Looking for work? What Biden’s infrastructure bill could mean for California job seekers
California could see hundreds of thousands of highway and transit-related jobs over the next five years because of the new federal infrastructure plan President Joe Biden signed on Monday.
The news about those jobs, though, is somewhat mixed. While there are likely to be lots of new opportunities for people without college degrees, pay will vary greatly depending on the work, and it could take some time until they’re available.
California is slated to get $25 billion for highways, $4.2 billion for bridge replacement and repair and $9.45 billion for public transportation from the infrastructure bill over five years.
The White House Council of Economic Advisers estimates that every $1 billion in federal highway and transit funding supports 13,000 jobs for a year.
“We can see 75,000 to 100,000 jobs created annually from the federal infrastructure investment,” said Michael Quigley, the executive director for the California Alliance for Jobs, a group of construction companies and unions advocating for more infrastructure spending. “It’s going to be really substantial for California’s economy.”
Michael Bernick, an employment attorney with Duane Morris LLP and former director of the California Employment Development Department, warned that the estimate might be somewhat generous, though not far off.
More important, said Bernick, now an employment and labor law attorney, is that “infrastructure projects are not rapid in their job creation.”
He noted that in 2009, the majority of the infrastructure money in the Obama administration’s economic stimulus plan was not spent until two to three years later. Sustained increases in construction employment in highways did not begin until 2015.
The Biden plan, though, could eventually mean a lot of work for people who need it. The nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California estimated that infrastructure workers are 9.2% of the state’s total workforce.
In a report this week, it found “These workers are especially likely to have less than a bachelor’s degree.” The study said 46.6% had a high school diploma or less, compared to 30.3% for people not working on infrastructure.
This means that some of the new infrastructure jobs “could promote economic mobility among workers with lower levels of education,” PPIC noted.
The study found the infrastructure workers are more likely to be Latino or Black than other full-time employees.
How much will the jobs pay?
Some full-time infrastructure workers are not necessarily highly paid.
About half are transportation and material-moving workers, such as stockers and hand freight movers, and most have at best a high school diploma. Median earnings for those jobs range from $25,000 to $40,000 depending on the level of education, according to the study.
Those without college degrees can get paid more in other infrastructure jobs.
Jobs involving construction, installation, maintenance, and repair, and architecture and engineering usually pay about twice as much as the material-moving jobs to workers with roughly the same education level.
“Those construction careers give them a level of economic security not found in other career paths,” Quigley said.
The industry has also ramped up hiring. In the Sacramento area, more workers are in the industry than at any point in the last 15 years, according to state data.
A warning, though: The estimates of job availability are subject to unforeseen factors.
The Council of Economic Advisers notes that the 13,000 jobs per $1 billion figure “does not remain constant over time.”
Increases in construction material prices and pay ”will tend to reduce the number of jobs supported by each $1 billion invested,” it said, and changes in worker productivity can play a role.
Quigley said some materials have had their prices doubled in a year, as supply chain issues continue to hamper the industry.
“We can be in a position where there’s funding and workers available, but not the materials available to scale up to the point of all those projects,” he said.
Will the infrastructure bill create good jobs?
Robbie Hunter, who represents nearly 500,000 construction workers as president of the State Building and Construction Trades Council, believes the plan will lead to high-paying jobs. The bill includes a requirement that many of the projects funded pay workers a prevailing wage set by the state for each region.
Construction laborers in Sacramento County, for instance, are required to be paid at least $32.31 an hour, accounting for wages and benefits such as health insurance.
The bill also allows cities and counties to prioritize hiring locally for federally funded construction projects, removing a prohibition set by the Reagan administration in the 1980s, said Alaa Milbes, the communications director for Jobs to Move America which has advocated for more equitable infrastructure spending.
Almost half of families of construction workers in California are enrolled in a safety net program such as Medicaid or CalFresh, according to a study from the UC Berkeley Labor Center. Many workers in the industry are in the residential construction sector, where they are often misclassified as independent contractors and are not being paid as highly as those who are putting up commercial buildings and roads, said Kuochih Huang, one of the authors of the study.
Although the infrastructure bill will create jobs that those in the residential construction sector can jump to, it isn’t at a scale that will lead to big changes in that field, Huang said. “Issues faced by migrants and Latino workers in the residential sector need to be addressed directly.”
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