Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
President Joe Biden arrives to speak about an agreement to provide Intel with up to $8.5 billion in direct funding and $11 billion in loans for computer chip plants in Arizona, Ohio, New Mexico, and Oregon, March 20, 2024, in Chandler, Arizona.
If you want to get a sense of what Biden might do in a second term, especially if he brings with him a Democratic Congress, consider what he has already done. Between November 2021 and August 2022, with the slimmest of Democratic majorities in both houses, Biden signed into law three landmark pieces of legislation—the bipartisan infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS Act.
Though Biden’s jobs creation record in general is exemplary—15 million jobs created in slightly over three years, including 800,000 manufacturing jobs. And the jobs created specifically thanks to these three laws were part of an industrial policy aimed at reviving U.S. supply chains, modernizing and greening decaying infrastructure, and adding new competence and domestic employment in semiconductors under the CHIPS Act.
As our friends at UMass Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute calculated in an authoritative report by Robert Pollin and colleagues released last September, “Investments supported by the BIL, IRA, and CHIPS programs would generate, in total, an average of nearly 3 million jobs per year, as long as investment levels associated with these programs are sustained at their anticipated levels.” They found that the expansion of job opportunities would be unusually large in occupations that did not require a four-year college degree.
Now PERI has just released a follow-up report on the occupations with the largest increased demand for labor thanks to these programs. The report also explores possible labor bottlenecks and strategies for increasing labor supply. Jeannette Wicks-Lim and co-author Pollin identify 21 occupations where demand has been increased by Biden’s three big programs, with relatively low entry-level requirements and mainly on-the-job training. These include laborers, pipelayers, and stock handlers.
But other occupations with increased demand do require significant training, such as crane operators, carpenters, electricians, sheet metal workers, wind turbine technicians—27 such occupations in all. In the context of tight labor markets, expecially for skilled occupations in short supply, whether all this great job creation proves inflationary depends heavily on a rendezvous between big investment programs and workforce development programs.
Here, too, Biden has made a good start. Whether the progress will continue depends on whether he gets a second term. The PERI authors also point out that women and people of color are grossly underrepresented in the occupations that need more apprenticeship and other training opportunites. They conclude: “The training, apprenticeship and postsecondary education programs that are needed to expand the labor supply in these … occupations should be committed to recruiting and retaining people from underrepresented groups.”
It is grossly unfair that Biden has not gotten more popular credit for his good deeds, which need to be intensified. The reason is that these and other successes have not been transformative enough, yet, for a majority of working people. That will take at least another term.
