MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

The Trump administration just cut a promising local hiring program. (Photo: vonderauvisuals)

Next City, a website focusing on urban issues, revealed in an August 28 article that Trump is ending an encouraging jobs program:

His administration announced last week its withdrawal of a proposed rule change, put forth during President Barack Obama’s tenure, that would have allowed state and local governments receiving federal transportation dollars to apply local hiring preferences to contracts awarded using those dollars. The withdrawal reverts the Federal Highway Administration and Federal Transit Administration back to rules set during the Reagan administration, which prohibited any geographic-based hiring preferences in contracts using federal transportation dollars....

“Local hire has allowed municipalities to use their own money to help employ people directly from their communities. It has been strategic for our elected leaders to say that they’re not going to raise our tax dollars for investments in capital projects without ensuring that persons facing significant barriers to employment get expanded access to good jobs and training opportunities,” said Erik Miller, executive director of Playa Vista Job Opportunities and Business Services.

Capital & Main, an investigative news site, included more criticism of the move in an article about the cancellation of the program:

“Many of these jobs were finally addressing long-term unemployment — many, for people of color,” said Angela Glover Blackwell, CEO of PolicyLink, an economic and social equity think tank. “This is yet another example of the Trump administration not standing up for jobs for the nation’s most vulnerable.”

Madeline Janis, executive director of Jobs to Move America (JMA), a national coalition that has been at the center of leveraging public transit projects to generate opportunities for the unemployed, has been raising the alarm about the repeal. She told Capital & Main that she discovered it buried in the DOT [Department of Transportation] rules change report almost by accident.

“It’s inexplicable to us why the Trump DOT would withdraw a proposal to make jobs available to people who need them — and in places where transportation infrastructure is being built and invested in,” she said. “For an administration that has talked about caring about creating good jobs related to infrastructure, it’s a complete contradiction between the stated policy versus the actual policy.”

To put it another way, as Next City phrased it, "President Donald Trump wants to build highways through black communities, but he doesn’t want to hire from them."

In the Capital & Main article, more detail was provided on the Trump administration move:

The administration...is quietly moving ahead to repeal a two-year-old initiative dating from the Obama administration that might be the only dynamic infrastructure and jobs program in existence at the federal level. According to its August Significant Rulemaking Report, the Department of Transportation (DOT) has set Friday as the termination date for a program that has already enabled states and cities to create thousands of new, high-wage transportation and construction jobs in some of the nation’s most depressed local labor markets....

Called the Local Labor Hiring Pilot Program, it essentially created an exception to a Reagan-era, free market interpretation of the Common Grant Rule, the department-wide administrative requirements for all of DOT’s federal grants. The Reagan Justice Department had prohibited contract requirements unrelated to price and engineering specifications, calling them an unfair competitive burden on corporate bidders. The Obama DOT didn’t repeal the old rule, but it enabled local agencies to get permission from DOT to write “geographic-based hiring preferences” into their federally funded transportation construction projects.

In general, it was an optional program for local governmental departments to help boost hiring in high unemployment areas.

Given the Trump administration's weighty bias toward corporate interests, it very well may adopt a policy of no-preference treatment in federal contracts based on almost any criteria. Businesses argue that such preferences increase costs, training, and lengthen project schedules -- and, of course, decrease profit. However, there hasn't been any study to prove these claims.

As for benefits of the program, The New York Times stated in an article (as noted by other sources above):

But advocates of local employment allowances say hiring from the neighborhood helps offset longstanding racial and gender imbalances in the construction industry. Local workers can also benefit from the on-site vocational training that many struggle to find elsewhere, they say.

Not only do people in high unemployment areas benefit, but individuals who receive jobs as a result of the program become taxpayers for local, state and federal governmental units.

Although the Trump administration has only been in office a little over six months, it has consistently made decisions that benefit businesses and not people, and has particularly shortchanged people of color, women and people of limited means. The termination of the Local Labor Hiring Pilot Program is one more example of government for the 1 percent.