Senate Standing Committee on Labor, Public Employment and Retirement

Senate Labor, Public Employment Retirement Committee will come to order. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here. Senate continues to welcome the public, of course, and has provided access both in person and by teleconference participation as we've been doing in the past for public comment.

For individuals who wish to provide public comment via the teleconference service, a participant toll free number is 877-226-8163. That's 877-226-8163 with an access code of 6948930. 6948930. Again, we certainly welcome participation. We also have representatives who are participating remotely.

When I say representatives, meaning participants, and for those remote participants, please mute your phones or computers as necessary. Please select 'unmute,' of course, before you begin speaking. This is obviously helpful for us. Our IT personnel will put you back on mute when you're done. Once recognized to speak, please make sure you can be seen on the screen. State your name and then that you're ready to address the Committee.

For today's hearing, we will be hearing all the panels of witnesses on the agenda prior to taking any public comment. Once we've heard all of the witnesses, we will have a public comment period for those who wish to comment on the topics on today's agenda.

For members of the public, please limit your comments to one minute. Let me just make a few brief opening remarks, and certainly if anyone else here in terms of Members of the Committee would like to do so, you are welcome to do so before we launch into our first panel.

We all know the struggles that Californians have been living through the last decade due to climate change. California's simultaneous climate crisis, drought, wildfire, flooding, rising sea levels, strains on the energy grid have prevented many challenges. The threat of climate change--of course, for us--is not a theoretical issue, and the state to evidence that has made multibillion dollar climate energy investments to help mitigate its impact.

In fact, last year, the Governor and the Legislature worked on some of the nation's most aggressive climate measures in history with the assistance of our own Committee Member Senator Laird and several others who were involved in a working group, and that was aimed at cutting pollution, accelerating the state's transition to clean energy as one would expect.

With a goal of achieving carbon neutrality no later than 2045 and 90 percent clean energy by 2035, it's imperative that we plan and strategize at all levels of government and with the help of our community stakeholders to make sure we can meet these goals and take advantage of the opportunities it presents. Of course, the federal government has also taken bold actions to address climate change by establishing greenhouse gas emission reduction goals and aiming to achieve a net-zero emissions economy by 2050.

Two landmark bills passed by the federal government--the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Infrastructure Reduction Act--are making investments of nearly 700 billion dollars to help us achieve these goals. With these changes on the horizon and one billion dollar investments heading our way, it's crucial that we take a pause and study the impacts and opportunities this presents for California workers. Of course, we don't mean a pause in terms of slowing anything down in terms of those investments. Quite the opposite.

What do we need in terms of workforce standards and what can we do to make sure that those are applied in a way that actually keeps things moving and perhaps speeds things up? What does the future of our workforce look like? Big question. How do we integrate labor protections that promote quality jobs into these new investments? How do we ensure equity in access and implementation of these resources? Our Committee is attempting to answer some of these questions; frankly, many more.

Our first hearing in March identified and evaluated federal and state dollars, reviewed the procurement process, evaluated what labor standards are attached to those funding streams to ensure that good jobs are created as a result. In our hearing today, we continue the conversation but with a focus on the workers and exploring what we need to do to ensure that we have the workforce needed to build the necessary renewable projects to meet our climate goals.

We want to understand if our apprenticeship pipeline is ready to train the workers we need for these new industries and how California can work with our community partners to recruit, retrain, and retain a green economy workforce with equity at the forefront. If gaps exist--and we believe they do--now is the time to take action to position California to compete for federal funds and create high quality jobs all along the way. With that said, I'd like to again invite our Committee Members to say a few words if they'd like, and we'll proceed in that way. Yes, Senator.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you for framing this conversation and the importance of us focusing on workforce. In 2011, I was part of a movement to build a wage theft--a coalition to end wage theft, and that coalition was formed because there were over 800,000 workers in our counties whose wages were being stolen after they worked their job. So after they presented and provided their labor, their wages were stolen.

Four years later, I was part of the Steering Committee to raise the wage to 15 dollars in Los Angeles County, and we were so excited to get to 15, and folks said, 'oh, it could not be done, 15 dollars,' but we knew at that time that was not enough to really sustain a family of four on an income of 15 dollars an hour, but we did it and we won and we won statewide.

But I want to say that's not a lot to be proud of in terms of our economy where we know a studio apartment in my district costs about 1,800 dollars. I want to say this conversation about workforce is critical because as we are thinking about this new revolutionary green economy, we have to learn from the old economy, the service economy.

And before that, we had an industrial economy that was high road, that was unionized, that created good jobs, that built many of the small neighborhoods, middle class communities that are now struggling in my district. So I'm sharing this because when we say workforce, we're talking about workers.

When we say workers, we're talking about families. When we're talking about families, we're talking about communities, neighborhoods, and so, if we are building this industry for the future, we have to learn from the past, and that means in 2011, we couldn't start trying to reform the service industry with wage theft protections and a fair minimum wage on the back end.

This is an opportunity for us to do this work on the front end, to make sure that every green job, every climate resiliency occupation is one that provides a living wage that sustains families, that builds our communities. I do not want to be here 50 years from now--and I plan to be around--to say that we didn't do it, and then we're trying to chase behind the green sector and put in labor standards and to ensure that every community has an opportunity to benefit. So I'm really excited for this conversation. I think it's much-needed.

It's much-needed to ensure labor standards, but also ensure our communities--particularly our communities of color, Black communities, immigrant communities, women who are leading families--have an opportunity to participate and to participate in fair ways that help to uplift our state. So with that, I look forward to the information and the good work that we will do after this hearing is done together. Thank you.

Thank you, Senator. Senator Laird.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you very much for the mention of last year's efforts and when we were doing the Climate Working Group last year, we had equity and high road labor standards as a key part of everything that we wanted to do, and we came to a high road labor agreement among the diverse members of the Working Group, including figuring out ways to get past some stumbling blocks, like if you're doing well capping and the project is only 70,000 dollars, we figured out how to group the small ones so it was a critical mass to be able to justify some sort of project labor or labor standards on it.

And because we came to an agreement as bills were moving, Senator Durazo amended the entire High Road Labor Standards Agreement into a bill in the Assembly, and it did not survive the Assembly--much to our disappointment--because it was a key part of our package, and so this year, people are breaking it into pieces.

Senator Durazo still has a procurement piece, Senator Becker has a piece, and we're trying to move it so that we still address that issue, but it reflects on the Chair's opening comments because while we want to set the standards and we want to incent the jobs and make sure there's inequity, there has to be a pipeline to doing that, and that's what this hearing is about, is to make sure that we have the adequate pipeline to meet the needs that we are identifying.

And one last thing: this happens to be--these few days in the Capitol--a focus on offshore wind. There's a huge conference. I keynoted it yesterday. I was on a Keynote panel at the Energy Commission the day before. There was a town hall meeting sponsored by the daily newspaper in the San Luis Obispo area last weekend where I spoke, and there were 250 people there, and I had a meeting early this morning with stakeholders of local officials and people of the successful bidders.

And it is at the heart of that discussion as well is how we're going to do this, and so while some of us are out there fighting for the labor standards and fighting for equity, we need to make sure the pipeline is going to provide people to what we are trying to do and so I really salute the Chair for doing this hearing, and I apologize.

I have to go have a talk with the Appropriations Chair in the middle of the hearing about something we all know about, so I will miss some of it, but just thank you, and I look forward to the testimony.

Thank you, Senator, and just a little segue off of that, in agreement with everything we just heard from both Senators, when labor standards sort of came to a halt right at the end of session, remember that the climate investments--we all remember--happened in pretty rapid form the last couple of weeks of the session. Then we go into interim recess and there was a commitment on the part of this Committee--on my part as a Chair and these Committee consultants and staff that you see up here--to not really take a breather and wait till next year.

Going back to what Senator Smallwood-Cuevas said about coming back some years later was our belief that if we didn't quickly turn around and start working again on this issue, that within even a couple of years from now we would find ourselves sort of behind the curve trying to catch up, which doesn't always mean in the outside world outside of these chambers labor strife and such problems, but typically it does, and that isn't good and that isn't healthy for growing the pie and keeping the economy moving the direction we want.

So that was all to say, kudos to the staff here because they just kept working September, October, November. We did Zoom hearings. We did a listening tour. We stayed on top of this as a group. Sunshine Borelli in my office stayed on top of it as well. My Chief of Staffing thinks to where we could get to a point where we would be here today, and of course, in the previous informational hearing and information accountability hearing, why do I say that?

I suspect most of the panelists already could figure that out, that a lot of work went into this, but anyone else who's participating or listening, and just for the record, I want to say we didn't just get the idea to do this a couple of months ago or a couple of weeks ago. This has been a monthslong effort to get to this point today.

So we're eager to get started, and I want to hear from our panelists, and we all want to hear from our panelists, and the first panel is--we are calling it 'Putting California on the High Road.' We have Betty Hung here, I believe, by Zoom. She's a senior advisor to the Deputy Secretary of the United States Department of Labor, so we're very pleased and excited to have her joining us remotely today. Tim Rainey, California Workforce Development Board. Thank you, Tim, for being here, and Eric Rood, DIR Division of Apprenticeship Standards.

We have two more panels after that. The agenda is pretty clear as to what those are about. We'll introduce those folks when we get to them. We're going to try to be efficient. Don't be insulted, please, anyone, during the course of the morning if I ask you to try to wrap up or conclude or we try to redirect or something like that. These hearings are sort of set on infinity. I mean, we could go probably for days.

We're not going to solve all problems or address all issues today, but we do want to--while being efficient--make sure that we probe in a little deeper than we can during a typical policy meeting. So with that, who's going to start? We'll go--is Betty Hung available at this moment? Yes, I see her. Please go ahead. I know we want each of you to make some opening comments. Thank you.

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Senator Cortese, for the introduction, and thank you to the Members of the Committee for inviting me to participate in this hearing today. My name is Betty Hung. I'm Senior Advisor to our Acting Secretary of Labor. As a lifelong Californian myself from the City of Angels, it is especially a pleasure to be with all of you. We're living today through one of the most significant moments in our history.

President Biden and Vice President Harris have delivered historic federal investments, about two trillion dollars that will be distributed to communities across the country as part of the president's vision of growing the economy from the middle out and bottom up.

And thanks to the president's Investing in America agenda, which includes legislation that you all mentioned such as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, our nation has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build America's next generation infrastructure, combat our climate crisis, while also driving innovation, environmental justice, and equity. At the Department of Labor, we focus on two things.

One: making sure that every job created by these federal investments is a good job, and two: making sure that every community has equitable access to these good jobs. To put this in perspective, the federal investments in infrastructure, in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, is actually more than was invested in roads under the Eisenhower Administration when the national highway system was built, but we also know that back then when those good jobs were created, not everyone got them.

The federal investments in science and technology in the CHIPS and Science Act are more than was invested when President Kennedy challenged the country to land a man on the moon. This time around, we want to make sure that women also get to do the science and innovating, and the federal investments in our environment of halting the climate crisis--we've never seen such federal investments before.

And these jobs, a lot of which will be in manufacturing, we are working to make sure that these will be good jobs because history shows that unless we're intentional, they often will not be, and to achieve the promise of these historic federal investments, this will require a diverse, skilled, and ready workforce in states, counties, cities, and tribes across the country. As I mentioned, for us, the keys to this are job quality and equity.

And to make sure that government works for everyone, we have to learn from the past because there have been times when women, people of color, individuals with disabilities, people living in rural communities, justice-impacted workers, and many others have either been on the periphery of past federal investments or just left out altogether. So the Biden-Harris Administration is focused on doing things differently and ensuring that these INVEST in America investments help to create an economy where no one is left behind.

And to do this, we understand the critical importance of expanding and strengthening federal, state, and local partnerships and working in unisons with states like California and local governments to ensure that these federal dollars create good-paying union jobs for communities across the country and for workers in these very communities. To help with this mission, in January of last year, the Department of Labor announced the Good Jobs Initiative.

It's a whole of government effort to improve job quality and equity across our economy, and a cornerstone is to make sure that all of our federal government investments are creating good jobs and creating access to these good jobs for workers who face barriers.

We've entered the Department of Labor into memorandum of understanding with the Departments of Transportation, Energy, and Commerce to make sure that these federal funds focus on many of the things that you all just talked about: job security, family-sustaining wages, fair and safe workplaces, and the ability of workers to exercise their rights to form unions and engage in collective bargaining.

To date, our Department of Labor collaboration with the Departments of Transportation, Energy, and Commerce has directly shaped over 97.4 billion dollars of new investments dispersed from these agencies, including investments that have gone to California. For example, we worked with the Department of Transportation to embed job quality and equity language in the Watsonville-Cruz Multimodal Corridor Program, awarding 30 million dollars for road and pedestrian updates.

The project will include a project labor agreement to promote good-paying jobs with free and fair choice to join a union and identify ways to prioritize local hiring. Caltrans estimates that this project will create over 2,000 jobs for Californians. Another example of our federal, state, local collaboration to create good-paying jobs is the Outer Harbor Terminal Redevelopment Project in Oakland where we have an investment of 36 million dollars.

The project includes a pathway to zero-emissions port, and there's also a PLA that includes hiring goals for local impact areas most likely to experience the adverse effects of port operations, such as traffic and noise. It also includes pathways for workers from the port's local impact area to have access to high-paying construction jobs. These are just two examples of how federal investments, with federal, state, and local government partners working together, are helping to advance job quality, equity, and worker voice in California.

Guiding the work of our Department of Labor is a set of Good Jobs Principles that we at DOL partnered on with the Department of Commerce. You can find these good jobs principles at goodjobs.gov, and I would encourage people to go there to learn more, but I think at essence we believe that good jobs provide stability and security for workers and their families, and employers who provide good quality jobs have a clear competitive advantage in worker recruitment, retention, and productivity.

Good jobs are also essential to more equitable and resilient economy, so to ensure that equity is also at the center--along with job quality of building an inclusive economy--we're working to make sure that these federal investments promote opportunities for historically underserved communities, including Black workers, Indigenous workers, Latino workers, and HPI workers, other workers of color, women, immigrants, people who are justice-impacted, people with disabilities, people in rural communities, LGBTQ plus individuals, veterans, and more.

For example, through the work of our Good Jobs Initiative, several of our sister federal agencies and their grants now do things like incentivize pre-apprenticeships with supportive services such as child care, transportation, counseling, and ongoing career services. Senators, you all just mentioned the pipeline. We believe these pre-apprenticeships are really critical to building those pipelines and equitable pathways into good jobs.

Our sister agencies, also in their grant making, are now promoting registered apprenticeships and encouraging tools such as project labor agreements to help us drive towards more equitable outcomes. I also want to share that the Department of Labor's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, OFCCP, recently launched a Megaproject Program to advance equity in the Construction Trades Workforce on various federally-funded projects, including projects with a climate impact.

This Megaproject Program establishes Equal Employment Opportunity Committees of community stakeholders, including unions, community-based organizations, and local recruitment sources that will meet regularly to remove hiring barriers and promote consideration of a diverse pool of qualified workers, including women of color, women, people of color, veterans, and people with disabilities. One of these ten megaproject sites is the Otay Mesa Project in California.

We're also encouraging the creation of Access and Opportunity Committees across the nation as a key way for project owners, contractors, unions, community groups, and other stakeholders to take proactive steps to promote equal opportunity. These Access and Opportunity Committees are multistakeholder groups that regularly meet to monitor and support compliance with diversity and equity goals on a specific construction project or in a workplace.

These committees are often established by PLAs, community benefits agreements, or other project agreements to ensure that parties to the agreements use their best efforts to increase the representation of local workers and underrepresented workers in the construction industry, and in addition to sharing useful data on the project workforce, these Access and Opportunity Committees can provide a mechanism to bring stakeholders together from across the community to collaborate on solutions.

Our Women's Bureau at DOL is also spearheading efforts to invest in pathways and programs to help women, including women of color, who, as we all know, typically experience the most disparate outcomes. The Women's Bureau recently released five million dollars in funding to support our WANTO Program to provide technical assistance to employers and labor unions to encourage the employment of women in apprenticeable occupations and nontraditional occupations.

We know that women comprise less than four percent of the construction workforce despite being about half of the population, and Black workers represent just six percent of all construction workers compared to 12 percent in the workforce overall. So we know that it will be critical to advance strategies proven to help recruit, train, and retain women, Black workers, other workers of color, and other underrepresented workers in infrastructure and other federal INVEST in America-related careers.

So I just want to share--highlight another example of how federal, state, and local funding is working together to advance job quality and equity. So the Tradeswomen Inc is a current Women's Bureau WANTO grantee and is leading work to get more women into the skilled trades, including direct support to the ValleyBuild Consortium in California's Central Valley.

They're working to increase the recruitment and training of women, and they've actually designed and staffed an all-female pre-apprenticeship training cohort which then leveraged a three million dollar state grant through the Fresno Regional Workforce Board to expand pre-apprenticeship and build greater opportunity for women in the trades.

These efforts are creating the foundation for capacity to scale this work within the U.S. Department of Commerce's Good Jobs Challenge Grant, which distributed 23 million dollars to the Fresno Economic Development Corporation with specific targets for increasing women in manufacturing, construction, finance, and transportations and logistics jobs in the region.

And so this effort is actually also now bolstered by the legislation this body passed to fund the ERiCA or Equal Representation in Construction Apprenticeship Grant Program as ValleyBuild and Tradeswomen Inc were both just awarded in all-girl grants to provide supportive resources like child care and outreach and community building for women, non-binary, and underserved populations entering the skilled trade.

Our Women's Bureau has worked with the White House to feature both of these models: the California's ValleyBuild Model and the ERiCA Program, on webinars for other states to really show that this is a best practice and to provide a roadmap that other states can follow.

Ms. Hung, if we could ask you to wrap up shortly, that would be helpful, although we really want you to stick around for Q&A also. Thank you.

Yes, Senator. Thank you. I also just want to highlight that in terms of the green economy, we also know that the same people who experience the worst effects of the climate crisis also experience poverty jobs, and so at the Department of Labor, we are part of the Biden-Harris Administration's Justice40 Initiative which commits 40 percent of the overall benefits of certain federal investments to flow to disadvantaged communities that are marginalized, underserved, and overburdened by pollution.

And we also through our apprenticeship program, we're investing in states' capacity to prepare for the clean energy sector and ensure equity, for example, with investments such as the State Apprenticeship Expansion Formula grants. I also want to just highlight that we have over 80 million dollars available right now that regions can apply for to develop worker-centered sector strategies to meet emerging workforce needs impacted by the INVEST in America investments.

So with all of this, what are some next steps and how can we enhance our partnership--federal, state, local partnerships--so that this federal funding is really utilized to deliver for workers, and we recognize that states have such an important role to play. I would just highlight just a few things to wrap up.

One is, as I mentioned, we at the federal level are centering job quality, equity, and worker voice in our federal investments, and so as these federal funds flow to California and then to counties and cities across the state, there is an important opportunity to include and attach standards that also provide guidance around job quality, equity, and worker voice, and to provide guidance to local municipalities on the use of these federal funds, right?

To encourage and elevate the use of equity tools such as Access and Opportunity Committees, the importance of data collection, tracking and monitoring so that we can assess whether there are equitable outcomes for underserved, underrepresented workers, and also including things like the importance of supportive services. I would just highlight that the High Road Training Partnership model in California--

All right. Well, thank you for that excellent overview, and we do appreciate you sticking around. I know we will have questions. We're now going to move to Tim Rainey and again, Workforce Development Board, thank you for being here. Appreciate it.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, Senators, great to be here. Martin Luther King said, you can't have social and racial justice without economic justice. And I'm listening to my good friend Betty Hung talk about the incredible work going on at the federal level. And to me, this is anti-poverty work.

A lot of what she described, in fact, of course, the last one that she kind of set me up with on high road training partnerships, a lot of what she described, Otay Mesa, what's going on in Oakland, the Valley Build are all supported by high road training partnerships and high road construction careers projects, which we have all over the state. For the first time in generations, the Federal Government is talking about industrial policy.

This is very exciting for me because I've been around a long time kind of waiting for this moment or maybe preparing for this moment, investing obviously lots of money in infrastructure, but with this intention of impacting employment as a primary purpose, not as a secondary one, but as the primary purpose. And the Biden Administration, as Ms. Hung described, is providing us great tools on high road workforce standards for job quality and equity, but also to meet our climate goals and guidance for delivering those standards.

And she talked about a few project labor agreements and community workforce agreements, which is a PLA with a social benefit built in and community benefits agreements that could be applied either to construction or non construction projects. These kinds of things are what are creating pathways to good jobs for more people who otherwise would have been locked out of the state's great building of its infrastructure and prosperity. Jobs are going to be created, as we've all talked about, in broadband, transit, maintenance, manufacturing, of course, and operations.

But the vast majority of jobs are going to be in the traditional construction trades, primarily through our transportation infrastructure investments. In California, we're expanding high road construction careers. We have regional coalitions of building trades unions, joint apprenticeship programs, community based organizations, schools, community colleges, local workforce boards. In many cases, like in the Valley build example, actually running the project and taking the lead.

We have 11 of these coalitions all over California, in every corner of the state, serving every part of California, creating pathways for marginalized workers in communities, underrepresented groups to some of the best blue collar jobs around. Building trades councils are the ones negotiating project labor agreements on the ground. We could do more as a state to support that local regional work.

As I said, community workforce agreements are built into those increasingly, I don't know of a building trades council around the state that's not building in a social benefit. Oftentimes that's targeted to local hire. That is the mechanism to bring people into the trades, create those pipelines into good quality jobs through preconstruction training that is certified by the building trades. That way we line up to pre-apprenticeship with the state-approved apprenticeship placements in a very direct way. There aren't too many other ways to do it.

This work is employing local workers. When you have targeted hire and you have local hire, it employs local workers to go to work on projects in their communities, putting money in their pockets, which they then spend in their communities, priming the pump. So this has a kind of a virtuous cycle that we can scale up across this state with these federal monies coming in. I was in LA on Friday. Get down there as much as I possibly can.

I was touring Exposition park with the new Director there and the LA/Orange County Building Trades Council. We were talking about the Apprenticeship Readiness Fund. The Lucas Museum, which is an extraordinary thing to see, is going up. It's under a project labor agreement with a community workforce agreement that's pulling new apprentices in from the surrounding community. That's a community that needs it most.

So as we build that Exposition Park, we're going to create more opportunities for people from around that community to get those good, excellent actually, jobs. The LA/Orange County Building Trades Council, it's important to point this out, is partnering with community-based organizations around the region. Anti-Recidivism Coalition is one. I think you've heard about them doing terrific work. Flintridge 2nd Call is actually here.

Skip Townsend is going to talk a bit because what needs to happen to make pre-construction training work are generous supports for people who need to go into that pipeline. Income supports, things like stipends, but also counseling, transportation, childcare is really critical. My colleague at my right, Eric, will talk about that some. It's called the ERiCA Grant, but has nothing to do with his name. That would be just very selfish to do.

There's a good title there, acronym. In Los Angeles, 1260 people have been placed in state approved apprenticeship, not served, placed in apprenticeship just over the last few years. 95% are people of color, 19% of those are women. It's not high enough, but there's a lot of potential to get there. We'll talk more about that. 20% black workers.

And those numbers are really consistent across the state with all 11 of our regional coalitions in the Central Valley, which is Valley Build, San Diego, Imperial County, Inland Empire, all over the state, Sacramento, Bay Area, you know your projects very well in the Bay Area, in the South Bay, incredibly effective. So as we build stuff, offshore wind, utility scale, solar, hydrogen hubs, EV charging, we're going to impact employment.

But as we build lots of stuff, we're going to impact poverty, especially if we embed these high road standards and principles in the way the state puts out its money. Thank you. Can I just say one thing? Because I really wanted to. Senator Smallwood-Cuevas brought up, don't want to be here 50 years from now talking about this same stuff.

50 years ago, in 1967, Martin Luther King was signatory and wrote the forward to a document called 'A Freedom Budget for all Americans', which I think is still resonant today. And the basic objectives included full employment for all who can and want to work, good wages and safe working conditions, employment insurance to support workers between jobs or who need health and family leave, quality training and education for all, good homes for all, quality medicare for all, clean and safe water, air, and environment. Still resonant today.

Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate your overview, and thank you for sharing that. We're now going to move to Eric Rood, DIR, Division of Apprenticeship Standards, who of course, is here in person. Welcome.

Thank you so much. First and foremost, thank you, Betty and Tim, for testifying, and good morning, honorable Senators. Thank you for this opportunity to address you today. My name is Eric Rood. I am the Chief of the Division of Apprenticeship Standards for the California Department of Industrial Relations, and I am the Secretary of the California Apprenticeship Council. The Division of Apprenticeship Standards is dedicated to creating a skilled workforce that can support a climate resilient economy.

As a leader in the green economy revolution, California is investing heavily in sustainable future. The state has set ambitious targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and a skilled workforce is crucial to achieving these goals. Currently, California has over 90,000 active registered apprentices and over 1100 apprenticeship sponsored programs with most apprentices in the building and construction trades. We are proud to note that nearly 70% of apprentices are made up of people of color.

However, we recognize that more needs to be done to ensure equitable opportunities for women and underserved populations. To promote equity and expand opportunities, DAS launched the $25 million Equal Representation in Construction Apprenticeship grants. And I will want to say that my staff came up with that acronym, not me, for the ERiCA grants. These grants aim to offset childcare costs for parents who face barriers for apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship and provide outreach mentoring for women and nonbinary individuals entering the pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship programs.

Project labor agreements and community workforce agreements, as Tim spoke about, are vital tools for the Division of Apprenticeship Standards programs to achieve equity outcomes for underserved populations. These agreements are project specific contracts that set targets that contractors must meet to deliver equity outcomes for underserved populations, including women, nonbinary, justice involved, youth, and veterans. The Division of Apprenticeship Standards has developed a five point plan to increase apprenticeship opportunities with an economic, social, and climate perspective.

I have a few examples of climate focused programs that I would like to share from four of our largest construction apprenticeship programs in the state. The Southwest Carpenters are opening a new state-of-the-art training facility in Santa Maria, which plans to offer the Brother's Keeper pre-apprenticeship program to help underserved groups join the offshore wind industry and other renewable energy projects.

Additionally, the Southwest Carpenters conducted a four week boots program that empowers and assists women considering becoming union carpenters by providing hands on carpentry training. In Northern California, the Nor Cal Carpenters are building training centers in the North Coast region in Humboldt and Del Norte counties. They are working with the Hoopa Tribe Nation to develop training centers that will help build a local workforce for offshore wind. The Nor Cal Carpenters are also actively participating with surrounding school districts to offer opportunities to youth, including establishing the Career Connections Program.

The Nor Cal Carpenters have established a working relationship with the Hoopa Valley Tribe, offering direct entry into their full apprenticeship program, and are actively working to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in their industry. Their Operating Engineers apprenticeship program in Northern Local 3 and Southern California, Local 12, are involved in various aspects of renewable energy infrastructure, including the installation, maintenance, and disassembly of wind turbines and solar fields.

Local 3 and 12 members operate very large cranes with high capacities and boom lengths reaching hundreds of feet long, which can be dangerous without proper training. This Operating Engineer's Joint Apprenticeship Committee program provides certification training for crane operators, rigors, signal persons, and assembly and disassembly directors to promote safety during these operations. Moreover, these programs provide training to numerous equipment operators who are working in the construction of solar fields throughout the state.

These operators run through a rigorous three day process of forklift operations to minimize costly damage to solar components when moving them around the job site and provide a safer work environment for all involved. While I focus on four of our major construction apprenticeship programs, there are numerous other building and construction trades developing apprenticeship programs that support a climate resilient economy and prioritizing recruiting.

These programs include Northern and Southern California laborers and many mechanical trades programs in electrical, pipe fitting, sheet metal and ironwork, and some of the many programs offering opportunities for all Californians. California's dedication to renewable energy and sustainability, combined with its investment in apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship pathways, is resulting in well paying jobs that provide a high quality of life. I will put one of our Certificate of Completions from a building construction trades program with any college four year degree.

Most of the workers within five years are earning six digit salaries with benefits and so it's very important that we have a focus that allows entry for all Californians. I would be happy to reach out to my many apprenticeship coordinators at our next California Apprenticeship Council meeting, which is scheduled the first week of August, to discuss the strategies our building construction trades programs are doing around climate resilient training. So again, thank you for the opportunity to address you today.

Thank you all. We appreciate again you being here and starting this off with really excellent overviews. I think to stimulate some questions and answers here, we probably all came in with a lot more questions than answers. Anyway, I want to turn to my Committee Members, and note that Senator Durazo has joined us. Senator Laird, as promised, had to run off to Appropriations.

He'll be back, as we understand it, in a little while here, but we can go ahead and get into some Q&A. Let me start with Senator Durazo. And Senator, obviously we're trying to stay on time here, but we reserved a couple minutes for you if you want to say anything yourself in terms of overview.

It was noted earlier that your bill in this area, which is in your work, carried over from the end of the last session, is very important to us all here, and Senator Laird highlighted that as part of his comments on the working group. But I want to give you an opportunity not just to do Q&A, but to say anything you might want to say.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm sure everybody's covered it in one way or another. How anxious we all are to keep moving forward on the high road, standard concept to put that much more into tangible things that are statewide, men and women could look forward to. So I won't get into all of that. I do have a couple of questions if I can.

Please.

For Ms. Hung. It's great. I hope you're still on.

Yes. Hello, Senator.

Hi. Good to see you. And good t hear from you. I have a really specific question that has a lot to do with how we use our federal funds and our state funds and our local funds. And we've been grappling with this for many years, since I was at the LA Federation, of how do we address the issue of local hire and federal dollars?

This has really hindered state and local governments to put local and disadvantaged residents to work on infrastructure in their own communities. And we've talked about that, and it's a real impediment to state and local governments. During the Obama Administration, they approved a pilot program to allow grant recipients to use local hire programs, and I believe it has worked well. So I guess my question is, how do we get the current Administration to change the rules so that we can have more targeted, higher programs and really increase the numbers of workers of color, women, veterans, all the groups that we've been talking about today?

It would be an enormous help to us to be able to have the combination of federal, state and local funding.

Thank you so much for the question, Senator. It's wonderful to see you. And thank you also for just your long standing leadership in really advancing equity and job quality to make sure that everyone has a good union job. So to your question, the Biden-Harris Administration is really committed to growing the economy, as I mentioned earlier, from the middle out and bottom up.

And what that entails is also really prioritizing and centering job quality and equity with the $2 trillion that are in federal funds through the bipartisan Infrastructure law, the CHIPS and Science act, and Inflation Reduction Act.

And so we at the DOL, through our Good Jobs Initiative, have been working with our sister agencies to really raise greater awareness and understanding and support for things like project labor agreements, community benefits agreements, and local target hiring. Tools that really help to ensure that workers from those local communities themselves, especially workers from underserved, underrepresented communities, have equitable access to these good jobs. So, in terms of principles and policy level, that is a priority of Administration and of the Department of Labor.

With respect to, I think, some of the more specific details that might be applicable to various local jurisdictions, we would be happy to continue the conversation and to find out more about what can be done.

But I would say as a policy position, really encouraging and wanting to ensure that there are equitable pathways for workers from local communities, especially from underserved, underrepresented populations, to these good union jobs is something that we really care about and that we really, through this federal, state, local partnership, want to collaborate and support states and local communities in being able to actually operationalize that.

Thank you. Senator Durazo, anything else?

Yeah, just one more question, and this could be for anyone or all of you. We have pretty amazing apprenticeship programs in this state with the building trades, and it's obviously been worked on over decades. My question to you is how do we move forward on the non-construction where we have the opportunity to not only direct folks to work in, but we have the opportunity to create jobs in those related industries.

And I've seen numerous charts about the kinds of jobs and careers that could be created. So guess all of your take on how do we integrate into the non-construction areas that I think are way further behind as far as creating jobs with our state investment dollars and tracking those jobs and making sure that the same high road strategy applies.

Senator Durazo, I'll be glad to take from a State of California registered apprenticeship perspective. When I was appointed by the Governor Brown back in 2018, we more than doubled the size of the Division of Apprenticeship Standards to really focus on apprenticeship opportunities outside of our traditional building construction and firefighting apprenticeship programs that we have. Our Firefighting Apprenticeship program is the largest apprenticeship program in the country, and if it was, its own state, would be the 7th most robust apprenticeship program in the country.

Just to reiterate your remarks regarding how the current State of California registered apprenticeship is, we focus on developing a new unit, really focus on business engagement, really looking at a five point plan for us to create regional intermediaries and sector intermediaries modeled after a lot of our building construction trades programs to make it easier for employers to want to utilize the registered apprenticeship program. What we do know is there is a return on investment for employers that choose to go down the road of registered apprenticeship.

And we created a business engagement team that was focused around advanced manufacturing, healthcare, around civil service or public sector apprenticeships. We've been working closely also with our colleagues at government operations and CalHR and State Personnel Board to actually create apprenticeship programs within state civil service because we should be doing the very work that we're asking private employers to do as well. We also are looking to work with various labor unions who create a worker voice that will provide quality jobs. I look at apprenticeship standards.

We've increased since the last six months of 2022. We had a 36% increase in the number of apprenticeship programs in what we call the nontraditional industry apprenticeship sector. So we're really excited. We're focusing on, again, the same values that we have for building construction, that is having an equity piece, ensuring that we work with nonprofits, that we're working with community-based organizations. We're working closely. One program I'd love to highlight is our work with Kaiser Permanente and Dignity Health and with SEIU United Healthworkers.

There's at least six different occupations that we're working with them in that arena. We're also working with various other unions that are in traditional fields to really try to develop these opportunities. And we're convinced for all of our employers out there that this is an opportunity to make them the most competitive, have the most talent. What we do know is apprentices that complete a program are more likely to stay with your company. So you're going to have higher retention. You've invested in these employees.

They do not have huge college debt. Their classroom instruction is paid for, and they're earning a wage. So we can really delve into our lower socioeconomic communities to be able to get great careers within our various nontraditional industry sectors. So thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Senator. Let me pose a couple of questions, and we'll make sure everybody gets an opportunity here. Just no particular order here. So I'll stay on the topic of apprenticeship, since we're talking about that right now. When we talk about the state of apprenticeships in California, you see a lot of different data and statistical stuff around comparisons, just like you do in any other space, public education or whatever.

I've seen numbers that show us having low per capita apprenticeships as a state compared to other states. I don't know if that's true or not. There's, in some sense, no point in dwelling on that if we're here to try to grow apprenticeships and talk about that, growing the pie in general. But could you comment on that. I ask the question more from the standpoint of a call to action if there is one there. Don't want to put anybody on the defensive by asking a question.

Great question. Senator Cortese Chair. I would say that the Governor has really an ambition to grow apprenticeship to serve 500,000 registered apprentices over the next decade. And we're taking that call. I've brought on many of you may know my deputy chief, Adele Burnes, to really focus in on the policy aspect. Through the last budget for this current fiscal year, we created the Apprenticeship Innovation Fund, which will support our apprenticeship intermediary work outside of our traditional apprenticeship programs to help them grow, right?

To be able to focus on recruitment and creating more employers to be involved into the registered apprenticeship model. To your point, as of the end of 2022, we've served about 127,000 registered apprentices since the Governor took office. Of that, California has nearly 19 million workers, I believe, with the last data that I saw. So it's a very small percentage.

It is, for us, really a focus on really selling apprenticeship outside of the areas where there's a requirement. In the construction industry, there's a requirement to employ apprentices. It's part of the public works prevailing wage law. So there's a public works utilization requirement. So projects that are 30,000 or greater require all contractors to make a good faith effort to hire apprentices in that local geographical area. We don't have that same on the nontraditional side.

So what we're doing is we're selling the benefits to say, you're going to have a return of investment, you're going to have more quality workers. Are you experiencing a difficulty hiring positions and various classifications that are of good, that you need to have backfield? And we believe registered apprenticeship is that answer to hit that skills gap that's out there.

Yeah. Just not to pine too much, but it often sounds like, I think, legislatively, like a little bit of what comes first, the chicken or the egg kind of a debate, because we'll hear certain industries say, 'oh, we'd love to hire more apprentices, but we can't find them'. You'll hear some policymakers say, 'go signatory, and you'll have plenty of apprenticeships'. I mean, it's a choice at some level, I suppose.

And I guess part of the question ultimately, is how, if we want to expand and grow apprenticeships, we can't just depend on you without the support of legislation. I think that creates some mandates. My opinion. But please feel free to disagree if anybody wants to. I want to go back to the- Before I see the floor here, I want to go back, and I think this is probably a question for Betty Hung on the equity piece.

One of the challenges I think we've had in California. It's interesting, we have two Southern California legislators here and two Bay Area, Northern California legislators here. And in our own Bay Area caucus, we struggle quite a bit with how to identify the communities of concern.

It's not as easy as perhaps it once was in places like San Jose, California, San Francisco, and so forth, because the communities are so integrated that you will still see a census track, for example, that appears to be or is labeled federally as a community of concern. But when we get into competition, when we get into competition, we're competing against census tracts that are perhaps less integrated demographically, economically, and so forth. And so we feel like we struggle to compete.

How is the Biden Administration approaching that? We've used, for example, you're probably familiar, Ms. Hung, an index called Enviros Green at times to try to apply.

But I guess what I'm raising is how do you get equity in the criteria, geographic equity, and make sure that at the end of the day, the competition is really distributing dollars as equitably as possible up and down a state that's as diverse as California, where even some Central Valley districts might be more dominated than Los Angeles or the Bay Area per census tract.

Is it really fair to put us into competition with ourselves that way as we compete and as we try to match up these federal dollars?

Yes. Thank you so much for that question, Senator, and for lifting up the importance of equity and federal funding. So as I mentioned earlier, equity really is at the center of the Biden-Harris Administration. For example, on day one of the Administration, the President issued an Executive order on equity and serving underserved communities. So it's critically important and is really woven into all of our policies, programs and approach. With respect to your question, we have been working as part of this invest in America agenda, right?

With the $2 trillion of federal funding going out across the country. We have been working with our sister federal agencies, with grant opportunities as well as with our own grants at the Department of Labor to have stronger language both around job quality and equity. And so kind of as an across the board principle and really trying to look at equity from the perspective of underrepresented underserved workers.

So, for example, if you look at the President's two Executive orders on underserved communities, you really spell out an inclusive approach to really thinking about underserved communities. And then second, really with each kind of funding announcement, there are various criteria in really looking at each application and making those decisions. I would say for the Department of Labor, what we've been doing, for example, is really trying to provide space so that local communities can explain what equity looks like from the perspective of that community, right?

Who is underrepresented, who is underserved in your local context, whether it's state, county, city, et cetera. And finally, I would just note that I think part of growing the economy from the middle out, bottom up, is with all of these investments that really, these investments, federal investments, will touch every community across the country. So by really growing these resources, every.