To Increase Building-Trades Employment, Cut Big Labor Privileges
One of the worthy goals expressed by the second Trump Administration during its first months in office is increasing by 40-50% the nationwide number of apprenticeships preparing Americans for building-trades and other high-paying jobs.
The U.S. construction industry is indeed experiencing a significant shortage of construction workers, which could be mitigated by federal, state and local regulatory reforms.
The greatest impediment to the expansion of family-supporting construction jobs is, without a doubt, the unceasing opposition of building-trades union bosses.
National Right to Work Committee President Mark Mix commented:
“Union bosses publicly claim to support more apprenticeships in construction. But they do everything they can to keep the number of newly certified journeypersons to a minimum.”
Bosses’ Strategy: Limit Union Membership and Exclude Nonmembers From Job Market
A little over two years ago, 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 “A Union View From the Inside,” a commentary published by RealClearPolicy on June 19, 2023, the opposition of 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.”
Union bosses’ “beggar thy neighbor” mentality unfortunately seeps down to the union rank and file in many cases. Mr. Ludwig recalled with dismay how, at union meetings, members would “stand up and demand that fewer people be admitted to the union and granted opportunities union members profit from.”
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 and union-free contractors 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.”
Number of Union-Registered Apprenticeship Programs Is Actually Falling
“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 the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) construction-industry apprenticeship data,” said Mr. Mix.
“As a March 2025 analysis of these data for FY 2019 through FY 2024 pointed out, despite massive taxpayer-funded support for state and local government-registered apprenticeship programs [GRAPs], those programs collectively graduate fewer than 40,000 construction journeyworkers a year.
“That’s only enough to fill just over a quarter of the estimated annual new openings in construction jobs.
“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 current GRAPs, 69% 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 U.S. construction workers control nearly 70% of GRAPs. But despite the vast unmet demand for skilled construction workers, the number of union-boss GRAPs has actually fallen in recent years!”
Either Eliminate ‘Roadblocks To the Establishment of New GRAPs,’ or Allow Alternatives
Practically since the U.S. Senate confirmed her in March, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer has been barnstorming the nation to promote the Trump Administration’s drive to expand the number of apprenticeships in America to “at least a million.”
Many, if not most, of the additional apprenticeships would be in the construction industry.
“Right to Work supporters wish Lori Chavez-DeRemer well,” said Mr. Mix.
“But if she has any hope of making the Trump team’s vision of a million or more apprenticeships a reality, she must face the fact that she has only two choices: Either eliminate the Big Labor roadblocks to the establishment of new GRAPs, or help would-be hardhats become journeypersons through alternative means.”
Labor Secretary’s Pandering To Construction Union Bosses Doesn’t Help Administration
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 gives bureaucrats who are typically pro-Big Labor wide discretion to stop the registration of apprenticeship programs.
But the Trump Labor Department wouldn’t need Congress’s help to create guidelines for industry-recognized, non-GRAP apprenticeships that give young employees the opportunity to get the construction training they need without having to join or pay dues to an unwanted union.
Unfortunately, so far Ms. Chavez-DeRemer has failed even to acknowledge publicly the NAA’s malign role in tamping down the number of construction apprenticeships, much less propose any measure to mitigate the harm.
Mr. Mix commented: “The fact is, in state after state the labor secretary has visited and touted as examples of the value of apprenticeships the very Big Labor-controlled GRAPs whose top officers have a vested interest in blocking the establishment of additional training programs.
“Even in purely political terms, Ms. Chavez-DeRemer’s pandering to construction union bosses makes no sense.
“As stalwart economic journalist Dominic Pino explained in an article for National Review this March, construction union bosses wield monopoly control over tiny shares of hard hats in key states that went for Donald Trump in 2024, well below even the 10.3% national average.
“In pro-Trump Right to Work states like Tennessee, Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina,’ wrote Mr. Pino, ‘it’s hard to find a unionized construction worker.’”
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