The Biden-Harris administration’s industrial investments mark a turning point for economic policy that can help the United States regain competitiveness in several emerging sectors and create jobs across the economy. These investments include creating hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs that, at their best, provide routes to the middle class and offer a new generation of American workers decent wages and benefits and the freedom to unionize. Unlike in federally supported construction work, however, the government had little experience in supporting job quality incentives in the manufacturing sector prior to the enactment of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), the CHIPS and Science Act (CHIPS), and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Awarding agencies have had to learn how to incentivize job quality in the three years since the enactment of the first of these laws. While the government has made significant progress in encouraging a job quality race to the top in the sector, federal agencies and pro-worker lawmakers can do more to ensure manufacturing jobs created with government support offer good wages and the chance to join a union and are accessible to workers from all walks of life.
The IIJA, CHIPS, and IRA build out the country’s competitiveness in several key manufacturing sectors—including semiconductors, clean energy, electric vehicles (EVs), and parts and products necessary to meet the demand for building new and improved road, water, and digital infrastructure. One group of researchers estimates that over the implementation period, the laws will create 230,000 manufacturing jobs annually in the United States that are supported directly by new investments.
The above excerpt was originally published in the Center for American Progress.
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