Months after convening the Construction Career Pathways Project work group, Metro is beginning to forge a path forward to encourage more women and minorities to enter and remain in the building trades.

The effort brings together 16 entities from around the Portland-metro region, including city and county governments, transportation agencies, Oregon Health & Science University and Home Forward.

“In many cases, there are strong programs in place,” said Noelle Dobson, equity strategy program analyst for Metro, “and it’s a matter of how we might replicate some of those and take them to scale.”

Some local governments, including the city of Portland, have instituted equity requirements for major public projects. However, there are not enough minority and women employees for firms to comply, Dobson said.

“It’s both a supply and a demand issue,” she said. “Even if all agencies had (equity) goals … right now, the supply is not there to meet that demand.”

Retention of minorities and women in the construction industry continues to fall short. The work group is looking at the root causes of low retention, including child care and transportation issues and how workers are treated at job sites.

“The retention rates are not great,” Dobson said. “There are issues around jobsite mentoring, jobsite training, jobsite culture. There are issues of harassment, where people say it’s not worth it to come to work.”

Members of the work group are examining pilot efforts such as Multnomah County’s “Green Dot” program at its Central Courthouse project to encourage reporting of harassment.

“How do we address some of these barriers that aren’t related to: Are you a good bricklayer? Are you a good electrician?” Dobson said.

There are also efforts at the Hyatt Regency Portland at the Oregon Convention Center project site to help workers. Construction workers face commutes to work sites that change with each project, and challenging hours that create child care obstacles for working parents, Dobson said. Mortenson is serving as general contractor of the 600-room hotel.

A flood of large public projects is expected to create a steady demand for construction workers for the next several years. These include the Southwest Corridor Light Rail project, the Broadway Corridor and the Bull Run filtration plant.

The work group identified 81 large public capital projects that will require nearly 14,000 construction workers. Some of the projects have stated apprentice and workforce diversity goals. The goals average 20 percent apprentices, 25 percent minorities and 14 percent women.

The Metro-led work group aims to produce formal recommendations at some point this summer.

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A recent workforce study focusing on the construction industry produced results that show women and minorities still have much room for improvement in terms of participation.

The Metro Portland Construction Career Pathways Project was commissioned by Metro and carried out by a team of industry professionals, academics, economists and many others over the past year. Results show that a concerted, collaborative, regionally organized effort is necessary to make substantial headway toward greater percentages of women and people of color participating in the trades.

There’s a lot of interest in increasing the number of women and people of color in construction, said report project manager Kelly Haines of Worksystems Inc.

“The chart at the very end of the report is illustrative that it really is going to take everybody,” she said. “Public agencies do play a role, and the culture needs to change among contractors and how people feel when they go to work every day. So it’s going to be a collective effort at the regional level to really move the needle. There’s not really a simple answer.”

Tiffany Thompson is the director of advocacy for Oregon Tradeswomen Inc., one of the report’s collaborating organizations. Companies, unions and contractors should not be left to their own devices in this regard, she said.

“We think that it’s better where there’s a collective fund and a regional effort toward recruitment – rather than leaving it to the individual,” she said.

Workforce retention is also highlighted in the report, which states that a concerted effort must be made before women and minority tradespeople are able to operate in a workplace culture in which they do not feel discriminated against.

The report, released earlier this month, shows that women account for just 4 percent of the roughly 23,000 workers in Oregon’s construction industry. Of that 23,000, 20 percent are minorities – mostly Hispanics; blacks and Asians remain underrepresented in the trades, according to findings.

The team examined 81 public-sector building projects scheduled for construction between 2017 and 2021 in order to determine the percentages of women and minorities working in the trades. Some of the projects have stated apprentice and workforce diversity goals – typically 20 percent apprentices, 25 percent minorities and 14 percent women. Those goals, if applied across all 81 projects, puts five-year workforce demand at 2,700 new apprentices, 3,400 minorities and 1,900 women.

Portland’s 2016 employment statistics, however, show that without improvement, the industry would fall short by 445 apprentices, 1,074 minorities and 1,416 women over the next five years.

When it comes to women in the industry nationally, U.S. Department of Labor figures show that the effects of the Great Recession continue to linger; the total number of women employed in all facets of construction in 2016 was 939,000. However, that is 140,000 fewer than in 2005. The number of women in “production occupations” is barely 200,000 nationally.

“I think one of the challenges,” Thompson said, “is figuring out in the longer term how to get a high enough percentage of women in the workforce to weather those things.”

When it comes to recruiting people of color and women into the trades, one of the biggest barriers identified by the report is the lack of information available to youth about the many and varied career prospects in construction. It recommends an effort, likely beginning at the state level by the Bureau of Labor and Industries (BOLI), to inform educators and students within the public school system of the industry opportunities available to young people.

Further, existing apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship programs should be better funded, preferably at the state level, so they can continue to grow, the report states.

“To not know there’s this alternative means you get into school debt,” Haines said. “What we’re hearing from both contractors and apprenticeship programs is that they want better marketing. They want people to know about them.”

And when it comes to worker retention, the report notes that a history of overt racist and sexist policies in the trades has allowed persistence of jobsite cultures that adversely affect women and minorities. Further, women and minorities also tend to receive fewer training and mentorship opportunities, and the unsteady flow of work in construction often impacts them the hardest because they frequently lack of social support structures, according to the report.

Despite the challenges involved, Thompson and others who crafted the study are hopeful that efforts now under way will lead to meaningful changes.

“There are all kinds of things that give me hope,” she said. “We’re seeing a shift in the industry, and our partners in the construction industry are reaching out to us and saying, ‘We want more women.’ And I think there’s a lot more conversation in construction, not just because of the #MeToo movement, but in the industry in general about how do we retain women and how do we keep a respectful workplace.”

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