Hickenlooper 2020
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: April 10, 2019
CONTACT: press@hickenlooper.com
 

Hickenlooper Calls for "Largest Expansion of Skills Training and Apprenticeships in America's History"

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today,  at the North America’s Building Trades Unions' (NABTU) Annual Legislative Conference, Democratic presidential candidate John Hickenlooper laid out a plan for “the largest expansion in skills training and apprenticeships in America’s history." This plan includes....

• Giving every major company strong financial incentives to create a substantial skills training program within their own firm.
• Allowing Pell grants to be used to pay for apprenticeships, not just for college. 
• Expanding apprenticeship programs nationwide, modeled on Colorado's successful Careerwise apprenticeship program
• Making community college free for all young people who cannot afford it.
• Pairing regional companies with their local community colleges and union apprenticeships to ensure there is a clear training-to-job pipeline.

"There’s been a lot of attention, as there should be, on the affordability of a four-year degree and the punishing burden of student debt. But there is an even bigger problem that most of our leaders are ignoring," said Hickenlooper. "It’s the 'crisis of the forgotten two-thirds.' I’m referring to the fact that two out of every three young people will never get a four-year college degree.Those kids are the real future of our workforce, but today they are being neglected. If we really want to prepare our country for the changing workplace, that’s where we turn our gaze. We will design and build this effort in close cooperation with America’s labor unions, because you are the one with the front-line experience of training, and skill-building, and ensuring that good skills are well-rewarded."

Hickenlooper also shared his own personal experience of being laid-off for nearly two years, and said this workforce development strategy would prepare the country for the effects of automation. 
 
"The changing nature of work threatens to leave too many of our workers and too much of our future behind. Machines might be able to perform half of all U.S. jobs in the next two decades; as much of a third of the workforce will need to change occupations by 2030. Yet there is no national strategy to respond to the disruption," said Hickenlooper. 


***Full remarks as prepared follow***

I’m honored to be here. Your history represents the best of America’s history. The monuments you build have been described as the “swaggering vitality of American technology.”

The union movement has given America so much of what is best about our economy and society. The minimum wage. Social Security. The end of child labor. Work-based health coverage and safety protections.
 
The very idea of weekends.
 
As a country we take these gains for granted. But they were hard fought.
 
America owes a particular debt to the building trades union. Yours are the hands that built our country.
 
From our skylines, to our interstates, to our schools and homes, your skills and hard work define our landscape and improve our daily lives.
 
As Mayor and Governor, I was proud to work with your members to help transform Colorado to become the number one economy in America.
 
Together we can transform the entire country.
 
America today is facing a crisis of division … we’re as divided as any point since the Civil War. It has many causes, but it’s deepened by our president.
 
Unions are being attacked like never before – making it harder to organize and advocate for working people, while making it easier for big corporations to lobby against you.
 
Instead of protecting the individual rights of corporations, we need to protect the individual rights and wages of working men and women.

It’s time we had a president who understands that when our unions are strong, America is strong.
 
It’s time we had a president who stands up for collective bargaining.
 
It’s time we had a president who defends the hard earned pensions that you paid into. You did everything right, and you should be able to live out your retirement with dignity and security.
 
As President, any attempt to diminish a prevailing wage or threaten Davis Bacon will meet my veto pen.
 
Both in my time as small business owner and as mayor and governor, I brought people to the table, got them to drop their weapons, sit together, and really listen.
 
I brought together Republicans and Democrats, to get nearly universal health coverage in our state.
 
And I got the oil and gas industry to come together with environmentalists, to take real action on climate change – and create the first methane regulations in the country.
 
Today I want to talk about one area where we need to bring people together perhaps more than any other: to train our people. We need a system of lifelong learning for 21st century jobs … so that we can build an America that works.
 
Work – hard work – is at the center of our national story. It’s at the center of the Building Trades history and future. We were founded as a country of farmers, merchants, shipwrights, artisans … and brewers.
 
Ben Franklin extolled the virtues of industriousness in Poor Richard’s Almanac, and we built a national economy on the sweat of those who worked the mills and the rails and the plow.
 
America invented the airplane, the skyscraper, mass produced the automobile. We defeated fascism partly on the strength of our industrial might. We gave birth to the world’s modern information economy with Silicon Valley, the desktop computer, the internet, and smartphones.
 
At every stage, our greatest national hero was the woman and man making it all work. John Henry. Rosie the Riveter. George Meany the plumber.
 
Work. The very word is central to our lives. It’s not just our 9-to-5 jobs. It’s about whether things make sense. “This works.” “That doesn’t work.”
 
Work is in America’s DNA.
 
This isn’t abstract for me; it’s personal. I moved out to Colorado in the early 1980s to work as a geologist.
 
But then a recession hit, and I not only lost my job – I lost my whole profession. I was out of work for two years, and when you’re unemployed that long you begin to see a different person in the mirror.
 
And you know what the government did? Nothing. They actually did worse than nothing. They invited me to a resume writing class for geologists, so I could write a resume for a profession that no longer existed! I can’t tell you how demoralizing that was.
 
I learned a lot about what it means when a person doesn’t have a job to wake up to. I questioned my purpose.
 
But then some friends and I checked a book out of the library about how to write a business plan; and 34 investors and 3 loans later, we opened a brew-pub in an abandoned, forgotten part of Denver. The brewery took off. An entire neighborhood grew around it.
 
I personally worked with sheet metal workers, laborers, brick layers, painters, carpenters, electricians - and we said "you're hired” more than a 1000 times.
 
That’s a big part of why I’m running for president. I want to create the world’s most fertile ground for entrepreneurs. A place where every man and woman feels the dignity of a paycheck after an honest day’s work. Where anyone who works hard and plays by the rules can get ahead.
 
Work is at America’s heart. But today’s America isn’t working – and certainly not working well. Some say the official statistics are rosy. But the household reality tells a very different story.
 
We increasingly have an hourglass economy, with large numbers stuck at the bottom, a hollowed out middle, and a growing top with sky-high incomes and wealth.
 
No democracy has ever survived this level of income inequality.  
 
… All while healthcare costs are ravaging our families.
 
Most working households in America lack the savings to cover any major unforeseen expense, like a sudden house repair or medical bill.
 
After the Great Recession, new jobs were mostly lower-paid and less secure. A third of American workers now toil in a Gig Economy powered by minimal wages and virtually non-existing benefits.
 
On top of all this, the changing nature of work threatens to leave too many of our workers and too much of our future behind.

Machines might be able to perform half of all U.S. jobs in the next two decades; as much of a third of the workforce will need to change occupations by 2030.
 
Yet there is no national strategy to respond to the disruption. Businesses expect to increase investment in A.I. by as much as 60%. But only a small percentage plan to significantly increase investment in training their workers.
 
And just when federal employment and training programs should be ramping up, with unions showing the way, they’ve actually dropped dramatically since the 1980s.
 
Among major developed countries, the U.S. ranks 2nd to last on public investments in workforce development.
 
I want to bring people together to develop and invest in the workforce of tomorrow – to narrow the gap between the skills people have, and the skills a 21st century economy needs.
 
I know from experience that we can do this. In Colorado, we launched Skillful.com, a program for job-seekers to develop skills for tomorrow’s jobs, and for employers looking to hire for those skills.
 
We created Careerwise, a pilot collaboration with businesses and schools so high school students can "earn while they learn" as apprentices in the growing fields of IT, financial services, advanced manufacturing and healthcare.
 
It allows them to graduate without debt, with a year of college credit. It's become a model, replicated in over half the states in the country.
 
They will make more money and be able to focus on building their future, and rebuilding the middle class. 
 
It’s part of what helped drive Colorado from 40th in job creation to being the number one economy in the nation.
 
As president, I plan to build on those models. I’ll soon be laying out my comprehensive plan for strengthening America’s workforce and economy and making sure it works for all Americans.
 
But today I want to outline my strategy to build a 21st century American workforce.
 
We need to start by making work pay. That’s why I will raise the federal minimum wage to at least $15 an hour. I’ll make sure everyone has portable, universal health care and paid family and medical leave.
 
The heart of this strategy is skills and training.
 
That’s why I’m announcing the largest expansion in skills training and apprenticeships in America’s history.
 
There’s been a lot of attention, as there should be, on the affordability of a four-year degree and the punishing burden of student debt.
 
That’s a real problem, and I’ll talk more about that soon.
 
But there is an even bigger problem that most of our leaders are ignoring. It’s the “crisis of the forgotten two-thirds.” I’m referring to the fact that two out of every three young people will never get a four-year college degree.
 
Those kids are the real future of our workforce, but today they are being neglected. If we really want to prepare our country for the changing workplace, that’s where we turn our gaze.
 
We will design and build this effort in close cooperation with America’s labor unions, because YOU are the one with the front-line experience of training, and skill-building, and ensuring that good skills are well-rewarded.
 
You have it down to a science … you spend $1.4 billion a year training 60,000 people a year – which means your privately funded education and training system is bigger than any university in America.
You’ve been training workers for over a century – and we want to take your sustainable model to other industries.
 
We need you at the table, with government and the private sector, to show others how it’s done – how to create best practices and outcomes for the highest wages possible.
 
We’ll give every major company an incentive to create a substantial skills training program within their own firm. They’ll have a choice, to help finance our national skills training program with a new fee, or to opt out if they finance within their own firm.
 
We’ll expand Pell grants to be used to pay for apprenticeships, not just for college.
 
We’ll pair regional companies with their local community colleges and union apprenticeships to ensure there is a clear training-to-job pipeline.
 
We’ll make community college free for all those who cannot afford it.
 
And we will take the innovations we launched in Colorado and scale them nation-wide.
 
We will also enlist civic organizations and good corporate citizens to ensure America’s community colleges are training for the skills that companies need to drive our economy forward.
 
Others may want to attack the entire private sector. But the private sector drives growth and employs almost everyone here today. We need employers to have a financial stake in the skills training solution.
 
We will make upskilling and reskilling a standard benefit of employment, rather than an inadequate government retraining program after someone loses a job.
 
We’ll rebuild this nation’s infrastructure. And we’ll reform American capitalism so that it produces not just growth, but also equitable, sustainable, across-the-board growth.
 
If we pursue this kind of strategy for elevating America’s skills, we can change the whole way Americans look at advanced technology.
 
We can make it seem less like a threat and more like an opportunity.
 
Every robot will need teams of code writers and technicians to build, program, and repair them. Every digitized medical database will need analysts to figure out the implications for keeping people healthy.
 
We can create millions of good jobs and keep them here in America if we ensure our people have the skills to fill them.
 
When it comes to our new economy, I’m an optimist. As a small business owner, you have to be. And I believe that if we make the right investments and decisions today, based on what we know will happen tomorrow, we can take advantage of our changing economy and make it work for American workers.
 
We can transform “the forgotten two-thirds” into the “amazing two-thirds,” another greatest generation, with a level of skills our country has never imagined.
 
We can turn the specter of automation and A.I. into a major source of jobs and career opportunities.
 
We can end this devastating pattern of an hourglass economy and restore a big, healthy, growing, secure middle class, where work is rewarding and rewarded, and workers come first.
 
At the end of my presidency, I want people to say to each other: it feels like a cloud has lifted. It feels like we are coming together as a nation again.
 
And above all, I want them to say: It feels like America is working again.