Manufacturing Renaissance is pleased to announce that Erica Swinney Staley, Executive Director has been appointed by National Skills Coalition (NSC) and Business Leaders United for Workforce Partnerships (BLU) to serve on a national Manufacturing Panel that will advise the Biden administration on its “Made in All of America” initiative and related policies.
Erica Swinney Staley, along with other leaders in the panel, will meet in the coming months with Biden administration officials at the Department of Commerce, as well as Congressional leadership to help shape federal recovery policies for the manufacturing industry.
“We want to ensure that federal recovery efforts support the businesses and workers most impacted by the pandemic, particularly workers of color, women, and workers with a high school degree or less,” said Andy Van Kleunen, CEO of National Skills Coalition. “We know that skills training alone will not ensure an inclusive recovery, but we also know that it must be part of our nation’s federal policy response. If we want those policies to succeed, industry leaders must help shape them.”
NSC and BLU convened a total of four recovery panels for the following industries: Healthcare, Manufacturing, Infrastructure, and Retail/Hospitality.
Different industries have experienced the COVID-19 pandemic in different ways. The goal of the industry recovery panels is to ensure that federal recovery initiatives include investments in job training and support services that workers and businesses need to adapt to the structural shifts within their industries.
“Since before the pandemic, youth and young adults from low-income, Black and Brown communities typically do not have the opportunity to learn about or prepare for these exciting, good paying careers from home or school. Meanwhile, in the Chicagoland area we have tens-of-thousands of good paying manufacturing jobs going unfilled while we have crisis-level unemployment among youth and young adults. I’m honored to participate on this panel to represent this perspective centering young people as one of the primary beneficiaries of new federal policy and programs in manufacturing and workforce development. If successful, companies will win and communities will win,” said Erica Staley.
The Industry Recovery Panel initiative is supported in part by Walmart, JPMorgan Chase, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, and Microsoft.