The Missouri Department of Transportation, unions and civic organizations that crafted the Highway 40 Workforce Development agreement in 2006 agree that it has led to increased minority participation on that project, but has not been a pathway to more inclusion in the region’s construction workforce.
The agreement called for 30 percent of all work hours to be completed by people of color, women and low-income residents of the region. In addition, $2.5 million (half of one percent of the project budget) would go to pre-apprenticeship training programs.
Last week, members of the agreement coalition announced that 27 percent of people hired met the criteria and $2 million has gone to training programs. Slightly less than 300 people are currently working on the project.
What the Rev. Tommie Pierson, chair of Metropolitan Congregations United Highway 40 oversight committee, had hoped to be “a national model for diversifying the construction work force,” has worked on the highway project. But success ends there.
“We still have some work to do,” he said during a press conference at the Kingshighway and I-64 intersection near BJC Hospital.
In the St. Louis region, African Americans comprise 17 percent of the workforce population, according to the second annual Roads to Good Jobs report by the Transportation Equity Network.
Yet, blacks make up just 10 percent of the construction work force. This is among the largest differences among the 25 metropolitan areas researched in the study.
“We have made some strides in providing good paying jobs opportunities, but we are not done yet,” said the Rev. Myron Taylor of New Bethel MB Church in East St. Louis n United Congregations Metro East.
The study’s primary author is Todd Swanstrom of UM-St. Louis and he says investing more transportation dollars in public transit and opening more jobs in the construction industry to under-represented workers “is a win-win situation.”
“The continued dominance of white males in construction is particularly disturbing given the huge federal financing of highway and transit projects,” he writes in the report.
Sawnstrom and UM-St. Louis researchers examined minority and female employment in 25 metro areas and found that white males dominate construction work, regardless of the racial and gender makeup of the local workforce as a whole.
The authors calculated that 137,044 black workers are “missing” from the construction workforce in studied areas metropolitan areas. If blacks participated in construction at the same rate they participated in all industries, tens of thousands more blacks would be employed in construction.
The next federal transportation bill, scheduled for reauthorization in 2009, “provides an opportunity to ensure that transportation spending does the most to stimulate the economy while providing good jobs to the people that most need them,” Swanstrom writes.
In 2007, St. Louis County Executive Charlie Dooley and MCU worked to create an executive order similar to the Highway 64/40 agreement. MCU is now working with the city of St. Louis to pass a similar ordinance “that would provide more opportunities for local residents, women and people of color,” Pierson said.