Roundtable participants emphasized the need for more industry diversity and more child care support.
One worker expressed frustration with the benefits cliff she experienced once she began making more money during her apprenticeship. So now I m paying the full cost of child care and there s someone on W-2 getting all of their child care subsidized, Shantel Collins, a LiUNA! Local 113 laborer, WRTP graduate and mother of two, said tearing up.
Despite national calls from Republicans to tighten unemployment insurance distribution, including Wisconsin s reinstatement of the job searching requirement for unemployment benefit recipients, Walsh rejected the idea that the enhanced payments are to blame for the country s labor shortage. Instead, he pointed to coronavirus concerns and issues around wages and child care.
Wisconsin Examiner
American Jobs Plan presents opportunity to rebuild Wisconsinâs manufacturing, labor, environmental legacy
FLINT, MI - OCTOBER 13: United Auto Workers union members and their families rally near the General Motors Flint Assembly plant on Solidarity Sunday on October 13, 2019 (Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)
It seems like these days you canât throw a rock without hitting a vacant manufacturing facility in Wisconsin. For generations, manufacturing jobs kept money in the wallets and food on the tables of working families across the state. But in recent years that legacy has been threatened. Offshoring, a lack of government investment and weak procurement policies to ensure weâre using American materials to build up our infrastructure have been chipping away at our stateâs economy and at the very livelihoods of blue collar Wisconsinites in communities from Milwaukee to La Crosse.
Join the Milwaukee Area Labor Council for a 2 hour conversation on identifying the different ways people feel judged and discriminated against and why it’s important for us as the Labor Movement to become active Allies in the struggle for racial and economic justice.
The 2 hour session will look at how people, including you as a participant, identify themselves and how they think others see them. It will give us an opportunity to explore our own thoughts and ideas of others we see as different. We will then look at how systems are in place that benefit those who have, and make it harder for those who struggle. We will explore better ways for each of us, and our unions, to be better Allies to those who have been, and continue to be, marginalized and discriminated against, by systems and those who develop and protect them.