Updated federal grant guidance will help create good jobs

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

Bart Sheard
June 28, 2024

Recently, the Biden-Harris administration issued important updates to the Office of Management and Budget’s Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance, also known as the “Uniform Grants Guidance,” which sets parameters for how states and localities, and others, can spend federal money and award it to private entities.

These updates streamline and clarify requirements that will give state and local governments more opportunities to ensure federal funds are used efficiently while also advancing specific community goals and initiatives like good jobs, equity in recruitment and hiring, environmental sustainability, and uninterrupted delivery of services.

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Project Labor Agreements are key to our clean energy transition

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

Project Labor Agreements, or PLAs, enable contractors to know, definitively, what their costs will be, and typically include language that eliminates the risk of strikes, lockouts, or other labor disruptions.

By Marc Poulos Jun 8, 2023, 2:15pm EDT

A large-scale American energy transition is upon us. The Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law in 2022 by President Joe Biden, allocates nearly $400 billion for new energy projects, including solar, wind, carbon capture and sequestration, hydrogen, nuclear and more.

It represents what politicians in both parties have long suggested was the key to American energy independence: an “all of the above” strategy.

That is, if we can deploy the sufficiently skilled workforce to build, maintain and operate these facilities.

So how do we do it?

First, we need to acknowledge that for all of their environmental risks, America’s legacy fossil fuel sector has produced a largely sustainable workforce model. The industry long ago recognized the importance of partnership with skilled trade unions to attract, train and retain the skilled workforce it needed. Not surprisingly, U.S. government data has found that legacy energy projects typically feature two to three times the level of union density as renewable projects.

Another study, analyzing the energy industry in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota, found that clean energy projects were simply not competitive in the labor market relative to their legacy industry peers, and increasingly reliant on lower-skilled workers from out-of-state to build projects.

To its credit, the Inflation Reduction Act has recognized the importance of job quality and local workforce development as central tenets of America’s clean energy transition. Most of the tax incentives linked to new project development require minimum labor standards, including prevailing wages and apprenticeship utilization.

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Columbus council creates advisory committee for diversity hiring on construction projects

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New panel to recommend city diversity targets on union construction projects costing over $5 million

Bill Bush | The Columbus Dispatch
Nov. 15, 2022

The Columbus City Council on Monday created a nine-member committee designed to make recommendations on adding goals for hiring female, minority and local workers on larger city construction projects that utilize “project labor agreements,” which are pre-hire agreements with trade unions.

The new Community Benefits Agreement Advisory Committee will make nonbinding recommendations to the mayor on when such inclusion goals should be sought from construction companies and labor unions. But it doesn’t appear the city will have to worry about unwelcome proposals: four of the nine members will represent the mayor’s office or various departments under the mayor, while the fifth and deciding member will represent City Council.

The other four committee members will represent trade unions and “groups historically underrepresented” in the construction industry, the ordinance says.

The committee can also review plans and make recommendations on how newly constructed facilities get used, and on mitigation of the effects of construction on the neighborhood. It can make recommendations on dedicating green space, sports courts and occasional uses of the new space for art or youth programming, the ordinance says.

“This new chapter will promote a diverse workforce, efficient construction timelines, greater consideration of environmental impacts, and overall community benefits related to large city construction projects and renovation projects,” Council member Rob Dorans, who is employed as an attorney for a labor union, said during the meeting.

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