Women Wanted: Blue-Collar Fields Find New Workforce (CA)

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The share of truck drivers, electricians, plumbers and mechanics who are women recently touched the highest level in at least 25 years

By Sarah Chaney and Eric Morath
April 29, 2019 5:30 a.m. ET

Kenyette Godhigh-Bell dismissed any thought of becoming a truck driver years ago when it appeared too daunting to break into a job where more than 90% of workers are men.

“You’ve got this cowboy-boot wearing, cigarette-smoking, tattooed or whatever white guy’s job,” she recalled. Now Ms. Godhigh-Bell, a 46-year-old black woman in sleek high-heeled boots, regularly pulls her 18-wheeler to Nebraska slaughterhouses so she can pick up beef and chicken for transport to grocery warehouses.

She is among a growing number of women taking jobs in blue-collar roles that have long been-and still are-mostly men, including police officers, construction laborers and electricians. A number of factors are driving the trend, including companies broadening recruiting efforts in a tight labor market to workers being drawn by better-paying jobs to women recognizing they won’t be alone.

The increase has been especially pronounced in transportation and material-moving, a field that includes truck drivers, delivery people and warehouse workers. In 2018, 43% more women worked in that category than in 2000, according to the Labor Department, and those gains accelerated the past five years as the labor market tightened. The overall number of women in the workforce increased about 15% during that time.

The number of women working as security guards, police officers and other protective service jobs also rose more than 40% since 2000. Women working construction jobs has increased 23%.

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Women are increasingly being drawn into blue-collar jobs because the pool of men willing to take those jobs is shrinking, said Gad Levanon, chief economist at The Conference Board. More Americans are pursuing college degrees, leaving fewer willing to take traditional blue-collar jobs.

“That makes recruiting extremely difficult,” he said, adding that companies in blue-collar industries need to go beyond the typical pool of candidates. “Women, in many cases, turn out to be one of those groups.”

The rise of women in majority-male jobs reflects recent labor-force trends: Women have been driving the comeback in working-age labor-force participation, while participation among men ages 25 to 54-long the stalwarts of blue-collar jobs-has lagged behind.

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(Official Page for the 9th Annual National Trades Women Conference)

Opinion: California must invest in workforce to meet housing goals (CA)

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Construction workers are repelled by the sector’s physically demanding work and comparatively low pay

By SCOTT LITTLEHALE
PUBLISHED: April 14, 2019 at 6:10 am

Burdensome regulations and exclusionary zoning are not the only barriers to solving California’s persistent housing crisis.

Even under the rosiest of regulatory scenarios, California’s residential construction industry needs at least 200,000 new workers to produce enough new housing to improve affordability.

But it is struggling to compete for them. Industry leaders often claim it’s because “Young people don’t want to get their hands dirty;” “Parents are pushing college instead of vocational training;” or because “Schools have abandoned shop classes.”

Actually, research shows that the seeds for today’s housing construction labor shortage were planted by the homebuilding industry itself – more than three decades ago.

The last time California produced housing on a scale that state leaders say is needed to boost affordability today was the 1970s. During those years, residential and non-residential construction wage rates were equal. Builders routinely employed apprentices and made binding commitments – often through collective bargaining – to fund skilled trade apprenticeship programs.

During the 1980s, homebuilders refused to renew collective bargaining agreements and began replacing higher skilled crews with lower skilled workers. As land and regulatory costs grew, contractors relied on a strong supply of young men without a college degree and a growing pool of immigrant laborers to offset these burdens by working for less.

Construction labor productivity began to shrink alongside these shifts, but it has taken decades for annual deficits in housing supply to reach a crisis point. Today, we need to double our housing production just to tread water. To boost affordability, we need to produce even more. Either scenario demands more workers.

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Lujan Grisham signs bill invalidating counties’ right-to-work laws (NM)

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Author: Andy Lyman
March 29th, 2019

Supporters of right-to-work legislation in New Mexico were dealt a big blow Wednesday when Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed into law a bill to prohibit counties from passing their own right-to-work laws.

Compulsory union fees in the public sector was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2018, but private sector unions can still require workers to pay union fees. It’s against the law for all unions to require workers to pay dues, but they can collect fees to pay for the wage and benefit bargaining.

With the governor’s signature, House Bill 85-sponsored by Democratic Reps. Daymon Ely of Albuquerque and Andrea Romero of Santa Fe-invalidates resolutions passed, over a span of about 14 months in 10 New Mexico counties and one village, that barred union membership as a condition of employment.

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The bill was a direct answer to a push by right-leaning organizations, led by Americans for Prosperity, to localize efforts that failed to pass the Legislature in 2015. That year, with a majority in the House, Republicans passed a bill that would have made it illegal for employers or labor unions to require workers to join a union as part of the job. That bill never made it past the Democratically controlled Senate.

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Pritzker signs ban on local government ‘right-to-work’ laws (IL)

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By Peter Hancock – Capitol News Illinois
04/12/2019, 04:52pm

SPRINGFIELD – Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Friday signed into law a bill that prohibits local governments from enacting so-called “right-to-work” laws that are aimed at weakening the power of labor unions.

“The Collective Bargaining Freedom Act makes it abundantly clear that we have turned the page here in Illinois,” Pritzker said during a bill-signing ceremony in his statehouse office. “From the start, right-to-work was an idea cooked up to lower wages, slash benefits and hurt our working families. Right-to-work has always meant right to work for less money, and it’s wrong for Illinois.”

The first right-to-work laws in the United States were enacted in the 1940s, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when soldiers were returning home and the U.S. economy was shifting from war production to civilian manufacturing.

Marc Dixon, a sociologist at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, said during an August 2018 interview that different arguments have been used over the years to campaign for the laws.

The first states to adopt them were primarily in the South, he said, where the laws were used to weaken labor unions, especially the Congress of International Organizations, or CIO, which were actively supporting civil rights legislation for African-Americans.

Later, in the 1950s, he said, they were supported by people who claimed certain labor unions embraced communist sympathies or had ties to organized crime.

More recently, supporters have argued for right-to-work laws on the basis of free speech. As more and more blue-collar workers aligned with the Republican Party, supporters have argued that workers should not be forced to join unions that, broadly speaking, tend to support Democrats.

The bill that Pritzker signed Friday came in response to a local ordinance adopted in north suburban Lincolnshire in 2015. It provided that workers could not be compelled to join a labor organization as a condition of employment within the village.

A U.S. District Court judge struck down that law in 2017, ruling that federal law allows only states to regulate collective bargaining. And in March 2018, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision. But other federal circuits have ruled that local governments may enact local right-to-work laws, making the issue ripe for a U.S. Supreme Court review.

Asked about that during the bill-signing, Pritzker said he is confident the new Illinois law would be upheld.

“The law as it is does not allow a state to hand this responsibility down to local communities,” he said. “This bill actually just establishes what is the law today, so I believe that that would be moot, essentially, at the Supreme Court.”

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In Illinois, GCs could be on the hook for subs’ unpaid wages (IL)

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AUTHOR – Kim Slowey
PUBLISHED – April 2, 2019

Dive Brief:

  • The Illinois House of Representatives this month passed an amendment to the state’s Wage Payment and Collection Act that could make general contractors responsible for the wages of their subcontractors’ employees. The state Senate will now take up the bill.
  • The liability for a subcontractor’s unpaid wages would lie with the direct contractor – the company in contract with the owner – even if the direct contractor has paid the subcontractor in full.
  • The law as proposed would also apply to lower-tier subcontractors and cover fringe and benefit payments owed to third parties on behalf of employees. Just as in most other civil actions, the direct contractor’s property could be seized in order to raise the money necessary to pay back wages and benefits.

Dive Insight:

In addition to wages and benefits, the direct contractor would be responsible for interest on those payments, but not fines and penalties. The proposed regulation would give direct contractors the right to examine the records of subcontractors and lower-tier subcontractors in the course of the project to ensure that they are paying their employees.

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Such legislation can give state officials extra teeth in pursuing payment for those workers left in the lurch by unscrupulous contractors. In California, where GC’s liability for subs’ unpaid wages was enacted for contracts signed on or after Jan. 1, 2018, officials have been aggressive in addressing wage theft violations.

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Associated Builders and Contractors, Eastern PA Chapter, Inc. et al v. County of Northampton

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“Four municipalities recently passed responsible contractor ordinances which specify certain criteria that a contractor must satisfy to be eligible to perform work valued over a certain monetary threshold for those municipalities. … the ordinances’ require… that all bidders on qualifying public works projects participate in a so-called “Class A Apprenticeship Program” … expense of their nonunion competitors and taxpayers. The plaintiffs … arguing that the apprenticeship-program-participation requirement is not rationally related to any legitimate government purpose.

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…the court agrees with the defendants that ERISA does not preempt the ordinances because they do not “refer to” or have a “connection with” ERISA-covered plans … and even if they did, the market participant exception would preclude preemption here.

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Infrastructure Investment Must Create Good Jobs for All

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Center for American Progress
April 22, 2019 at 9:03 AM

Advancing a large-scale plan to rebuild America’s crumbling roads and bridges is at the top of many federal lawmakers’ 2019 agenda…

Equally important, lawmakers must ensure that any major infrastructure investment also helps secure the nation’s long-term prosperity. This means that the jobs supported by the plan must pay fair wages, provide good benefits and a voice on the job, and offer American workers from all walks of life a pathway to the middle class.

Over the past century, pro-worker lawmakers have sought to uphold the basic guarantee that government spending will create good jobs. This has been accomplished through a variety of measures-such as prevailing-wage and benefits laws that ensure workers receive fair compensation, as well as protections to prevent discrimination, support equal pay, and ensure that workers are able to exercise their right to form unions. Yet it is far from guaranteed that the jobs created through the infrastructure plan will be good ones.

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Without adequate job quality protections, jobs funded through any new infrastructure investments could be of low quality, pay substandard wages, provide too few opportunities for advancement-particularly for women, people of color, and other historically disadvantaged communities-and do little to correct the decades long problem of stagnating U.S. wages.

Weak job standards not only harm American workers but also put responsible businesses that pay fair wages and respect employees at a competitive disadvantage. Moreover, research finds that when corporations receiving government contracts pay poverty wages or violate workplace laws, they often deliver poor-quality products to taxpayers and require taxpayers to bear hidden costs through federal and state governments’ provision of services to supplement workers’ incomes, such as Medicaid, nutrition assistance, and refundable tax credits.

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Opinion: Union membership fixes wage disparity

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Ron Bieber
Published 11:00 p.m. ET
April 9, 2019

The disparity in the wage gap between CEOs and working people continues to grow to obscene levels in our country. It wasn’t always this way. In 1965, the gap between CEO and workers’ pay was 20 to 1. However, this ratio exploded in the decades that followed, climbing to a 343-to-1 ratio by the year 2000. It has remained above the 300-to-1 level since then.

If you happen to be a working woman, the wage disparity is even worse.

Last week marked Equal Pay Day. This annual observance was started to raise public awareness of the pay gap between men and women. It is commemorated on the date that symbolizes how far into the current year a woman has to work in order to earn what a man earned in the previous year.

All working people in this country deserve a raise, but if you are a working woman, the need is that much greater. The best answer to address this inequality is to have strong, vibrant unions to allow workers the freedom to collectively bargain for better working conditions.

Inequality in any manner is wrong, but to address women’s workplace inequality, Susan B. Anthony said it best over 100 years ago when she said “Join the union, girls, and together say Equal Pay for Equal Work.”

The labor movement built America’s middle class. When working men and women exercised their freedom to join in union, they demanded a fair return for their work and better working conditions. It’s no coincidence that as unions have been under attack in recent years by elected officials and corporate special interests, the middle class has been shrinking, and wages for working people have been stagnant.

This erosion of worker’s collective voice has been used to manipulate the economic rules to benefit the wealthiest 1% and CEOs, hence the growing disparity between CEO and workers’ pay.

Union workers also benefit from the nondiscrimination policies unions fight for in our collective bargaining contracts to protect all working people.

(Read More)

Prevailing wage law passed after Alabama workers built Northport VA

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By James T. Madore
Updated May 3, 2019 6:00 AM

The Northport VA Medical Center gave rise to the federal law stipulating that the prevailing wage be paid on federal building projects, according to historians and federal records.

The use of an out-of-state contractor and workers to construct the local hospital in the 1920s led Rep. Robert L. Bacon (R-Westbury) to propose what became the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931. The act is still in force, though it has been amended through the years. The hospital was in Bacon’s district.

Speaking at a 1927 congressional hearing, Bacon said several New York State contractors were outbid for the hospital’s construction because they included the state’s prevailing wage in their bids, which the successful bidder, from Alabama, had not done.

The out-of-state contractor “brought some thousand nonunion laborers from Alabama,” Bacon said. “They were herded onto this job, they were housed in shacks, they were paid a very low wage.”

He continued: “It seemed to me that the federal government should not engage in construction work in any state and undermine the labor conditions and the labor wages paid in that state. …The least the federal government can do is comply with the local standards of wages.”

Bacon’s bill languished until it was sponsored in the Senate by John Davis (R-Pennsylvania), a former labor secretary under three presidents, including Herbert Hoover. The bill was signed into law by Hoover in 1931.

More recently, opponents of the prevailing wage, such as columnist George F. Will, have asserted Bacon was upset because some of the workers on the Northport hospital’s construction were black. But neither he nor Davis spoke of race in the period leading up to the legislation’s overwhelming adoption, according to congressional records.

“For Bacon, the issue was not race,” economists Hamid Azari-Rad and Peter Philips said in “The Economics of Prevailing Wage Laws” (Ashgate, 2005). “The issue was that both black and white workers from Alabama were being paid very much less than the wage scale prevailing in New York.”

The original hospital buildings are no longer in use and will be demolished next year, a VA spokesman said.

(See Article)

Mail haulers in Alabama owed $329,057 in back pay (AL)

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Posted Apr 22, 5:03 PM
By Leada Gore

A Florida-based contractor will pay back wages and benefits to postal delivery personnel in Montgomery.

The payment comes after an investigation into St. Augustine, Florida-based Postal Fleet Services Inc. by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division.

Postal Fleet Services will pay $329,057 in back wages and benefits to 53 employees for violations of requirements of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act and the McNamara-O’Hara Service Contract Act, the labor department said.

“No federal contractor should gain an economic advantage by paying employees below the prevailing wages and fringe benefits their contract requires,” said Wage and Hour Regional Administrator Juan Coria. “Federal service contracts spell out employers’ responsibilities when they bid on these jobs. Violations like these can be avoided.”

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