Get Started: Understand the Complexity of Your Local Construction Landscape
Creating and implementing a strategy that emphasizes support for a local and diverse construction workforce and supply chain requires a solid understanding of how a regional construction market works. This is an interconnected world of project sponsors, craft and labor unions, construction management firms, subcontractors, and other vendors. You will need to be aware of how these players connect to one another, and how factors that are outside of your institution’s control can impact your own local and diversity inclusion in campus construction projects.
Know what major projects are happening in your city or region
In markets where there is more demand for diversity in construction labor and vendors than the existing supply can fully meet, a major construction project that has ambitious diversity goals can easily occupy the capacity of the strongest local and regional minority- and women-owned vendors as well as available minority union labor, making those construction resources scarce when it comes to your own campus construction projects. Being aware of the current regional construction activity levels when you put out your own construction RFPs helps you understand any variations in response rates and inclusion successes.
A history of entrenched racism in the construction industry affects present-day minority membership in construction related unions
The history of union labor is packed with victories for the common good, but this history also holds a complex story of discrimination, and that legacy continues to have an impact today. Many construction related unions struggle with issues of diversity, and any state related requirements for meeting diversity metrics have been generally weak or poorly enforced. For the purposes of your build-local strategy, this means that the minority and women labor pool may be small – but hopefully also growing.