Yeah, local residents who have the skills, licenses, or certifications to do the work required. Go ahead, hire some fast food workers to run heavy construction equipment, do surveying, constructing overpasses, welding, and laying highways.
Davis Bacon requirements on federal construction projects in effect means only union labor. What is the racial breakdown on the city’s construction unions membership?
I know it’s asking an awful lot for a “reporter” to consider such a question as it requires having some “actual knowledge” of how the world works.
Here in NJ you’d just see a line of five black men and white women waving the traffic flags (whereas before you’d see one at each “end” of the project to control traffic). They wear their costumes (immaculate hard hats and boots), and stand in clusters watching the white men operate the machinery and hand tools. The costs of these tokens is the unwritten “diversity tax”, and impacts businesses everywhere. I’ve noticed at my job there seems to be a “Y=2X” policy at work, where each retiring old white man are replaced with two females (not much younger) who have been cast off by other companies as useless - and combined they still don’t deliver the same results (but they lighten the load for us real workers because we can shorten our hours to match theirs).
The diversity tax is observed by companies to fend off lawsuits and the government to maintain the façade of assimilation and an integrated workforce; no amount of pushing or incentives is having the desired outcome in terms of diversity at the top of any fields that aren’t traditionally female. Without government intervention (either government jobs or mandated diversity for contracts), the workforce in this country would be white and Asian men by a large majority.