LYNNWOOD—The Lynnwood City Council received a briefing from the Workforce Task Force at its Work Session Monday, July 20, exploring utilizing a community workforce agreement for future contract jobs.
A Community Workforce Agreement (CWA) is a pre-hire labor agreement that a city or other public agency requires for a construction project (or group of projects). It establishes the terms and conditions under which contractors and subcontractors will perform the work, with the goal of promoting labor stability and delivering community benefits.
The implementation of a CWA would, according to the Task Force, create a change in the way that the city handles construction projects, to benefit its targeted/priority workers.
Some of the benefits of using a CWA is reducing wage theft and misclassification, expanding benefit programs such as health and welfare and pensions, offering robust training and apprenticeship programs within the city, and increasing access and opportunities to careers.
This partnership is meant to bring a smooth, cost-efficient project to the parties and to provide training and employment opportunities to targeted/priority workers.
The CWA would define the rights and responsibilities of the parties involved and change the expectations and accountability of the parties, particularly with the community and contractors alike.
The Workforce Taskforce includes Lynnwood Council members Bryce Owings (chair), Isabel Mata, Vice President Derica Escamilla, and Chelsea Wright who met with ML Johnson and Associations LLC. recently to brainstorm ways in which a workforce agreement could work in the City of Lynnwood.
Owings said some takeaways from that meeting were exploring priority hiring, which would prioritize Lynnwood residents or even hire a certain percentage of graduating high schoolers.
Another option, Owings said, is partnering with neighboring cities which would require hiring a new employee but would lessen the cost on the cities involved in the long run. The cities currently being considered at Edmonds and Mountlake Terrace.
Though Project Labor Agreements are the more traditional route, a Workforce Agreement is also becoming increasingly more popular, Owings noted, which is more of a partnership with the community (i.e. contractors).
“It’s a partnership with the contractors, it’s a partnership with the community, what we want from it and how do we want it to benefit our community and we can be as aggressive, or less aggressive as we want and depending on the city that might be different,” said Owings. “Each city might be different things that we might want but we would split the cost of that administration.”
Council member Owings said ML Johnson and Associates is a great agency to work with because they are an outside entity with no ulterior motives other than providing the city with information.
Councilwoman Wright added that the workforce’s conversation with ML Johnson and Associates representatives was “inspiring” – particularly the segments that related to diversity and inclusion, specifically “disadvantaged workers” in targeted neighborhoods.
“We have a lot of people in our city, and frankly in cities everywhere, who don’t know what an outlet can be for them. Maybe for a high school student college is not for them, they’re at home taking care of their siblings while their parents are working two jobs each,” said Wright adding that her youngest son attended college in New York before realizing it was not for him and joining the trades instead. “I like the options that we have. I like the options we have. I realize it does take money and we are in a huge crunch, but I think that the work is possible…I see a real opportunity for our community members here. These are not just jobs right now, these are careers you can have for the rest of your life, right here in your city.”
Council Vice President Escamilla said that the task force had plans of assembling a group of questions and a list of all their wants with the hopes of created a tailored presentation, but ML Johnson and Associates beat them to the punch with a power point presentation that answered most of their questions.
“At the end of the day they had their costs already figured out. It was 1.5 FTE’s. Now if we join forces with other cities it would be more paperwork and more administrations so maybe that becomes two or three, but this could be a regional thing and we’ve been talking about that with our animal control and our street sweepers, so again it intersects with the things that this council is aligned with,” said Escamilla, adding that the team hopes to drill down the impacts in future meetings. “Our wants come at a cost.”
Owings closed out the briefing by saying the task force’s work is just in its very early stages and there’s a lot more work to be done.
Author: Kienan Briscoe
