As American cities work to rebuild more inclusive and resilient economies, urban manufacturing can provide an anchor for equitable community development. Manufacturing creates quality jobs that foster economic well-being by providing living-wage incomes and opportunities for career mobility. The challenge, however, is making sure that people of color are able to connect to opportunities in the manufacturing sector across a continuum of positions from entry-level jobs to ownership opportunities. Policymakers and urban manufacturing practitioners must reengineer policy and practice for workforce and industrial development to leverage the sector as a tool for racial and economic equity in our cities.

Negotiations over historic levels of public investment in the infrastructure bill have created openings to inform federal policy on urban manufacturing. UMA’s recent federal policy agenda, Centering Federal Industrial Policy in Racial Justice & Community Development, outlines how charting new federal frameworks for industrial and workforce policy can enable urban manufacturers to scale innovative strategies for inclusive workforce and community development. In this webinar, NextCity hosted a conversation about how federal policy can support urban manufacturing and equitable workforce development. The event was supported by the Surdna Foundation.

The panel discussion featured Livia Lam, Senior Vice President of Federal Relations at Strategies 360; Miquela Craytor, Executive Director of the Manufacturing and Industrial Innovation Council at New York City’s Department of Small Business Services; and Stephen Tucker, inaugural President & CEO of Northland Workforce Training Center in Buffalo, New York. Mekaelia Davis, Program Director of the Inclusive Economies program at the Surdna Foundation, and Katy Stanton, Programming and Operations Director of Urban Manufacturing Alliance, offered opening remarks. NextCity contributor Emily Nonko moderated the discussion.

Takeaways

Traditional workforce development paradigms focus on skills deficits. We need to fix that. Livia Lam, contributing her extensive labor and workforce policy experience in Washington, set the stage for the conversation by deconstructing the “skills deficit” narrative of workforce policy. 

For decades, federal workforce policy has almost exclusively centered on “upskilling” workers to help employers solve their labor issues. This skills-centric framework implicitly defines racial and gender disparities in structural unemployment and occupational segregation as an issue of the mismatch between human capital and the needs of employers. However, when Lam walked through research on recent labor market trends, another story emerged. Even when people of color and women receive additional education or training, these groups experience differential returns in terms of wage increases. Lam cited the 2019 outcome trends of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) Adult program, which illustrated that the fourth quarter median earnings of the average Adult program participant was $7,212.

However, Black workers averaged $5,952 compared to white workers at $7,148.  While there is complexity in how federal workforce performance results are derived, these outcomes illustrate that a narrow focus on skill deficits fails to address the underlying factors that perpetuate racial and gender wage differentials and persisting occupational segregation in the labor market.

As negotiations over the federal infrastructure plan are underway in Congress, Lam’s analysis offers fruitful guidance for lawmakers. Indeed, upskilling programs are under-resourced and require greater levels of public investment. Yet, as Lam maintained, policymakers need to reframe the debate in terms of strategies that “enable the workforce ecosystem to achieve equitable outcomes in employment.” Federal industrial policy has an opportunity to play a transformational role in driving demand for jobs in the manufacturing sector that can offer living incomes and career advancement opportunities.

At the local level, urban manufacturing practitioners are restructuring workforce development programs with racial equity at the center, offering insights on opportunities to shift federal policy and leverage new funding. Innovative workforce programming at the local level is well-positioned for federal support with the pending infrastructure bill and the pledge to pursue equity as an economic development strategy. New developments may enable urban manufacturing practitioners to scale their equity-centered workforce strategies.

Echoing Lam’s call to reorient workforce development toward equitable outcomes, practitioners in Buffalo and New York City both discussed the push to transform workplace culture in order to retain people of color and women. Stephen Tucker of Northland Workforce Training Center in Buffalo recalled a networking event where only five of nearly 200 job candidates were people of color. Even with targeted outreach and educational programs focused on recruiting workers of color, exclusionary work environments perpetuate racial barriers in the sector. At the event, Tucker asked the predominantly white manufacturing council leaders: “When was the last time that you attended a networking event and you were the only person at the event who looked like you? And it never happened [to them] before.” Tucker’s story underscores that businesses and intermediaries need to be held accountable to supporting a diverse leadership pipeline.

Manufacturing practitioners in New York City are also deploying worker retention strategies in a sector where leadership is almost exclusively older white men. In contrast, about 90 percent of graduates from the City’s manufacturing apprenticeship program, Apprentice NYC CNC Machinist, are workers of color.

Miquela Craytor of the City’s Department of Small Business Services explained how predominantly white male leadership structures alienate workers of color from a sector that can provide living incomes and opportunities for career advancement. In response, Craytor successfully pushed for launching a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (“DEI”) assessment for MaiiC members on the need to create a diverse leadership pipeline. The DEI assessment led to the creation of a DEI taskforce and will contribute a crucial resource to small- and medium-sized manufacturers that often do not have dedicated staff for HR. With increased funding, Craytor highlighted that local government could further expand the capacity of smaller firms to operationalize DEI initiatives by creating shared infrastructure for HR. While apprenticeship programs are often more closely associated with entry into the workforce, lessons from New York City suggest that short- and long-term solutions to retain workers and to promote their career advancement are crucial.

Other local strategies are oriented toward transforming the structure of manufacturing ownership. Craytor referenced a New York City initiative to promote ownership among people of color through succession planning. As the current generation of predominantly white owners near retirement, there is an opportunity to support new owners of color and transition to worker ownership models. Currently, the New York City program is conducting preliminary meetings with owners and facilitating neighborhood forums to ground ownership transitions in community development. She noted that New York City’s Department of Small Business Services is already playing a role in terms of providing technical assistance, education, and financing to plan and support transitions. 

Manufacturers, intermediaries, and policymakers need effective indicators and accountability mechanisms to evaluate whether workforce development initiatives are advancing equitable outcomes. Accountability begins with defining effective standards for equity. Lam elevated recommendations from UMA’s recent federal policy agenda that called on the Biden/Harris administration to ensure that the public sector, manufacturers, and intermediaries can effectively evaluate equity in manufacturing. 

Innovations in evaluation methods at the local level offer lessons for the federal government. For instance, Lam highlighted planning initiatives in Seattle where the City used a community engagement process to establish indicators for equitable workforce development with immigrant communities. In contrast to established evaluation methods for equity in workforce development, not all indicators were focused on skills attainment. The City of Seattle’s metrics captured crucial dynamics such as workforce culture and relational skills. In light of innovative community-based evaluation methods in Seattle and other localities, the federal government can advance the use of effective equity indicators by supporting capacity-building for workforce intermediaries to carry out community engagement and data collection.

After developing effective evaluation standards and processes, manufacturers, intermediaries, and the public sector need to be held accountable to their equity commitments. Tucker stated, “if we are serious about moving the needle … there has to be … some type of enforcement mechanism.” Local hiring requirements and community benefit agreements are common tools in community development, but these agreements sometimes lack a lever for enforcement. Too often, manufacturers and intermediaries are well-intentioned in signing these agreements but fail to implement effective practices that advance racial equity. Making a “good faith effort” can too often become a habitual “get out of jail free card” for companies and unions, Tucker aptly observed. Lam also suggested that the federal government can step in to play a more prominent role in developing and overseeing accountability mechanisms. New waves of federal funding could provide a lever for enforcement if support is contingent on meeting indicators for workforce equity. 

Learn more by reading UMA’s federal policy agenda and watching the panel.