Workforce Diversity and Inclusion

Workforce policies and strategies promoting diversity and inclusion ensure that everyone can benefit and prosper from EV-related job growth. In other words, underserved community members should be able to access good jobs related to EV production, EV charging station production, building EV charging infrastructure, and EV maintenance.

What does that look like? Let’s use a example. Fun EVs (a hypothetical company) creates and sells EVs, and which employs people for management, human resources, engineering, manufacturing, and other occupations. A diverse and inclusive Fun EVs workforce means that it uses:

• Recruiting and hiring practices that target talented and diverse job applicants to fill professional (e.g. engineers, accountants, etc.) and management (e.g. CEO, VP, etc.) jobs. It does not rely solely on referral systems and does not recruit solely from high-ranked universities (which tend to be less diverse than lower-ranked schools).
• Targeted or local hiring practices to employ individuals from local underserved communities (see below).

Equity Guide:

To ensure EV-related jobs are accessible to underserved community members, especially if public funding is involved, stakeholders should consider these approaches:

High Road Strategies

A “High Road” strategy is “characterized by high-quality work, high-quality jobs and broad access to opportunity for a diversity of businesses and workers.”^[8] High road strategies typically have four components:^[9]

1. Generating demand for green goods and services,
2. Ensuring job quality and equitable access to opportunity,
3. Supporting businesses that want to thrive in a high-road market and
4. Creating workforce training pipelines that connect vulnerable people to green jobs.

Click here for best practices info and see below for more resources.

Targeted and local hiring policies

Targeted hire: A policy “aimed at increasing employment opportunities for disadvantaged workers, who often experience difficulty accessing” workforce pipelines.^[10] Targeted hiring policies create “mechanisms to increase the availability and accessibility of opportunities for these workers. For example, targeted hiring policies “can recommend that a percentage of the total hours in a project are performed by apprentices, women, or disadvantaged workers.”^[11]

Click here for more info and see below for more resources.

Local hire: A policy aimed at hiring people who live close to the place of work. This increases the availability and accessibility of local workers and is particularly valuable when the workplace is located in a city or area with a high low-income population. The local hiring policy, for example, can require that a certain proportion of the people working on a project are from a particular area.

Click here for more info and see below for more resources.

Ensure Access to Good, Family-supporting Jobs

Typically, these jobs pay well, and at minimum offer employer-provided benefits like health-care, pensions/retirement benefits, paid sick leave, paid vacation, safe working conditions, reasonable schedules, organizing rights, and a modicum of job security.^[12]

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Create Career Pathway Jobs

Entry-level jobs for at-risk youth or underserved community members can be designed as stepping stones towards real careers in the growing clean energy economy.

Career pathways provide an “integrated collection of programs and services intended to develop students’ core academic, technical and employability skills; provide them with continuous education, training; and place them in high-demand, high-opportunity jobs.”^[13]

Example from Green For All Research^[14]

Limitless Vistas, Inc. (LVI) is a New Orleans-based nonprofit organization that provides training and work experience to at-risk youth and disadvantaged young adults. LVI students receive hands-on training in a variety of areas, including urban planning and development, farming, and bioremediation. Additionally, LVI students work with a variety of partners to conduct environmental service projects while adding to their skill sets.

Click here for more examples and see below for more resources.

Remove barriers to employment that prevent many people of color from accessing jobs

Based on the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Green-Collar Jobs Campaign, “people facing barriers to employment,” means people who are:^[15]

• No/low income and/or receive public assistance;
• People of color;
• Women;
• Previously homeless or in supportive or transitional housing;
• Overcoming prior criminal convictions or juvenile adjudication;
• Suffering from chronic under/unemployment;
• Single parents;
• Limited English speakers or speak English as a second language;
• Without a GED or high school diploma; and/or
• Emancipated foster care youth

Some possible strategies to remove those barriers, taken from PolicyLink’s research:^[16]

• Advocate for “Ban the Box” policies that eliminate questions about conviction history from job applications, ideally for private as well as public employers. “Since Durham, North Carolina, passed such a measure, hiring rates for people with records increased dramatically, from 2 percent in 2011 to 15 percent thus far in 2014.”
• “Fund public transit, including buses, that connects communities of color with high unemployment to job centers.”
• “Enact legislation forbidding employers from running credit checks on job applicants, as 10 states and several cities, including Chicago, have done.”
• “Launch efforts to increase citizenship; studies show that immigrants who successfully naturalize increase their earnings by 8 to 11 percent.”

Please reference the links below for more information and guidance on how to ensure underserved community members can access EV related jobs.

Tips for Success:

Job tracking and reporting

EV related businesses using public funding or getting tax breaks should be required to track and report employment and workforce data in order to assess job benefits to underserved communities in particular.

To determine the overall jobs benefit accurately, as well as the specific benefits to underserved community members, employment and workforce data should be collected and tracked at the individual level: length of employment, hours worked, positions hired for, advancement, hard‐to‐employ characteristics, income‐level, race, zip code or census tract.

Click here for more info and see below for more resources.

Helpful Links & Examples:

Helpful Links

• Targeted Hiring and First Source Referral Systems (Partnership for Working Families)
• Just and Fair Employment for All: Good for Families, Communities, and the Economy (PolicyLink)
• Equitable Development Toolkit: Local Hiring (PolicyLink)
• Equitable Development Toolkit: Living Wage Provisions (PolicyLink)
• Expanding Opportunity: Employing The Formerly Incarcerated In The Green Economy (Green For All)
• Best Practices in Green Re-Entry Strategies (Green For All)
• Bridging the Economic and Climate Gap: A Workshop by Green For All (Green For All)
• Pathway to Clean Jobs and Prosperity: State Policies for Helping Low-income Working Families Build Clean Energy Careers (The Working Poor Families Project)
• The Equity Solution: Racial Inclusion Is Key to Growing a Strong New Economy (PolicyLink)
• Full Employment for All: The Social and Economic Benefits of Race and Gender Equity in Employment (PolicyLink)
• National Equity Atlas (PolicyLink and Program for Environmental and Regional Equity at University of Southern California): A comprehensive data resource to track, measure, and make the case for inclusive growth
• Exploring Targeted Hire: An Assessment of Best Practices in the Construction Industry (UCLA Labor Center)
• Job Projection and Tracking Guide (Green For All)

Examples

• LCP Tracker: A software solution for construction site compliance management, certified payroll and workforce reporting
• Elation Systems: An information technology firm that focuses solely on providing web-based compliance management systems for government agencies, private businesses, and contractors to help them meet compliance reporting and monitoring requirements

Job Training

As the number of EVs on the road increases, so will the need for a workforce that is prepared and trained to build them, fix them, and make sure there’s infrastructure to plug them in. Skilled workers for these jobs will not develop on their own, and the benefits of the clean energy economy will not “automatically spread to the workers and communities with the greatest economic needs.”^[17]

Equity Guide:

To ensure underserved community members can access the job training, stakeholders should consider the following these practices from the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Green-Collar Jobs Campaign:

• Assess opportunities for EV-related jobs in your area
• Identify cross-sector partnerships, for example:
  • Community colleges
  • Local government officials
  • Community-based non-profit organizations
  • Green businesses and industry representatives
  • Labor unions
  • Existing job training programs and educational institutions
• Find funding
• Develop a comprehensive curriculum
  • Soft skills training: prepares participants to enter the world of work
  • Hard skills training: thorough hands-on training detailing how to perform tasks that will be required on the job
  • Financial literacy skills training: prepares participants to responsibly manage their money and save for the future
  • Environmental literacy
  • Paid internship or on-the-job training component: provides an opportunity for participants to successfully enter and stay in the labor market
  • Green Business/Employer Councils: provide ongoing support to the training program by agreeing to take participants on as interns and, if they do well and there are openings, to hire them as employees
  • Duration: Programs should balance brevity (so that graduates can get into green-collar jobs quickly) with to the need to provide enough time for students to learn and develop their skills in a comprehensive way
• Target participants and recruitment
  • Design your green-collar job training program with a definite group of target participants in mind
• Provide wrap-around support services
  • Comprehensive case management services provided by trained counselors or social workers can be critical for supporting people who face barriers to employment. Counselors develop individualized plans based on an assessment of a full range of needs, such as child care, transportation, housing, mental health, physical health, financial stability, and educational achievement. Counselors will often work with an individual’s family members to involve them as part of the wraparound plan. And counselors will meet regularly and frequently with individuals to ensure progress and follow-through.

Click here for best practices info and case studies.

Helpful Links & Examples:

• Green Pathways Out of Poverty: Workforce Development Initiatives (Green For All)
• Greener Skills: How Credentials Create Value In The Clean Energy Economy (Green For All)
• Greener Pathways: Jobs and Workforce Development in the Clean Energy Economy (Green For All)
• Making Green Work: Best Practices in Green-Collar Job Training (Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Green-Collar Jobs Campaign)
• Green Job Training: Changing Lives, Fighting Climate Change (video) (Green For All)
• Green Equity Toolkit: Standards and Strategies for Advancing Race, Gender and Economic Equity in the Green Economy (Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation)
  • Case studies video
• Careers in Electric Vehicles (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)
• Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Training Program (EVITP)
• Transportation Electrification Curriculum Development (University of California, Los Angeles – Luskin Center)

Supplier Diversity

Supplier diversity is the practice of purchasing goods and services from “diverse business enterprises” (DBEs) owned by minorities, women, disabled veterans, and LGBT individuals.

Companies that use supplier diversity to introduce competition into their procurement often find it leads to higher quality goods and services and lower prices. Companies that rely on the same “old-boy networks” of suppliers year after year often miss opportunities to buy better and cheaper goods and services. A smaller company can often provide faster, more tailored service than a bigger, one-size-fits-all company can.

Most of the major automakers have successful supplier diversity programs. Ford, General Motors, Honda, and Toyota are all members of the Billion Dollar Roundtable, a group of eighteen corporations that spend at least $1 billion dollars annually with diverse businesses.^[18]

By creating economic opportunities in communities that most need them, supplier diversity helps stimulate state and local economies, help create jobs in underserved communities, and build wealth for people of color. For example, most minority-owned businesses employ over 75% people of color.^[19]

Supplier diversity also helps companies obtain better products and services at lower prices by encouraging diverse businesses to compete with entrenched suppliers.

Supplier diversity in the EV market can:

• • Increase competition

Improve and tailor customer service

• Stimulate crucial sectors of state and local economies
• Create jobs
• Improve the environment

As the nation’s demographics continue to change, automakers that have strong partnerships with diverse businesses will instill brand loyalty in diverse markets, which will provide the automakers with a competitive advantage.^[20]

Equity Guide:

To ensure EV related businesses benefit diverse businesses and underserved communities, especially if public funding is involved, stakeholders should consider these approaches:

• Identify large pots of public dollars that fund private business and advocate for laws or regulations that require that businesses receiving public funding to contract with diverse business enterprises for a minimum percent of their overall dollar spend on goods and services
• Require that each recipient of a publicly funded grant or loan report, on a periodic basis, their dollar spend on goods and services with diverse business enterprises
• Require that each recipient of a publicly funded grant or loan submit (to the relevant government agency) and implement a detailed and verifiable outreach plan for increasing opportunities to work with diverse subcontractors
• Require the relevant government agency (providing grants or loans to businesses) to establish guidelines for all grant or loan recipients to follow in carrying out the established supplier diversity mandates
• Require the relevant government agency to develop its own outreach program to inform and recruit the most qualified loan and grant applicants from diverse communities, including but not limited to women, minorities, disabled veterans, and LGBT business enterprises

Click here for more info and see below for more resources.

Helpful Links & Examples:

Helpful links

• Equitable Development Toolkit: Minority Contracting (PolicyLink)
• Supplier Diversity Report Cards (The Greenlining Institute)

Examples

• Utility Supplier Diversity Program (The California Public Utilities Commission): See General Order 156 for more info
• Insurance Diversity Initiative (California Department of Insurance): Assembly Bill 53 (Solorio, 2012), requires major California insurers to submit an annual report to the Insurance Commissioner regarding their efforts to increase procurement from women-, minority-, and disabled veteran-owned business enterprises
• EmPower California (California Energy Commission): Assembly Bill 865 (Alejo, 2015) directs the Commission to develop and implement an outreach program to increase the participation of women, minority, disabled veteran, and LGBT business enterprises in their grants and loans