again. At the very time when California and much of America – especially the Gulf Coast – are trying to rebuild a crumbling infrastructure, he proposes for the second year in a row to zero out $1.3 billion in federal support for vocational education programs. Unless Congress refuses to go along, California would lose about $139 million to support the dwindling number of high school career technical education programs.

This would be unbelievable if it wasn’t part of a perverse pattern of cuts to working Americans that began the day after Dubya took the oath of office in January 2001. Consider the following facts:

The California Department of Education tells us that out of every 100 students who enter our public high schools in this state, 30 will drop out before graduation. Of the 70 who are left, 21 of them – 30 percent – will choose to pursue a college degree. What happens to the 79 who have either dropped out of high school or who won’t go to college is too often a tragic waste of precious human and economic potential.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Jack O’Connell described the problem this way in his State of California Education speech: “Letting students graduate without even basic skills today leaves them defenseless and unable to survive in the world of tomorrow,” O’Connell said. “And that is not just costly, it is immoral.”

O’Connell is right, and the State Building & Construction Trades Council (SBCTC) believes that building trades unions have the tools to help solve this problem. For more than 100 years, each of the construction craft and trade unions, working in partnership with union contractors, have operated joint apprenticeship programs that provide California and the nation with the best-trained construction workforce in the world.

But in recent years, despite these excellent joint apprenticeship programs, experienced construction workers in all the trades have been retiring faster than apprentices are being trained. That’s partly because various state and local infrastructure bond issues have been approved by voters in recent years. For example, California school construction is at an all-time high. More than $50 billion in private building and public works projects are in the pipeline across California.

Then came Hurricane Katrina, and now there is a growing demand for construction workers in the Gulf Coast region as rebuilding efforts are gradually getting under way there.

It is becoming clear that unless we find a way to speed up recruitment and training, there will not be an adequate pool of skilled construction workers. Even before Hurricane Katrina, it was estimated that California will need nearly 30,000 new skilled workers every year for the next decade.

It is ironic that this construction worker shortage is looming when there is such a vast pool of capable but untrained young people in search of a career that does not require a college degree. With starting wages of $11 to $13 per hour, the construction field provides a tremendous opportunity for earning a good wage, health and pension benefits and a lifelong career.

To address this critical problem, in the spring of 2005 the State Building & Construction Trades Council (SBCTC) initiated a statewide program to educate a minimum of 10,000 high school students, teachers and guidance counselors about opportunities in the building trades. Funded by a grant from the California Department of Education with Workforce Investment Act funds, the SBCTC hired outreach coordinators experienced in the building trades who were either African American or Latino.

Throughout the spring and early summer of 2005, the coordinators made presentations in California high schools, with a focus on schools with heavy minority populations in Central Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Long Beach, Oakland, Richmond and Berkeley.

Their basic message to students, teachers and guidance counselors was: stay in school and prepare yourself for a construction apprenticeship and you will be on a career path that provides good wages, health insurance and retirement benefits. What’s more, they were told, construction apprenticeship is an earn-as-you-learn program. Instead of paying to attend college, apprentices get paid to learn their craft.

The response from students and high school faculty was tremendous. Many students and faculty alike had never heard of the joint apprenticeship programs, which in the past has sometimes been referred to as “America’s best-kept secret.”

When the grant money was depleted last June, it was clear that it had been successful, and that there was much more to do. Fortunately, in December 2005, the California Employment Development Department (EDD) awarded a grant to continue and expand the program, which is called Building California Construction Careers (BC3) www.buildingc3.com. The new grant will keep the outreach going through November 2006, and will expand it to ROP programs as well as One Stop career centers operated by EDD. Already, the outreach coordinators have scheduled presentations at 13 construction career fairs between now and the end of May.

The BC3 program is only one part of building trades unions’ efforts to reach out to school districts and the communities around them what Superintendent O’Connell called “partnership academies” where “academics are blended with a focus on careers.”

An example of such a partnership is Yerba Buena High School in the East Side Union High School District in San Jose. Under a master agreement signed between the district and the Santa Clara-San Benito Building Trades Council, Yerba Buena High School was created to mentor students in the basic skills of the construction industry. Academy graduates get the standard sequence of college prep courses in math, English and other core subjects. But by the time they graduate, they will also know how to read blueprints, use construction equipment and tools, estimate material costs, and calculate circumference, diameter, area and volume.

It’s too bad that the Bush administration seems totally clueless about how to estimate the circumference, diameter, area and volume of the education problems in America. We’ll just have to get the job done without them.