Tag: Diversity

Feb 23

2016

Buffalo trade unions lagging in diversity

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  Construction in Buffalo is booming. SolarCity. Children’s Hospital. The University at Buffalo Medical School. Taxpayer-funded projects like these are employing thousands of union construction workers. But the boom has resurrected concerns that the unions have made little progress over the past decade in diversifying their membership. While minorities make up 17 percent of Erie County’s workforce and more than half of the city’s population, they account for only 11 percent of unionized construction workers, according to the most recent figures available. What’s more, there’s been virtually no change in the racial makeup of the building trades over the past[...]

Posted 8 years ago

Nov 30

2015

Outrages & Insights: Diversity at SolarCity

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There’s a problem with the pipeline that is feeding workers to the SolarCity project at Riverbend, Jim Heaney told Steve Brown on Sunday’s installment of Outrages & Insights. Heaney, referring to a story last week reported by Charlotte Keith, noted that African Americans accounted for only 5.7 percent of the construction workers employed at the SolarCity site during the quarter that ended in September. That contrasts with a city population that is 38 percent black. The project is nevertheless meeting its goal of employing a workforce that is at least 15 percent minority.

Posted 8 years ago

Nov 24

2015

Diversity, but few jobs for African Americans

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Diversity hiring goals set for the construction of the SolarCity plant in South Buffalo have not translated into a lot of jobs for African-American workers. While African Americans make up an increasing share of the project’s workforce, they accounted for only 5.7 percent of those on the job for the quarter ending this September, an Investigative Post analysis found. That’s in a city that’s almost 40 percent African-American and a county with a workforce that’s 11 percent black, according to the state Department of Labor. The project is nevertheless meeting its minority workforce goal of 15 percent, largely through the[...]

Posted 8 years ago
Investigative Post

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