A regional effort to bolster the ranks of women and people of color in the building trades gained a key backer after the city of Portland this week committed to supporting the Construction Career Pathways Project (C2P2) framework plan.

The city is among 16 municipalities and public agencies collaborating via an owner work group convened by Metro to devise a strategy for increasing career opportunities for traditionally underrepresented communities in the skilled construction workforce. The stakeholder group was convened in 2018 and met regularly through August 2019 to develop a framework plan that would create a consistent regional approach to recruit, train and retain a diverse workforce.

Now, after a phased process that has included conducting a workforce market study, engaging stakeholders, and drafting and finalizing the framework plan, officials are gathering endorsements from the agencies involved in the project in order to move into the final phase – implementation of the framework plan.

“(That) is really where the rubber hits the road for us,” said Raahi Reddy, director of Metro’s diversity, equity and inclusion program, before Portland City Council on Wednesday. “We will work together with the agencies that have adopted this framework to coordinate our efforts and to make sure that we are holding ourselves and our projects accountable to the public.”

The group has engaged with industry partners, including contractors, labor and apprenticeship groups and community organizations, to develop the framework and determine how best to effectively enact the plan. Other agencies that have so far adopted the plan include Metro, Multnomah County and Prosper Portland.

The framework plan consists of seven points public owners should integrate into their practices in order to make improvements in construction workforce equity. Among those are setting minimum workforce participation goals based on a percentage of work hours performed on a project – including 20 percent by apprentices, 14 percent by women, and 25 percent by people of color – as well as implementing jobsite anti-harassment and culture change strategies, utilizing software to track progress on goals, and committing funds to increase diversity.

An accompanying tool kit provides further details and guidance for public owners in implementing the points recommended in the framework plan.

In signing the framework plan, the city is committing to continuing to collaborate with the stakeholder group and aligning with the minimum workforce participation goals over the course of a seven-year ramp-up period.

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An effort to align government policy on construction sites is gaining steam, with Prosper Portland‘s board voting last week to endorse a framework plan for the Construction Career Pathways Project.

The project, spearheaded by Metro, is an effort to increase participation in the construction industry by women and people of color.

Metro is developing what it calls a “tool kit,” including template language for diversity goals.

William Myers, a Prosper Portland board member, said the Hyatt Regency Portland at the Oregon Convention Center project showed the need for better coordination. That project involves Metro, Prosper Portland, TriMet and various city bureaus.

“We had conflicting policies that needed alignment,” he said at the Oct. 9 board meeting.

Myers noted the Construction Careers Pathway Project comes alongside other efforts to diversify the workforce.

“We’re starting to see the industry take over and course-correct a lot of these things,” he said.

Myers pointed to the positive jobsite culture training being conducted by the Pacific Northwest Carpenters Institute, as well as an effort being discussed that would provide child care to workers.

Raahi Reddy, Metro’s director of diversity, equity and inclusion, said the project is meant to provide a flexible framework.

“That’s up to each agency what the workforce agreement looks like,” she said.

Contractors will benefit from standardized language on workforce goals, said John Cárdenas, Prosper Portland’s construction, business and workforce equity project manager.

“The best reaction I can ever hear from a contractor or subcontractor is, ‘Oh, I’ve seen that before,’” Cárdenas said. “That familiarity breeds comfort, and that comfort gets us closer to achieving our goals.”

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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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