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Good Jobs: What Biden’s Executive Order on Investing in America and American Workers Means to Workers

 

On September 6, 2024, President Bident signed the “Good Jobs” Executive Order. In a nutshell, the Order describes what makes a job “good” and directs federal agencies to prioritize projects that improve labor standards.

What is a “Good Job?”

According to the Order, a Good Job:

  • Promotes positive labor-management relationships by entering agreements with labor and community groups, such as:

    • Project Labor Agreements (pre-hire collective bargaining agreements that establish terms and conditions for a specific project)
    • Community Benefits Agreements (agreements between a developer and community groups to provide benefits identified by the community groups)
    • Collective Bargaining Agreements (“CBA” or union contract)
    • Agreements ensuring uninterrupted delivery of services
    • Agreements facilitating first CBAs
    • Voluntary Union Recognition
    • Neutrality Agreements
  • Promotes family-sustaining wages by:

    • Paying prevailing wages, wages in the top 25% of industry pay, or union scale wages
    • Promoting equal pay
    • Eliminating discriminatory pay practices
    • Implementing pay transparency
  • Promotes economic security by:

    • Providing paid sick, family, and medical leave
    • Providing health care
    • Providing retirement benefits
    • Providing child, dependent, and elder care
  • Fights discrimination by:

    • Adopting recruitment, hiring, and retention policies to attract workers from underserved and local communities
    • Implement reporting structures and ongoing training to prevent discrimination and harassment
    • Participate in programs supporting compliance with the EEO, Rehab Act, and VEVRAA
  • Strengthens the workforce by:

    • Investing in union-affiliated training programs, apprenticeships, and pre-apprenticeship programs
    • Partnering with community colleges, career and tech programs, disability services organizations, the public workforce system, and the American Climate Corps
    • Providing child care and transportation assistance, as well as other services that will help workers complete training
  • Protect worker health and safety by:

    • Engaging in supplemental safety training
    • Working with unions to design and implement workplace safety and health systems
    • Disclosing occupational safety and health violations

How Do I Get One Of These Good Jobs?

It’s a little tricky, because no one has created a central clearing house for workers to search for these jobs. Also, each municipality or region has its own mechanisms and acronyms. For example, here in Syracuse, we have ON-RAMP, “Real Life Rosies,” CREATES, and Syracuse Build. Your area will have different acronyms. But one thing you can do is look at job postings for

First, the “good jobs” criteria apply to projects selected by the following Federal departments:

  • Department of the Interior
  • Department of Agriculture
  • Department of Commerce
  • Department of Labor
  • Department of Housing and Urban Development
  • Department of Transportation
  • Department of Energy
  • Department of Education
  • Department of Homeland Security
  • Department of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Second, the criteria apply to projects selected by the above agencies for funding through:

  • The American Rescue Plan
  • The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act
  • The CHIPS Act
  • The Inflation Reduction Act.

So one way to find work that is covered by the Good Jobs Executive Order is to do a web search using one of the Departments, one of the Acts, and your city.

Another way to locate the Good Jobs is to pay attention to news stories in your area: are there any infrastructure projects happening near you? How about tech companies coming to your town? Are there environmental conservation projects underway?

You can also reach out to unions and community organizations in your area. Projects receiving federal funding from these initiatives are expected to engage with community stakeholders, so local chapter of Citizen Action, Jobs to Move America, or your local labor council should be involved with the project already and may know where potential applicants can get more information.  Additionally, if you run into trouble getting jobs that you are qualified for, these organizations are going to want to know that so they can make the companies hold up their ends of the bargain.

This is one of those announcements that the news doesn’t usually pick up, so tell your worker friends about the Good Jobs Executive Order. And if you get one of these Good Jobs, join the Union and make it even better.

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