Can New York City’s Infrastructure Boom Change the Face of Its Workforce?

After seven years working in construction, Samuel Wattree knew a union apprenticeship could be his ticket to better pay and stability — if he could get his foot in the door.

Following a stint in prison, Wattree, now 39 a father of three, had found his purpose in ironwork: “It was love at first sight,” he said. “I wanted to give myself a shot at life.”

Yet joining a union was “not as easy as everyone thinks,” even for an experienced craftsman, Wattree explained, noting that there were roughly 200 slots for every 2,000 candidates. Like many, he had no luck on the recruitment lines that used to wrap around the corners of the Construction and General Building Laborers’ Local 79 or Local 3 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers — until one day last year while working in Coney Island when he bumped into an old friend who gave him a big break — a referral for a pre-apprenticeship program that sent him straight to the front of the line. 

Over the past decade, a patchwork of pre-apprenticeship programs for underrepresented women and workers of color like Wattree has been quietly transforming New York City’s infrastructure workforce. It couldn’t be coming at a more critical juncture. With the city poised to receive billions from the federal government’s $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, reformers see an unprecedented opportunity to supercharge their efforts to build a more inclusive construction industry.

Samuel Wattree studies welding at the Ironworkers Local 580 Training Facility in Queens.

As it stands now, the national infrastructure workforce is largely white, male, and aging, according to the Brookings Institution — only about 18.5% are women and under a third are people of color, often employed in lower-paid positions. Within the construction industry, only 11% of workers are women and around 88% are white. 

Projections show that without robust workforce diversity and training initiatives, women will account for only 29% of jobs created by the bill. Black women will account for only 4% of new jobs and Latinas less than 5%. Workforce training initiatives — like New York City’s pre-apprenticeship programs — could help more workers benefit from the good jobs created by the infrastructure bill, while also helping employers cope with major staffing shortages.

The Hudson Tunnel. The Second Avenue Subway. LaGuardia Airport and Hunts Point Market. Federal dollars are slowly trickling in for some of New York City’s largest — and most long-awaited — infrastructure projects, with the potential to create tens of thousands of well-paid union jobs. 

For decades, the country’s construction and manufacturing unions were dominated by father-son hiring practices. Apprenticeships often relied on legacy admissions, with open spots going to members’ sons, brothers or relatives. To some extent, they still do. Ensuring that those new jobs, from electricians to civil engineers, are filled equitably — or filled at all amid dire labor shortages — is no easy task. 

It’s also one that will fall largely on states and cities themselves, which have great leeway on how to allocate much of the bill’s project funding and some of the over $800 million in grants explicitly earmarked for workforce development. 

Community colleges, which are a major provider of workforce training programs, have received tens of millions in federal dollars to build up their infrastructure programs in states like Iowa, Nevada and Tennessee. In Virginia, the nonprofit FLIPP Inc. received nearly $2 million to train formerly incarcerated people for green jobs. 

In some places, without more workers, it could be difficult to get infrastructure projects built at all.

Leather clothing like the kind worn by Samuel Wattree is favored by welders for its heat and flame resistant properties.

Pathways to (Pre-)Apprenticeships

That shouldn’t be a problem in New York City, where over half of the unionized construction workers are now people of color, insists Gary LaBarbera, president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York (BCTC), which represents 15 local union affiliates and over 100,000 workers. 

Pre-apprenticeship programs and other training initiatives have helped the city’s workforce “stay ahead of the demands of the industry,” he said. Last year, the Biden administration launched the Apprenticeship Ambassador Initiative, a network that aims to scale up the use of apprenticeships and pre-apprenticeships for infrastructure-related projects. 

BCTC runs four pre-apprenticeship programs that together now account for about 40% of all new apprenticeship recruits. 

Project labor agreements are also a powerful tool (and a federal requirement) for ensuring that underrepresented workers are hired for large federally funded infrastructure projects like the $16.1 billion Gateway Tunnel, said LaBarbera.

Many of those workers will come from pre-apprenticeships and other direct entry programs.

“The goal of organized labor, ultimately, is to lift people out of poverty and build these ladders into a middle class career,” said LaBarbera. 

Samuel Wattree trains on a scaffold at the Ironworkers Local 580 Training Facility in Queens.

One year after beginning the Edward J. Malloy Initiative for Construction Skills, Wattree, 39, is now earning more as a first-year apprentice for Ironworkers Local 580 than he ever did in his seven years at nonunion firms. 

Over the next few years, after graduating as a journeyman, he stands to earn around double the $25 per hour he makes now.

It’s already helped him afford a car to commute to work and a larger apartment for his three children. 

Joining the union “took the weight off of our struggles of not being able to pay our rent on time and not being able to pay for Pampers,” he said. “It affected us tremendously.”

At nonunion firms, between finding a new job and going without benefits, “It’s a grind every day,” said Wattree. “Now, I can see a bright future.”

Bill Could Hold Billions for Workplace Development

While the bulk of federal infrastructure funding is still being disbursed, there are already glimpses of how New York City’s medley of workforce training programs may grow and expand. 

A nonprofit in the South Bronx has already received a federal workforce development grant for $500,000 — a 150% increase in funding from previous years — to break down “barriers for entry into the workforce” for jobs redeveloping polluted lots, or brownfields, said Melanie Barrett, director of development at the HOPE Program.

The city’s Federal Infrastructure Funding Taskforce has also been awarded over $1 billion.

“A lot of people involved in the conversation didn’t used to be involved in the conversation,” said John McDermott, director for strategic partnership for the Consortium for Worker Education, the workforce development arm of the New York City Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO.

That’s a reflection of the improvements the trades have made in recent years, he said. 

“The demographics of the unionized construction industry used to be almost entirely white and almost entirely commuter,” said McDermott. “Now, it really looks like New York City.” 

The ‘Trade Girls’

Unlike Wattree, Amanda Filpo grew up surrounded by sheet metal workers, but she never considered it a career option for herself. It’s hazardous work — fabricating air conditioning ducts or installing metal sheets — often done while perched on a roof.

“I didn’t know if there was a space for women,” she said. “I’d only ever seen my dad and my crazy uncles in construction.”

Amanda Filpo at a construction site in Manhattan.

Even that wasn’t always possible. In the 1980s, Filpo’s father became one of the first Latino craftsmen to join Local 28 of the Sheet Metal Workers, hardly a decade after the union was sued by the Justice Department for refusing to admit workers of color. 

He was the one who convinced Filpo to look into Nontraditional Employment for Women (NEW), a pre-apprenticeship program for women, back in 2014.  

After all, he would tell her, the best welder in the business — a Local 28 member named Julie who retired this year — was a woman, but still at first, Filpo was skeptical.

Then, he showed her his pay stub. 

After that, “I was all in,” said Filpo, now 30 and a member of Local 28 herself. For seven weeks, she trained with a cohort of other women on the basics of the building trades, from carpentry and plumbing to navigating the workplace and occupational safety.

“It was like being in our own version of college,” she said. “Trade girls.”

Progress and Challenges

The number of tradeswomen is higher than ever, but that isn’t saying much — they will likely account for only 29% of jobs created by the infrastructure bill, according to the National Partnership for Women and Families. People of color account for a far higher percentage of New York City’s trade unions than in prior years, but they are less likely to hold higher-paying positions.

Plus, with a bureaucracy buckling under a hiring freeze and threats of budget cuts, some fear that New York City won’t be able to take full advantage of funding opportunities that the city can’t afford to lose.

“I worry about the capacity of agencies to even apply for money” amid a hiring freeze, said Judith M. Smith, an adviser to the philanthropy-funded New York City Workforce Funders Collaborative. 

“People can’t even think about applying for money for new programs when they can’t even carry out the programs they’re mandated to carry out,” she said.

In other words, there’s still a long way to go, said Filpo.

In the nine years since she graduated from NEW, Filpo’s become one of the first Latinas elected to be a union trustee and president of the Women’s Committee at Local 28. She was also able to afford to go back to school. 

“Construction really opened my eyes to the kind of future I wanted,” she said. She and her fiancé — a fellow sheet metal worker — each earn over $100,000 and could afford a down payment on a house this year.

In that time, she’s already seen some changes in her workplace too.

“Diversity makes unions more powerful because it reflects the workforce, and women bring something different to the table — why shouldn’t unions embrace that and make us stronger?” she said. “The industry deserves to keep on improving.”

Copyright 2023 Capital & Main.

All photos by Matt Gunther.