OFCCP NPRM Announcement Re: Affirmative Action

"Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) would revise 41 CFR part 60-1 and 60-4 by removing outdated regulatory provisions, proposing a new method for establishing affirmative action goals, and proposing other revisions to the affirmative action requirements that reflect the realities of the labor market and employment practices in the construction industry today."

----------------------------------------------------------------- DOL/OFCCP

RIN: 1250-AA01

Publication ID: Fall 2013

Title: Construction Contractors' Affirmative Action Requirements
Abstract: The regulations implementing the affirmative action obligations of construction contractors under Executive Order 11246, as amended, were last revised in 1980. Recent data show that disparities in the representation of women and racial minorities continue to exist in on-site construction occupations in the construction industry. This Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) would revise 41 CFR part 60-1 and 60-4 by removing outdated regulatory provisions, proposing a new method for establishing affirmative action goals, and proposing other revisions to the affirmative action requirements that reflect the realities of the labor market and employment practices in the construction industry today.
Agency: Department of Labor(DOL)	Priority: Other Significant
RIN Status: Previously published in the Unified Agenda	Agenda Stage of Rulemaking: Proposed Rule Stage
Major: No	Unfunded Mandates: No
CFR Citation: 41 CFR 60-1; 41 CFR 60-4 (To search for a specific CFR, visit the Code of Federal Regulations.)
Legal Authority: sec 201, 202, 205, 211, 301, 302, and 303 of EO 11246, as amended; 30 FR 12319; 32 FR 14303, as amended by EO 12086

Legal Deadline:  None

Timetable: Action Date FR Cite NPRM  04/00/2014

Regulatory Flexibility Analysis Required: Undetermined	Government Levels Affected: None
Federalism: Undetermined
Included in the Regulatory Plan: No
RIN Data Printed in the FR: No
Related RINs: Previously reported as 1215-AB81
Agency Contact: Debra A. Carr  Director, Division of Policy, Planning, and Program Development  Department of Labor  Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs  Room C3325, 200 Constitution Avenue NW.,  Washington, DC 20210  Phone:202 693-0103  TDD Phone:202 693-1337  Fax:202 693-1304  Email: ofccp-public@dol.gov

Repost: Atlanta council passes community benefits plan, clears path for construction

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

By Katie Leslie

Dec. 3, 2013

The Atlanta City Council unanimously passed a controversial plan for spending millions on neighborhoods near the future Atlanta Falcons stadium, clearing the way for the city to issue $200 million in bonds for stadium construction.

The community benefits plan was approved after months of tense negotiations between city officials and residents and is essentially a $30 million wish-list for the poverty-stricken communities most affected by the stadium — English Avenue, Vine City and Castleberry Hill.

The plan needed the council and Mayor Kasim Reed’s approval before city officials can issue bonds, backed by hotel-motel taxes, for stadium construction. The $1.2 billion Atlanta Falcons stadium is scheduled to open in 2017.

Despite months of talks, some residents have criticized the community benefits process as rushed and incomplete. They’ve repeatedly said they worry the money won’t be delivered and isn’t enough to make a difference. “I can’t say that it’s really good and it fulfilled what we would hope it would do because it hasn’t,” said Yvonne Jones, who serves on the community benefits committee and is chair of a neighborhood planning unit. “It just has not panned out to be in the best interest of the community.”

But English Avenue resident Makeda Johnson — who also sits on the committee which helped create the plan — called for the council to pass the legislation and praised the process as inclusive. “We worked very diligently. We worked very hard, and we’re here to stay in that process to the end,” she told council members before the vote.

Reed has said the $30 million is just one pot of money headed to those neighborhoods. The mayor appeared at the committee’s final meeting last week and said the city has applied for a $250 million housing grant and will spend tens of millions on infrastructure improvements. “I wanted to address this notion that we think we’re going to solve this with $30 million,” he said, recalling that more than $100 million has been spent in the area over the course of the past two decades. “As opposed to doing it over 10 and 20 years, we’ll be able to do it over four, six, eight and 10.” “It’s not $30 million we’re going to end up leveraging,” he continued. “It’s going to be far more than that.”

The community benefits committee doesn’t have the authority to direct how the money will be spent. Instead, the plan offers suggestions for projects to address environmental impacts, traffic congestion, public safety concerns and potential gentrification. Suggestions include a business incubator, childcare programs, land banks, affordable housing programs and more.

Organizations, developers and business owners whose projects fall within the plan’s parameters must apply to Invest Atlanta for funding. Invest Atlanta, the city’s economic development arm, oversees $15 million in funds from the Westside tax allocation district that must go to brick and mortar projects. The other $15 million — geared toward human services projects — will come from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation and has a separate application process.

Deborah Scott, head of Georgia Stand-Up, successfully pushed for the council to amend legislation creating an advisory group for workforce development and job training programs. That committee will make recommendations for how to support these efforts in the communities. “If we can get a good couple of nuggets in there, that’s the goal,” she said before the meeting.

Still, Scott – whose group was an original proponent of a community benefits package — said she was concerned that residents have little recourse should funds not find their way to communities as the legislation requires. “If they don’t do what they say, there’s no claw-back,” she said.

Running underneath the discussions is a current of distrust. Residents worry they don’t have adequate say in how funds are ultimately directed toward their communities. And city officials are loathe to award money to organizations that have a history of under-performing. More than $100 million has been spent on the neighborhoods since 1989 with little to show for it, city officials have said.

Tensions have flared throughout the months of meetings as residents called for the benefits package to be an agreement instead of plan. The negotiations erupted in anger in recent weeks when residents learned the benefits package was introduced as legislation to the council before it had officially been approved by the community benefits committee.

At the time, Councilman Michael Julian Bond, who introduced the bill, said it was a procedural move to place the legislation on the calendar before the year’s end, but was not the final document.

The benefits committee later approved the final plan. “I know we’ve disagreed during this process, (but) the city has put millions of dollars in trying to attempt to turn this community around,” Bond said Monday. “And we’re not going to walk away from that investment just because we pass this resolution today.”

Repost: Massachusetts Building Trades face long diversity odds

(Photo Courtesy of Building Pathways)

by Martin Desmarais | 12/4/2013, 11:34am

Increasing the numbers of blacks, Latinos Asians and women in the construction industry and the building trades is an uphill battle, with thousands of workers entering each year and the established diversity programs helping a small number so far, but Massachusetts trades organizations say they are committed to the fight.

Mayor-elect Marty Walsh touted his own effort — Building Pathways, a building trades pre-apprenticeship program serving low-income residents of the Greater Boston area.

The program, which he launched while he served as head of the Building and Construction Trades Council of the Metropolitan District, was designed to help Boston residents, with a focus on women and people of color, learn the skills and receive the credentials to enter building trades apprenticeship programs.

With over 20 different trades and several dozen apprenticeship programs throughout the state, Building Pathways aims to help its students find the right career direction.

Launched in 2011, the six-week skills training, assessment and placement program has had five training cycles with 70 graduates, 95 percent of whom are women and minorities. According to Building Pathways statistics, 85 percent of the graduates have been placed in apprenticeship programs. The last class of 16 participants graduated last month, all of whom were low-income minority Boston area residents, including 10 women.

While Walsh has received plaudits for his diversity efforts, the numbers are just a tiny fraction of the workers who enter the building trades on a yearly basis. According to the Massachusetts Building Trades Council, almost 6,500 workers were enrolled in both union and non-union apprenticeship programs last year — with unions spending close to $30 million to recruit and train new workers. Comparably, Building Pathways has graduated 70 over three years.

Walsh says he recognizes that the Building Pathways program is not going to single-handedly diversify the building trades industry overnight, but he says it is an extremely important program for what it is attempting to do and that it can serve as a model for a way to increase diversity.

He also points out that the only reason the program has had any success at all is because the different building trades are behind the efforts and have guaranteed placement of its graduates — they want to increase diversity.

“All of them are very much into it,” Walsh said. “That was the key to this program.

“It is the only program of its kind that is successful,” he added. “It has been very, very effective.”

Despite their professed commitment to diversifying their ranks, none of the union or non-union building trades organizations would disclose the demographics of their workers.

Frank Callahan, president of the Massachusetts Building Trades Council, says the problem is not about a requirement to track diversity, the challenge is so many different unions and organizations that are run separately and have their own bylaws and charters.

“It is difficult on a whole number of fronts,” Callahan said. “I get frustrated about it myself.”

Callahan says he believes the building trades are sincere in their diversity efforts.

“I go out to the union halls, I see the diversity in members,” he said. “It is something that the building trades have been committed to for quite some time.”

District 7 City Councilor Tito Jackson says the unions will have to disclose numbers if they want to make progress on diversifying.

“We know the building trades don’t reflect the population of the city of Boston,” he said. “We need to make sure we’re being thoughtful and deliberate about how we diversify the building trades. We have to be able to measure our gains against a baseline.”

While the Massachusetts building trades continue their efforts without numbers to illustrate the cause, other states that have made pushes for diversity in the trades have estimated numbers — and the results do not reflect much improvement.

A report out of Philadelphia, which cites numbers from the Office of Housing and Community Development collected from 2008 to 2012, found that the makeup of the union members in the building trades by the end of this period were 99 percent male, 76 percent white and 67 percent suburban residents. This number is only union members — non-union numbers have not been recorded — so it may not reflect the true diversity of the building trades workforce.

But the report findings demonstrated that even after Philadelphia officials pushed for diversity there was little impact on the unions that lead the way in the industry.

The National Black Chamber of Commerce was quick to jump on the implications of the report, releasing to the media an open letter in July to U.S. Representative Marcia Fudge, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus.

“We are very disturbed that elected officials as well as civil rights organizations have this cordial relationship with construction unions. Construction unions have consistently discriminated against black workers and contractors,” the letter stated. “Ninety-eight percent of all black construction firms are nonunion. There is a reason — if they join a union the union will manage their employees and thus never hire them for work. The end result is the business being void of any black workers and the former black employees will soon be unemployed.”

The letter also concluded: “These construction unions are a prime contributor to black unemployment.”

Municipal officials in the Maryland, Virginia and the Washington D.C. metro area have also made a push for diversity in the building trades, but like in Massachusetts, there is little data to back up what is actually happening.

While the numbers of minorities in the Massachusetts building trades workforce is small, the increased number of construction projects in Boston has created an opportune time for all parties involved to really target the diversity issue in the Massachusetts building trades.

“Boston is No. 2 in the nation for construction right now, so we are really booming,” said Mary Vogel, executive director of the Construction Institute and program manager for Building Pathways. “This is the opportunity to make sure all of our construction workforce reflects our neighborhoods. Women, in particular, are underrepresented in our industry and we want to make sure they have an opportunity to get these kind of careers.”

View the original article at http://baystatebanner.com.

Repost: Women finding new job opportunities in field of construction

Another article that agrees that tradeswomen are the answer to the projected labor shortages in construction.

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(CBS News) BURLINGTON, Vt. -- Just three percent of women work in construction, but now there's an unprecedented opportunity to get more of them into the trades. The average construction worker is in his 40s and 50s and getting closer to retirement.

Amy Judd / CBS News

"Seventy-five percent of owners say they face labor shortages," says Tiffany Bluemle, who runs Vermont Works for Women, which trains girls and women in nontraditional trades. "So why would you not deliberately recruit 50 percent of the population for the jobs that you have?"

Amy Judd, a college graduate, picked up a hammer 15 years ago when she could not find a job teaching.

"It had never occurred to me that I would want to be a carpenter," Judd says. "It took me 80 swings to finally actually hit the nail, but when I did, that was my light bulb moment."

The economy is expected to add nearly 200,000 carpenters by 2020.

"I don’t think it's made clear for women in high school to say, 'Hey, this is an option for you,'" says Sylas Demello, an electrician apprentice. "You can go into the trades. You don't have to go to college. You can be an electrician, you can be a carpenter, you can be a mason. You can do all this kind of stuff."

Last year, the Labor Department allocated close to $2 million in grants for women in "nontraditional" occupations like construction.

"It's not always necessarily wearing a tool belt, carrying heavy things," Judd says. "If you like just being creative, or designing things, or problem solving, you can make a really good livable wage."

The average wage for someone working in construction is $26 an hour. Amy Judd now has her own business. Half of her eight employees are women.

© 2013 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

View the original article at http://www.cbsnews.com/.