Identify What Local Means to Your Organization
Construction relationships are different from procurement relationships
If in addition to launching a local-inclusion strategy around campus construction you are also creating strategies for inclusive hiring and procurement, you’ll likely adopt the same geographic footprint in terms of what the “place” in a place-based approach means to your institution. As with a procurement strategy, understanding the density of labor and construction suppliers in this footprint is an important part of defining the intended place.
A key difference between a construction strategy and related hiring and procurement strategies is that in hiring and procurement, your institution develops direct relationships with potential employees and vendors while in a construction scenario those direct connections to construction labor, subcontractors, and suppliers are made by each project’s general contractor instead. Your institutional role is to lay out expectations for the general contractor to fulfill.
There will be underemployed union laborers in your geography
If you are in a city or region where unions are an integral player in the construction industry, chances are good that your institution’s desired footprint is smaller than the union’s reach, but it will also be the case that members will be distributed through your geography.
It is quite possible that many local minority union members will have been on the bench for some time, and may not be current on dues and membership due to extended underemployment, creating a self-reinforcing barrier to further employment. Depending on how you are structuring contacts, there may be substantial mutual benefit to having a general contractor help to get those members current on dues so they can be hired as a way of meeting participation goals.