STL Unions Report Diversity Status
Pictured Above: Pat Wittich and Daniel Adkinson with Aschinger Electric lay a railing system around solar panels on the roof of the IKEA store being built at the corner of Vendervanter and Forest Park Expressway due to open September 30, of this year. Photo by Wiley Price/ St. Louis American
Date Posted: July 28, 2015
Posted In: News, Workforce,
by Tom Finan, Executive Director, Construction Forum STL
In a move that construction owners termed an important first step, area construction trade unions recently gave a look at the state of diversity in the St. Louis construction workforce. While the data that was released is somewhat opaque by intent, it presents a clearer picture of the state of the industry in the area of workforce diversity that had ever previously been available.
Left to right, Pat Wittich and Daniel Adkinson of Aschinger Electric Co. place rails around solar panels installed on the roof of the new IKEA store in St. Louis. Aschinger is a member of the IBEW/NECA Electrical Connection partnership. Photo copyright, St. Louis American.
The survey of construction union wage rates was conducted by Saint Louis Construction Cooperative (SLCC), an organization that from 1972 until recently was known as PRIDE. The survey showed that St. Louis-based construction trade unions represent 44,429 workers, of which 11.85% are African Americans and 6% are women. Those numbers excluded and the operating and engineers and boilermakers, which do not participate in the St. Louis Construction Cooperative (SLCC).
Jim LaMantia, executive director of the SLCC, said that the unions agreed to provide data, provided that the results be presented only in aggregate.
“No union was singled out. The only way to get (the numbers) was that (the drilldown information) was held confidential and released collectively,” La Mantia said.
“This is an initial step providing a base line to compare progress for inclusion going forward,” a spokesperson for the St. Louis Council of Construction Consumers (SLCCC) said.
The spokesperson said that a request was made by the SLCCC for a similar survey of the trades to look back five or more years to assess progress from a prior point.
LaMantia said that the SLCC has already sent the second survey out to the unions who participated in the first survey. He noted that if the first survey was to focus solely on the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County, the numbers would be closer to the totals for inclusion being sought by those governmental entities.
LaMantia said that the total head count in the construction trades here has dropped approximately 30 percent since the construction depression of 2008. His personal feeling is that there is no racial skew in the composition of the worker group that left the industry because of the economy.
Some of the union locals, he noted encompass the Eastern half of Missouri and into Southern Illinois. Much of those areas have no requirements for inclusion, LaMantia noted, which he believes would cause the numbers for inclusion for St. Louis and St. Louis County to skew higher than the overall study totals.
“This is just the beginning,” he said. “We’ll take a deep breath and figure out what we are going to do with it. Going forward we will reveal as much of the demographics as we can. Who’s to say we can’t go back (in tracking inclusion history) 10 years?
“The major concern of the unions is that they want market share. Contractors’ favorite color is green, as in money. They want the safest, most productive workers possible out there.”