One of the key goals of the U.S. Department of Labor since President Donald Trump’s second term commenced in January 2025 has been to expand the number of apprenticeships in America to “at least a million.”
Since apprenticeships prepare Americans for high-paying jobs, especially in the building trades, and the construction industry is clearly experiencing a significant shortage of workers, this is a worthy aspiration.
Because of the opposition of union bosses who publicly claim to support more apprenticeships, but actually do everything they can to keep the number of newly certified journeypersons to a minimum, achieving this goal will be difficult.
In June 2023, former unionized welder Karl Ludwig publicly exposed how building-trades union bosses abuse their government-granted special privileges to jack up the amount of money they can extract from businesses and customers by reducing the supply of tradespeople in the market.
As Mr. Ludwig observed in his contribution to the RealClearPolicy forum (“A Union View From the Inside”), the opposition of the powerful officers of United Association (UA), the union to which he formerly belonged, to the “growth and advancement of skilled labor” takes several forms. One is “intentionally limiting union membership.”
UA and other building-trades union bigwigs also routinely seek to diminish the supply of labor and drive up prices through “state license laws, prevailing wage, and project-labor laws” that make it difficult, if not impossible, for union-free workers and businesses to compete for prime projects.
And it’s not just workers who lose the opportunity for gainful employment in the construction industry, or to compete for the most desirable jobs, who get hurt by these policies of exclusion.
As a consequence of union bosses’ avarice and the public policies that enable them, “less pipefitting work gets done,” and “American industries processing steam, petrochemical, water and other materials suffer from the loss of valuable skilled labor.”
“The accuracy of Karl Ludwig’s observations about UA kingpins and their applicability to the bosses of other building-trades unions are borne out by Department of Labor construction industry data,” said National Right to Work Committee President Mark Mix.
“As an analysis submitted to the U.S. Senate last fall by the Associated Builders and Contractors noted, from FY 2019 through FY 2024, despite massive taxpayer-funded support for government registered apprenticeship programs [GRAPs], such programs graduate fewer than 40,000 journeypersons a year.
“That’s far short of the estimated 439,000 new construction workers needed by U.S. companies in 2025 alone.
“A key reason why GRAPs are miserably failing to meet the demand for additional skilled tradespersons is that anti-competitive federal and state laws work in combination to empower GRAPs, most of which are Big Labor-controlled, to impede the establishment of new GRAPs.
“As a consequence of ‘union-friendly’ laws, Big Labor bosses who represent just 10.3% of construction workers control 69% of GRAP participants. But despite the vast unmet demand for skilled construction workers, the number of union-boss GRAPs has actually fallen in recent years!”
Mr. Mix continued: “The ideal solution would be for Congress and the White House to work together to bring about the repeal of the misbegotten, New Deal-era National Apprenticeship Act [NAA], which as currently implemented gives bureaucrats who are typically pro Big Labor wide discretion to stop the registration of apprenticeship programs.
“Roadblocks to the launching of new GRAPs are especially acute in Big Labor stronghold states like California, Minnesota, and New York, but they also represent a substantial problem in many Right to Work states.
“Fortunately, even without Congress’s active help, the Trump Labor Department has the authority to adopt regulations curtailing the unwarranted power of Big Labor-dominated state apprenticeship agencies to block training programs from being registered on vague and questionable grounds.”
Recently, the Trump DOL, now headed by Acting Sec. Keith Sonderling, appears to be headed in the right direction.
This March, the DOL announced four new guidance documents on the implementation of GRAPs with the stated goals of improving flexibility and removing burdens for program sponsors.
Most importantly, the DOL guidance indicates state-level bureaucrats should be prohibited from “evaluating/registering apprenticeship standards or programs, making apprenticeability decisions, or deregistering programs.”
“In their regular communications with White House staff members,” noted Mr. Mix, “Right to Work federal legislative officers are encouraging the Trump Administration to follow through on the regulatory reforms for GRAPs outlined by the DOL in March and make them a reality in the near future.”
Fixing apprenticeships is especially urgent and important for the current presidential administration because the “largest infrastructure buildout in human history,” as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang accurately calls it, is now underway.
In a recent Pittsburgh commencement speech, Mr. Huang forecast that the $7 trillion global investment in building data centers and factories, in which his firm is a key player, would create a “boom in jobs of electricians, plumbers, technicians and builders,” as the Economic Times indirectly quoted him.
“The potential is there for vast numbers of additional jobs with six-figure salaries for blue-collar Americans,” said Mr. Mix.
“Unfortunately, if America isn’t able to furnish enough skilled plumbers, electricians, steelworkers, network technicians, etc., investments will go to other countries with better training pipelines instead of the U.S.
“Frankly, the second Trump Administration lost valuable time in addressing America’s apprenticeship problem in 2025 and early 2026, when ex-Big Labor Congresswoman Lori Chavez-DeRemer, whom the President had appointed at Teamster boss Sean O’Brien’s suggestion, was heading the DOL.
“Now that personal scandals have forced Ms. Chavez-DeRemer to resign, there is hope that under Acting Sec. Sonderling rapid progress can be made in removing government-imposed impediments to the establishment of new apprenticeship programs in all 50 states. But time is of essence.”
This article was originally published in our monthly newsletter. Go here to access previous newsletter posts.
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