Biden-Harris Administration Roadmap to Support Good Jobs
The Biden-Harris Investing in America Agenda is sparking a manufacturing, construction, and clean energy renaissance across the country. To help ensure America’s workers can access the good jobs created by historic new investments, the Administration is aligning on a whole-of-government effort, the Roadmap to Support Good Jobs. The purpose of this collaborative vision is to build our workforce by ensuring every American—whether they go to college or not—will have equitable access to high-quality training, education, and services that provide a path to a good career without leaving their community.
To accomplish the President’s vision of growing our economy from the bottom up and middle out, we will strengthen and expand our workforce by partnering with employers to provide opportunities for good-paying, family-sustaining jobs across the country. The President’s historic investments in a future Made in America will create millions of jobs rebuilding our infrastructure, supply chains, and manufacturing here at home, through the American Rescue Plan (ARP), Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), CHIPS and Science Act, and Inflation Reduction Act. Breaking down longstanding barriers that have left many on the sidelines, including women and people of color, is not just an historic opportunity—it’s an economic necessity.
To meet this moment, we must ensure students and workers at all stages of life have equitable access to education and training for good jobs in their communities. At the heart of this effort is ensuring the full range of our education and training systems, including middle and high schools, community colleges, community organizations, unions, and more, work in lockstep with employers to prepare and place millions of students and workers from all backgrounds in sustainable quality jobs across critical sectors—including clean energy, semiconductor manufacturing, construction, healthcare, information technology, education and child care, and biotechnology.
The roadmap focuses on four priorities: 1) connecting people to good jobs; 2) ensuring we have the skilled, diverse workforce for our transformational investments; 3) boosting education and training efforts so every community can meet its foundational labor needs; and 4) creating good quality, family-sustaining jobs, including union jobs.
In its first two years, the Biden-Harris Administration has already taken historic steps in these four areas, with provisions to strengthen our workforce built into the President’s signature legislation, which can help serve as demonstrations to build off in future initiatives. Today, the White House is announcing a series of actions to build on that progress that will connect American workers to good-paying jobs and make sure no community is left behind.
1. Connecting People to Good Jobs: To achieve the President’s goals, we must channel the full skills and talents of all our people. The Administration is committed to ensuring all people can find and keep quality jobs in their communities and that companies can find the best talent. That means expanding free and affordable job training opportunities such as Registered Apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship; ensuring that wherever possible, federal funds support services (such as child care) that help Americans enter and remain in the workforce; and encouraging employers to hire workers based not on the degrees they have, but the talent and skills they possess.
Actions to achieve these goals include:
- The Department of Labor (DOL) will award $85 million in competitive and formula grants to states to better support state Registered Apprenticeship capacity, while also driving system capacity and readiness. DOL will also engage in rulemaking to build a modern and more navigable national apprenticeship system.
- The Department of Transportation (DOT) will build on recent guidance and help states and other partners understand how they can use flexible transportation funding—including annual highway formula funds, currently $48 billion under BIL—for workforce development services that connect people to jobs on projects, such as transportation assistance, child care, and other supportive services.
- The Department of Commerce (DOC) will launch its new Recompete Pilot Program, awarding $200 million in grants to persistently distressed communities to support job creation, evidence-based workforce interventions, and long-term economic development.
Key actions to date:
- Promoted worker-centered sectoral training strategies through the American Rescue Plan’s $500 million Good Jobs Challenge, providing training and credentials to get more workers into in-demand jobs in fields such as health care, clean energy manufacturing, and infrastructure.
- Scaled and expanded Registered Apprenticeships to provide earn-while-you-learn opportunities by investing a historic $285 million in fiscal year (FY) 2023, proposing $335 million in the FY 2024 budget, and encouraging Registered Apprenticeships through Federal grants and contracts. Launched the Apprenticeship Ambassadors Initiative to amplify the Registered Apprenticeship model with private- and public-sector employers and took bold action to quickly scale apprenticeship in critical sectors like cybersecurity.
- Released nearly $23 million in American Rescue Plan funds to develop and establish new primary care residency programs in underserved and rural communities.
- Invested in career opportunities for justice-involved, youth, and other underserved workers—including through $115 million through 2023 appropriations for the Reentry Employment Opportunities program, $65 million for Strengthening Community Colleges training grants, and $105 million for YouthBuild.
- Reduced barriers that limit workers’ access to good jobs, including proposing a ban on non-compete agreements covering nearly all American workers, and expanding opportunities in Federal service for people without four-year degrees through skills-based hiring.
2. Preparing Workers for Our Transformational Investments: The Administration has made major investments through the ARP, BIL, CHIPS, and the Inflation Reduction Act that will create new jobs in sectors vital to economic and national security such as advanced manufacturing, cybersecurity, climate resilience, and electrification. The success of these historic investments, and the building of a sustainable, resilient economy for every community, depends upon the Nation’s education and training systems adapting to emerging needs in these growing sectors. In particular, we need to ensure schools and colleges, unions, non-profit organizations, and governments at every level are collaborating with employers to meet our economy’s needs and bring in workers traditionally underrepresented in these fields. To that end, the Administration is taking action to convene employers, labor unions, and workforce development organizations to develop high-quality education and training standards, portable credentials, and labor-management partnerships to ensure a diverse, skilled workforce and good jobs in critical supply chains. We are expanding career-connected learning strategies for youth, including work-based learning, college credit, and industry credentials; and maximizing use of federal workforce investments, including new Inflation Reduction Act clean energy tax incentives for projects employing Registered qualified apprentices from Registered Apprenticeship programs and training funds in BIL and CHIPS.
Actions to achieve these goals include:
- DOC will award $500 million through its Tech Hubs program to accelerate the growth of select U.S. regions so that they become globally competitive in emerging technologies. This will include building the workforce needed to support innovation.
- DOT will announce $1.7 billion in funding for bus and bus facilities grants. The program gives additional consideration to applicants with a strong plan for creating good-paying jobs and Registered Apprenticeship programs that include supportive services. Transit agencies moving to zero-emission fleets may request up to 5 percent of the grant for workforce development and supportive services to help current workers update their skills and train new hires.
- The Department of Energy (DOE) will invest $150 million in BIL funds to expand its Industrial Assessment Center (IAC) Program, increasing pathways for workers into high-quality clean energy jobs and supporting small and medium-sized American manufacturers. The IAC Program will form new partnerships with community colleges, trade schools, and union training programs, offering hands-on experience for engineers-in-training while helping manufacturers save energy, reduce costs, increase productivity, and boost competitiveness.
Key actions to date:
- Announced $80 million in Building Pathways to Infrastructure Jobs grants to train jobseekers in advanced manufacturing; information technology; and professional, scientific, and technical services occupations that support the renewable energy, transportation, and broadband infrastructure sectors. The grants from the Department of Labor (DOL) will fund partnerships between employers and the public sector to develop, strengthen, and scale promising and evidence-based training models in in-demand occupations. DOL intends to make a total of approximately $200 million available for Building Pathways to Infrastructure Jobs grants over multiple rounds of funding.
- Invested more than $40 billion in workforce efforts through ARP funds to strengthen and expand our workforce, including efforts to train workers for in-demand jobs in fields from healthcare to clean energy manufacturing to infrastructure. This includes major investments of ARP State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds—with state and local governments making 3,500 workforce investments worth $11 billion.
- Secured commitments to equitable workforce development from more than 350 organizations in construction, broadband, and electrification as part of the White House Infrastructure Talent Pipeline Challenge.
- Launched the Battery Workforce Initiative, an industry-driven, government-facilitated sectoral strategy to develop a skilled domestic battery manufacturing workforce.
- Expanded equitable construction training opportunities through a $20 million cooperative agreement with TradesFutures and the National Urban League, which will enroll 13,000 young adults—particularly those from underrepresented communities—in apprenticeship readiness programs in the construction trades.
3. Ensuring Every Community Can Meet Its Foundational Labor Needs: The Administration will continue work to meet both long-term and urgent labor supply needs and improve job quality in sectors foundational to our economy and communities—urban and rural—such as health care, child care, education, and transportation. This effort will require innovating and strengthening education-to-workforce connections nationwide, ensuring that education and training opportunities serve youth, students, and workers at every stage of their career. To that end, the Administration is strengthening high-quality, affordable career pathways to healthcare and teaching jobs so that we have the nurses and teachers we need; improving the quality of vital jobs such as child care, home care, and meatpacking that experience recruitment and retention challenges; and ensuring that supportive services like child care and transportation assistance are integral to our workforce investments.
Actions to achieve these goals include:
Key actions to date:
- Child Care Stabilization funding, already reaching over 220,000 child care programs across the country. These funds are allowing child care providers to retain and rehire workers and continue to support working families. More than one-third of child care programs receiving assistance report that they would have been forced to close permanently without this assistance.
- Nursing Expansion Grant Program to support workforce training programs and address staffing challenges nursing professionals face in the care economy.
- and provided more than $400 million in competitive funding toward programs to develop, recruit, and retain high-quality educators.
- 120 new trucking Registered Apprenticeship programs.
- CHIPS Incentives grants greater than $150 million provide a plan to improve access to high-quality child care for their semiconductor manufacturing and construction workforces.
4. Boosting Job Quality to Promote Recruitment and Retention: The President’s goal is to ensure every job is a good job—consistent with the Good Jobs Principles—meaning they are well-paying, quality jobs, with benefits, safety, stability, and worker voice. Key to this effort are expanding workers’ rights to organize and collectively bargain and enhancing employer responsibility for creating good jobs that people want to keep. To achieve this, we’re working to triple Registered Apprenticeships and pre-apprenticeships to ensure high-quality jobs—including union jobs—are accessible to those previously excluded; and embedding job quality criteria in federal funding opportunities. And we’re ensuring employers: comply with worker protection laws; root out bias, discrimination, and harassment in the workplace; guarantee workers a free and fair choice to join a union; and provide high-quality benefits such as health care and child care.
Actions to achieve these goals include:
- HHS will propose minimum staffing standards at nursing homes—promoting job quality and staffing among care workers—based on its research into the level and type of staffing needed to ensure safe and quality care.
- DOT will issue a primer on local and economic hiring preferences—a key tool for workforce equity enabled for the first time in federal legislation under BIL—including best practices and case studies from across the country.
Key actions to date:
- Created the Good Jobs Initiative to provide critical resources to workers, employers, and governments as they work to improve job quality and equitable workforce development pipelines into good union jobs free from discrimination and harassment. The Good Jobs Initiative has collaborated with BIL-funded agencies to embed equity and good jobs criteria in more than $97 billion of competitive and formula funding.
- Launched the Mega Construction Projects (Megaprojects) Program with participation from BIL- and CHIPS-implementing agencies. The program offers on-the-ground compliance assistance and stakeholder engagement from the earliest stages of a large construction project to remove hiring barriers and ensure a diverse pool of qualified workers—including women, people of color, veterans, and people with disabilities—for jobs in the trades. The program will also provide demographic data on underrepresented workers’ participation in Megaprojects.
- Released guidance for states, local educational agencies, community colleges, and other partners on leveraging Pell Grants and Career and Technical Education (CTE) funds for Registered Apprenticeships.
- Launched a new National Early Care and Education Workforce Center, a $30 million investment to support research and technical assistance for states, territories, Tribes, and communities working to recruit, retain, and support a diverse and highly skilled early care and education workforce.
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