August 30, 2021

Dear Speaker Pelosi, Leader Schumer, Leader McCarthy, and Leader McConnell,

Thank you for your ongoing efforts to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and help an economy reeling from the public health crisis.  As vaccinations increase, businesses reopen, and families start to resume pre-pandemic activities, our industries are committed to a robust and inclusive economic recovery.   

With a generational shift in occupational roles economy-wide and accelerated level of digital transformation brought on by COVID-19, we have dueling problems—workers unable to find good-paying jobs that fit their skills and employers struggling to hire skilled workers for in-demand and emerging roles.  Strong federal investment in the long-term success of America's workforce is critical to solving both challenges and address this skills mismatch.

For businesses across industries, this mismatch existed prior to the pandemic and was only exacerbated by the crisis:

• Surveys of manufacturing executives at the end of 2020 found 62.4% of respondents identified “inability to attract and retain talent” as their primary current business challenge, a concern that had topped the list for ten quarters prior to the pandemic.
• Analyses of previous infrastructure deals suggests that every $100 billion invested creates 1 million new jobs, largely in construction, energy, transportation and logistics industries, the majority of which require some training after high school.
• Employment in healthcare occupations will grow 15 percent from 2019 to 2029, adding 2.4 million new jobs.
•  Leisure and hospitality employment increased by 280,000 in March 2021 but was still down by 3.1 million jobs since February 2020. Likewise, retail added 23,000 jobs in March 2021, but employment was still 381,000 below its February 2020 level.

Congressional investments in workforce training and supports are essential to position workers for the new, skilled jobs that are going to be part of a different post-pandemic economy and to meet industry demand.  And workers themselves agree – 82% want increased public investment in skills training to help people find new jobs in response to the pandemic and 81% want to see increased investments in skills training in the long-term.

The undersigned businesses and industry associations urge you to support investments in workforce and skills as part of any economic recovery legislation. Specifically, we urge you to:

• Provide sufficient resources to support the demand for sector-based workforce training and reskilling programs that help bridge skills mismatch, including workers' digital skill needs, while promoting more equitable economic mobility,
• Expand workforce training capacity by providing tax incentives for training programs led by industry, educators, and non-profit organizations and embracing flexible short-term and on-line training in key digital and emerging, in-demand skills, and
• Drive informed training by growing real-time labor force data identifying economywide trends focused on emerging roles and the skills needed for in-demand jobs and high-demand sectors and measure the equitable impact of public investments.

We are committed to helping workers thrive in the changing economic landscape.  Given the scale of change, government investment, assistance, and incentives are needed now more than ever to prepare the workforce for the economy of the future. We stand ready to work with you to build a strong and resilient economy.