Rebuild Illinois is paying off for our infrastructure, labor workforce

While new federal infrastructure investments are just coming online, we are more than four years into Rebuild Illinois — the historic, bipartisan $40 billion modernization effort signed into law by Gov. J.B. Pritzker in 2018.

According to the Illinois Department of Transportation, the first $12 billion invested by this effort into our state highway system has already improved more than 5,339 state road miles and another 533 structures (such as bridges), and made another 762 safety improvements.

In doing so, it has put a consequential dent in a transportation maintenance backlog that was imposing hundreds of dollars in costs each year on state motorists in the form of preventable repairs and safety accidents.

Indeed, IDOT’s June bid letting was the largest in the agency’s history, putting as much as $910 million more to work rebuilding the infrastructure we all count on.

Much less discussed, however, has been the impact of Rebuild Illinois on our skilled construction workforce, and the lives and livelihoods of the professionals who comprise the backbone of this essential industry. This includes thousands of carpenters, ironworkers, operating engineers, craft laborers and others.

This discussion really matters because the construction industry is facing workforce supply needs not seen in decades. And ironically, this new era of historic demand for construction services follows an era that saw construction labor standards that promote safety and workforce/apprenticeship training investments (such as collective bargaining rights and prevailing wage laws) attacked and weakened across many states.

Public investment will ease labor shortage

Research has consistently shown that while these attacks generally failed to save taxpayers money, they more likely have helped to fuel skilled labor shortages that neither our communities or this vital industry can afford. This has been a particular problem in the non-signatory (or non-union) segments of the construction industry, where investments in new worker training are voluntary and are often jettisoned to win short-term project bids.

Happily, the crucial public investments underway — both at the state and federal level — are taking the opposite approach. They are attaching prevailing wage requirements to projects, and promoting partnerships between contractors and labor institutions, which promotes public value: Research has shown that projects with strong labor standards have the same, or lower, public cost than the alternative, by offseting comparatively higher wages with superior safety, productivity and craftmanship and reducing the risk of project-paralysis via labor shortages.

Union partnerships are especially important because only the unionized side of the industry institutionalizes long-term workforce training investments. This is done through a “cents per hour” contribution to a joint labor-management training program that is credentialed and registered with the U.S. Department of Labor and negotiated during the collective bargaining process.

In short, it means as more union workers are employed to rebuild Illinois’ infrastructure, the pot of money used to train new workers grows — strengthening, diversifying and expanding the skilled labor supply pipeline that already produces more than 90% of Illinois’ skilled construction apprentices.

As an example, the apprenticeship program associated with Operating Engineers Local 150 — the professionals who operate cranes, excavators and other heavy equipment on many Rebuild Illinois highway projects — has already grown its annual apprentice class sizes by more than 50% since 2018, the year before Rebuild Illinois came online.

Training programs run cooperatively by signatory contractors and other trades are reporting similar growth. The carpenters are considering starting a pre-apprenticeship program specific to transportation infrastructure work because there has been such an increase in heavy/highway work demand. Laborers have considerably increased their recruitment.

The other side of Illinois’ building boom — and the unionized trade workers who are doing much of it — is what it means for livelihoods and the broader economy. It means job quality— a livable wage, more families on private health insurance with a stable retirement plan and fewer living in poverty or supplementing low incomes with public assistance such as Medicaid and food stamps. Research shows it also means more workers are able to own homes, while boosting the local tax revenues that support police, fire and other vital public services.

Rebuild Illinois isn’t just a program to modernize our infrastructure, but an investment in growing our economy and the long-term workforce supply pipeline needed for today’s building boom. The data shows it is delivering. That’s good news for taxpayers, commuters, contractors, workers and communities across our state. 

Marc Poulos is executive director of the Indiana, Illinois and Iowa Foundation for Fair Contracting.

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