 Good morning. Thank you all for coming to our event today where we are going to probably delve into a topic which in the policy community is little explored. Certainly the subject of black men is often talked about and connecting black men to good jobs is often talked about but particularly the transportation sector is a way to grow the number of and availability of good jobs for black men not just as a temporary stimulus measure to address high unemployment in the African American community but really to set the stage for long term growth and living standards for black men is an underexplored topic and we're pleased that you all are here to join us and we've got such a tremendous panel to explore these issues. We're going to keep things brief since we are starting a little bit late due to some technical difficulties. Thank you all for your indulgence. So I will begin just by introducing our moderator who will get things started for us this afternoon this morning. She excuse me is Linda Harris who is with the Center for Law and Social Policy and there she is the director of youth policy. Linda has more than a quarter century of experience. She started when she was just a young girl working on a variety of working in a variety of workforce development initiatives. She has she has worked for Baltimore City working for the office of the mayor doing a lot of economic development and she has also co chair. She's the co chair of the campaign for youth which is an alliance of national organizations which is seeking to raise awareness of youth who fall outside of the labor market mainstream. So she's an excellent person to guide our discussion today. Linda Harris. Yeah that quarter of a century thing made me feel ancient. But it's actually been more than that but who's counting. I'm really delighted to facilitate and moderate this panel discussion which I'm looking forward to just having seen some of the presentations. The Center for Law and Social Policy some of you may know we've been in this space for 40 years of developing policy solutions that impact the lives of low income people but specifically in the arena of youth policy. We have concentrated on what do we do about the situation of disconnected youth in communities of high youth distress. And more recently we've also put a laser focus on that issue of young men of color in particular young black men their labor market education situation. About two years ago we issued a publication called Dream World. It was part of the 2025 campaign for black men and boys and it was a vision document. And the question was at the time the young young men entering kindergarten in 2025 will be 18 years old and entering the labor force. And what do we have to do different to assure that the such the conversations we have in 2025 don't sound like what we're having now. How do we elevate the opportunity. And part of what we talked about in that issuance wasn't that the fact we had a need to commit to a full scale community wide strategies that reach out and reengage young black men. That we have to build supported pathways that will put them on paths to the labor market where that can have opportunity for economic success. We where we have to greatly expand the opportunities for work experience work exposure internships job creation opportunities. And that we have to deal with this issue of how do we broker access when there is opportunity because it's not always just a question of do the jobs exist. But how do we assure the access for young young black men and how do we address some of the unfair hiring practices that are there. We did a subsequent paper called building post secondary pathways for low income young men of color where there we highlighted the importance that community plays in assembling the systems and the resources and adapting the policies to make these kinds of things happen at scale and the role that federal policy and state policy has to play in building the capacity of communities. Now I put all of this in person. I put this out there because this is what is near and dear to our work. But the one thing that we recognize that without vibrant sectors of the economy without access to those sectors none of this is going to work. And that's what's exciting about today's discussion that's that's going to happen because we're talking about an industry that has opportunities to have jobs that may be and is amenable to how can we provide opportunity for young black men. And how do we use the industry the transportation sector to deliver these young men to futures of economic promise. And so I'm excited about those intersections as we talk. Our panelists represent a rich assembly of expertise and experience in this arena. And we'll talk about how the transportation infrastructure may hold promise for advancing economic opportunity for young black men. We talked about foregoing the bios and interest of time. I want to send you to the you know the materials that you have for websites where you can get the bios and more background on each of the presenters. But I'm going to introduce them in order and each one of them will speak for approximately 10 minutes and then we're going to open up for question. We have Algernon Austin who's the director of the program on race, ethnicity and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute. Second we will have Michelle Holder who's a senior labor market analyst for the Community Service Society of New York. Then we're going to have Anita Hairston who's a senior associate for transportation policy at PolicyLink. And then Jeff Brooks who is administrative vice president and director of the transit division for the Transport Workers Union of America. And Brian Turner who's executive director of the Transportation Learning Center will do a joint presentation. Lots of packed agenda and we're going to actually ask Algernon to start. Good morning to you all. Thank you all for coming out this early in the morning. And as I'm going to... One I can better see that. And can people hear me? Okay, so I'm going to talk about transportation infrastructure as mentioned in the initial bid jobs for black men. As the announcement to this event mentioned black men have the highest unemployment rates by race and gender. Black men were not in labor. Even the national number, the national high unemployment rate really fails to capture the hardship that black men face. Because the national is an average of the good and the bad. But as this slide shows that there are some metropolitan areas where things are extremely bad. Where there's extremely high unemployment rates of close to 20% or above 20%. Detroit, Charlotte, Chicago, Las Vegas. To give you some context, the highest unemployment rate or the peak unemployment rate of repression was about 20%. So we're talking about a population that's really facing what we call the day of repression. And what can be done to improve labor market circumstances. So here I'm looking at the sheer of the working age population in different industries. We see construction, manufacturing, transportation. The light green bars are for blacks. The blue is for all men in this age group. And we can see that black men are significantly underrepresented in the construction industry. Underrepresented in manufacturing but slightly overrepresented in transportation. So transportation is a little bit of a positive sort of for black men. But the little advantage that black men have in transportation that is not made up for the huge deficits that face the construction and manufacturing. So if we're interested in improving labor market outcomes for black men. One really important challenge is improving their numbers of construction, building their numbers of construction. Building their numbers of manufacturing is another important mechanism. We're not going to talk about those today. But the third option is to improve the transportation sector as black men are being able to get those jobs. We have a larger mechanism. In fact, we know black men are underrepresented, severely underrepresented in construction. That does not mean that they're not there. And we can see here we have some very rough estimates of job losses over the six to the great recession of 2007 to 2011. And you can see black men lost significant numbers of construction jobs. And the construction industry faced significant decline. Everyone got hit including the black men in the construction industry. So about a quarter of the losses in this time period are due to black men losing jobs in construction. So if we can rebuild the construction industry, we will have a positive effect on putting black men back to work. The thing is also to keep in mind when we have a big construction project, a big transportation infrastructure project, you're going to need supplies and materials shipped to the construction site. You're going to need weights, debris, other materials shipped away from the construction site. That's going to require transportation. So the big construction sites, the big construction projects, don't simply use construction jobs. They also use transportation jobs moving the supply and the site. A lot of construction work involves assembling manufactured materials. So you're also going to need to manufacture them. So infrastructure projects not only produce jobs for people in construction, they also produce jobs for people in transportation, for people in manufacturing. The projects need accountants. So it's important to realize both the direct jobs that are created, but also the indirect jobs that are important. So a big transportation infrastructure project does not only put black men in construction back to work, but it will also be beneficial for black men in transportation and in manufacturing because of this. Another important reason that we should be talking about this is that we have severe infrastructure needs. This is our infrastructure grades from 2009 by the American Society of the Illegionnaires. You can see they're all very corporate. Unfortunately, there hasn't been any realistic impact. We have a lot of workers who have need jobs and who have severe infrastructure needs. So now is really the best time to do these kinds of projects. Over the last few years, EPI has done analyses of different types of infrastructure plans. And in these analyses, they've looked at what share of all the jobs created, what share would go to different demographic groups, and what kind of jobs are available. And here, I won't go into too much detail about what is planned. All right, I'll use some more. I'll speak a little bit about one in particular. But these are four different plans. And you can see this is the share of estimated share of African-American jobs. And you can see they're all positive. So range from 9% of all the jobs that go to African-Americans too is by 14%. The red line represents the 11%. That's the share of Blacks in the African-Americans. So if you're above that 11%, that means you're doing some work, some slight work to reduce unemployment. So for Blacks, the ideal infrastructure project is something that's big because you create a lot of jobs that will put people to work. But also that has a larger share of jobs that will go back to African-Americans. In fact, I'll review some of this disparity. Remember the first slide where you see places where Blacks or Black men have unemployment rates of 20% higher to review some of that disparity you need. We haven't done any systematic analysis, but among these and among some others, the projects that have significant public transit involvement do the best in terms of the share of jobs towards the Blacks. So that's part of the reason why we're looking at infrastructure and particularly public transit infrastructure because in both the terms of the direct and indirect jobs, they are effective at getting jobs for African-Americans. A little bit, FTA, so the FTA transit backlog that's lined up for it is the Federal Transportation Administration did an assessment of how much of all of our public transit systems, how much meetings managed to be cured. So that's what that project is. That's why FTA and public transit does a good job in terms of the share of jobs. And these jobs are 74% male. The majority require high school diploma or less. So they're a good sign for them to reach a Black male population. This is the wage distribution. Basically, most of the... If you take off the wage distribution in the United States, coming into five even pieces, and then look at the layout of the jobs, you can see the majority of the jobs are paying you sort of a medium wage to very high wage. So they're a good job in terms of the wages that they offer. So in conclusion, depending on the type of investments Black-Making has been cured of jobs, as I showed the first look suggests that public transit invests in particularly good in terms of the share of jobs that would go to Blacks. Most of the jobs are giving you good job wages. Remember that infrastructure investments, when you build, if you purchase more buses, build a subway system, you're going to need people to drive those buses repair those buses, meet your train conductors. So infrastructure investments also can directly create transportation drivers, can be part of the funding streams that create transportation drivers. Another point, when you have a good public transportation system, after the Americans have made their own private vehicles, this is mobility. This includes people's assets to jobs. So that's an additional benefit that you get from making public transit investments. So good morning, everyone. Christian, do you have mine keyed up? I'm having a little difficulty seeing the screen because of the flag, so I'm just going to... Okay, good morning. So as Linda mentioned, my name is Michelle Holder. I'm the senior labor market analyst at the Community Service Society of New York, which is a 168-year-old anti-poverty organization in New York City. I'm here to talk about black male employment in the transportation sector in New York City, but I'm also going to talk a little bit about the construction sector in New York City. And as Alginon talked about, he sort of gave the overview nationwide, I'm going to give you all a glimpse of what these sectors look like in New York City and how black male employment is represented in these sectors. My focus is going to be on the transportation sector, but again, I'm going to talk a little bit about the construction sector. Okay, thank you. I was pressing both buttons, but neither would mean so. Okay, so before I get into that, I just want to talk about the unemployment rates that Alginon mentioned, the very high African-American male unemployment rates. And so there's obviously a reason for that, and that was the recession. The impact of the recession was deleterious for the country, but it was especially disparate for black men. And as this chart shows, if you look at the percentage point change in unemployment during the recession for black men, it was almost 9 percentage points, higher than any other gender, race, and ethnic demographic group. You'll also see that going into the recession, black male unemployment was already high at 9%. At the end of the recession in 2009, it was almost 18%. And so what we're talking about is at the end of the recession, black men in New York City, one in five black men in New York City were unemployed. That's essentially depression-level unemployment rates. Okay, next slide, Christian. So today, or really last year, looking at 2011, the unemployment rates did decline for most demographic groups in the city, and it did decline for black men. In fact, it declined the most for black men, 3.3 percentage points. But as of last year, it was still high at 14.6%. So whereas New York City doesn't rank among the cities that Algernon laid out at the beginning of his presentation, it's still quite high. And I did want to make a mention of the issue of long-term unemployment in the black community in New York City, because I think that this is forgotten in discussions about joblessness. Long-term unemployment has become a pervasive feature of the post-recession landscape, and the black community in New York City has been the most impacted in terms of race and ethnic groups. What this chart shows is that by men and women, black non-Hispanics have been out of work long-term at the highest percentage. And by long-term, I mean out of work for more than six months. Nearly 60% of black New Yorkers who are jobless, who have lost their job, have been unemployed for longer than six months. And you'll see that, again, looking at the chart for both men and women, it's the highest of any race and ethnic group. Okay, so I wanted to kind of just lay out the unemployment picture for black men in New York City before I got into the sectoral discussion. And so first, let me lay out what this chart is saying. So this chart is looking at total employment in New York City by industry as of August. And as you'll see, it's a pie chart, I'm just gonna sort of focus in on the transportation sector, which is in blue toward the right, and then there's the construction and manufacturing sectors, which is kind of at the center of the chart. I did combine those sectors because the share of employment in New York City in those sectors is rather small. So I combined it for expediency. As you'll see, though, according to this chart, the transportation sector constitutes a very small share of jobs in New York City, just 2.6%. And likewise, both the construction and manufacturing sectors combined only comprise about 5% of jobs in New York City. Christian, the next slide. Okay, so now this chart is looking at the distribution of all men employed in New York City by industry. And again, pointing specifically to the construction and manufacturing sector, you'll see that the share of men in the transportation sector is 8.5%. Now, compare that to the previous chart, which had the transportation sector at 2.6%. Also in the construction and manufacturing sectors, the share of men employed in those sectors is 13.4%. And again, comparing it to the previous chart, which we don't have to go back to. I'll just give you the number. Comparing it to 4.8% for construction and manufacturing, you'll see that men dominate both of those industries in New York City. Okay, Christian. Now, this chart looks at employed black men in New York City by industry. And again, zeroing in on the transportation sector and the construction and manufacturing sector, you'll see that first and foremost, black men are well, not only well represented in the transportation sector, but they're overrepresented. 15.5% of all black men employed in New York City are employed in the transportation sector. That's compared to a sector which only comprises 2.6% of all jobs in New York City. So black men are very much overrepresented in that sector. In terms of construction and manufacturing, 11.2% of all black men are in those sectors combined. Now, it may look at first glance as if black men are overrepresented in those sectors, but what you should bear in mind is that, again, those sectors are very male, heavily male dominated. And so if you look at the previous chart, which we don't need to go back to, but all men employed in New York City, of all men employed in New York City, 13.4% were in construction and manufacturing, compared to, thank you, compared to 11.2% of black men. So black men are somewhat underrepresented in the construction industry if you look at the share of all men employed in those sectors in New York City. Okay, next chart. Now, so I think that the case is really quite clear that in New York City, the transportation sector has been really the biggest employer for black men. So what do the wages look like for those sectors where black men are underrepresented and black men are overrepresented? The transportation sector overall wages last year were almost $50,000, which is about the median household income level for the U.S. across the country. However, if you look at a sector like retail trade where black men are also overrepresented in New York City, you'll see that the wages are much lower at almost $36,000 a year. Where black men are underrepresented, for example, in professional and business services, you'll see that the wages are quite high. And that's also the case for the so-called fire sector, which is finance, insurance, and real estate. I didn't put those wages here, but it's actually a lot higher than the annual average wage for professional and business services. So, as Algernon mentioned, the transportation sector is not only one that's been welcoming for black men and has been amenable to black male employment, but it's also one that pays decently compared to other sectors where black men are overrepresented in New York City. Christian, can you go to the next slide? Got it. Okay. And so, let me zero in on even more so the transportation sector in terms of the distribution of black men across occupations in that sector. And you'll see that most black men in that sector are drivers, engineers, attendants. About 62% of black men in transportation in New York City are employed in those occupations. Then second to that would be office and administrative support at 17.6%. You'll see that in the occupations within transportation, which tend to pay the highest, which are in management as well as installation, maintenance, and repair, black men are somewhat underrepresented in management at 1.8% in installation, maintenance, and repair at 6.2%. So, even though we can talk about the fact that the transportation sector has been one that's been accessible to black men, even when you look at the spread of occupations, there is some disparities between low-paying occupations within the transportation sector and high-paying occupations. Black men tend to comprise the drivers, as this chart delineates, drivers, engineers, attendants. That tends to pay less than the management occupations as well as the maintenance and repair occupations. So, I think this gives a kind of a broad overview of what it looks like for black men employed in that industry in New York City. Again, it's an industry that employs the most black men in New York City. Actually, I'm sorry. Only one other industry beats that, and that would be the education, health services, and social assistance industry. Then second to that would be the transportation sector. So, Algernon talked a little bit about, or actually he talked a lot about transportation and investment in terms of infrastructure. Really what I wanted to show you is what it looked like for black men in terms of the spread of employment, not only in construction but in transportation. Thank you. We also think that in 1995, some of the statistics that Michelle shared is that in many ways, there's a determined opportunity. Whether you have access to health and food, whether you have access to a job, or go housing, all of those kinds of things, and we think that there are policies and solutions to make to turn that around so that everyone, regardless of the way, has access to opportunity. In particular, we're very interested in transportation because we think of a lifetime and a lot of religious issues to get into talking about some of the solutions to that and I'll offer a few that will hold promise for the use to connect other religious features who are for transportation. What we're talking about here for everyone is unleashing thousands of hours of untapped food, great innovation, and that's something that's very commonly described in other nations. So I think it's important for us to focus in on what's happening with African American males because it's also important for us to think about it. For example, local and targeted hybrid practices and are really important to quality construction jobs for having to write in the background. Imagine what it's like to see instruction readings going up in your backyard and you as well. There are some barriers to that in transportation, but there are some opportunities in some development to do the jobs that are being created by constructing or repairing housing. These across the country have really been looking to employ these local hybrid provisions and targeted crime provisions for projects of different sizes. And it's really been about building relationships between community and labor from training providers. All of those working together with organizations work to develop a local hiring proposal on the service transportation organization, which is basically an investment of and how it's somewhere around $50 billion. And we worked with representatives, colleagues of the United States and a column of Tennessee to develop a couple of provisions that would really allow for a breakdown in the area to having rural hire provisions and allowing state departments of transportation and regional transit agencies to have the flexibility and the discretion to utilize local hire. And while we didn't win this provision in the final law, I think there was a big lesson for us. We were able to get the support of 60 national state and local organizations and I don't think it would have been possible to secure that level of support that we not use for our frame that's lifted up the benefits of America. And so I think that we know what the solutions are and how it's really important that it's useful. But I think it's also important I think it's also important to look at all the impact of this action. And I'm mindful that last week there was a transportation brain stress that was housed by the congressional practices events last week. And one of the things that we focused on was disadvantaged business program at the U.S. Department of Transportation they have a goal to send contracts to go to this meeting. So if you just look at the Recovery Act $48 billion for transportation at 2% as much well below if you stood in Georgia in July it was a ballot initiative to raise additional place like Atlanta, track and choke to where there are hundreds of federal people who actually don't have access to it. To transit would be transit. And it's to this all Georgia NAACP raised inducts because they really pointed out that the Department of Transportation not been awarding contracts to disadvantaged business. Well you know, why should we pass sales tax if are we just putting good money out of the bag not allowing the more unfold access if you want to look at a model for how do you do participation well and in virtue of the Cornelia Foundation Missouri model highly successful there they worked on a project a new state project under St. Louis and by pulling together community labor, the contractors state Department of Transportation doing project and released ahead of schedule $11 million under budget and they well exceeded the goal they set of 16% to manage this enterprise participation because they had all of those. And again I think we know what the solutions are and I think the transportation is a really great starting point but given the high level of employment that my colleagues raised I want to have an upper frame in setting our sales even higher and thinking about infrastructure benefits. The vehicles for loans and grant programs that can build high levels of energy for our treatment plants schools, parks, etc. and when you look beyond transportation opportunities the largest grant program for expanding transit two billion dollars in the President's last budget there is the proposal for infrastructure banks which is a 2012 budget 30 million dollars just imagine the opportunities that's a real opportunity that we should watch which we're going on each level in the U.S. around infrastructure banks there's also a West Coast infrastructure how to raise resources in California or in Washington those are things that and I would just say that I think we should pay attention to please strike by what I'll tell you on this one on the right you may not be able to see it from here but everything's below but there we are today the newest transportation bill we have from where we were before so we're below the rent so I think that this is really a huge challenge and a call to action for us to really seek out transformational policy reform and also even service see if we can make this thing work so we're going to talk about capital investment as including human beings not just the things that get built and very much policy and program which is the business we're in see if this will work there we go transportation is one of the faster growing segments of the overall U.S. economy in terms of jobs public transportation transit which Jeff and I are going to talk about is one of the fastest growing parts of the overall transportation industry so it's a place to pay attention Department of Labor is projecting 38% growth in employment transit rail ridership in particular is growing like crazy and you also have an older workforce where about 40% of the current incumbents are expected of the frontline workers the people who maintain and operate transit systems are expected to retire in the next 10 years that means if you combine the growth and the retirement about 1% of the jobs that exist today are going to have to be rolled over in new opportunities for hiring in the next 10 years that's huge and we know that transit in particular is an important and interesting industry from the point of view of this discussion because big transit systems exist in big cities big urban locations with large urban populations and the concentrations of minorities and youth, urban youth who need much better outcomes than they're getting today transit provides family supporting jobs in general the average wages in transit which is by the way more than 90% union represented around the country are over $45,000 per job and we do have a strong union representation and in particular jump forward a little bit with 18% of all transit jobs being held by African Americans in the big cities it's much higher numbers in New York City for example 73% of the employees of New York City transit the country's largest transit agency is the middle of color and that's reflected in the unions that represent the front line workforce where if you go up and down the east coast the midwest local union after local union has an African American president many African American leaders on their executive boards they're tuned in to pay attention to these issues in a way that can be very productive and while we know that 18.4% of the jobs in the industry nationally are held by African Americans less than 4% of the more skilled front line jobs the maintenance technicians are held by African Americans so what does all this mean in terms of policy in terms of what we can do as a country in trying to shape the future the transit industry has, oh I'm not passing these slides I'm sorry I'll just jump straight to this the transit industry has one of the lowest levels of investment in skill development in training or development of human capital it's a very important term one of the lowest levels of investment of any industry we talk about an average in the US of about 2% of payroll going to human capital investment in companies that are very successful 3-4-5% federal highway has set a goal of 3% of investment because by the way they too have got lots of people retiring we need to be training up that next generation transit is somewhere between 0.6 and 0.8% 0.6 or 0.8% of payroll being invested in the development of human capital and yet if you go to something like the DOT's workforce summit held in April here in Washington well now I'm going to jump forward one more and tie this together in a better way but what does federal policy say about the level of investment in human capital basically nothing the capital investment program in the surface transportation act and this goes back 50 years is only about investing in things there's almost nothing there about investing in the human capital and without which physical capital can't do anything useful physical capital can't run itself it can't operate on time it can't operate efficiently it can't operate safely without the human capital the skill and the talent and the knowledge that's needed from human beings to make this go forward so federal policy is spending less than 1% in transit on human capital investment and so when you go back to what's happening in the current level of investment in the workforce in the industry you get what you pay for if the federal government is telling the industry buy new buses buy new trains build new bridges revive that track build that new line but very little about making sure that the skills are there but when you go to the back to that DOT workforce summit the leaders of the railroad industry the highway industry the transit industry are all saying our biggest need is their frontline workforce we need to invest in training programs for the 80% of the workforce that operates and maintains our transit systems so we need to find ways to to make human capital an integral part of federal programs for transit and other transportation sectors and with that money we need to concentrate on programs that can reach out and build career pathways and connect to career ladders at our center the transportation learning center we have built a framework over the last dozen years of national training standards apprenticeships systems that can be used if there were more money to invest in training but there isn't very much that system of training apprenticeship training standards hands-on learning opportunities can be rotated and applied to people who could come into the industry to high schools to middle schools to people in the community who could come into transit and who could come from the community to be served by transit which are these large cities so we're looking at two major emphasis first of all real money for human capital investment second of all quality career pathway programs partnering transit agencies and unions with high schools and middle schools hands-on and problem solving approaches to learning which could solve a lot of issues faced by young people who are dropping out because they're hands-on learners internships college credit for training that's done to national standards as we've been developing and all of that so I'm going to turn this over to Jeff Brooks who's going to talk about what he has done is probably the single most effective leader in the U.S. transit industry in building not just career ladder programs for today's transit employees but those career pathway partnerships to bring young people from the community into the industry and expand opportunities for quality careers Jeff good morning I just want to put myself on a timer I'll just give you a brief background of my history I came into a transportation under Amtrak in 1980 came in as a track labor as a result I ended up running track equipment which gave me the opportunity when I left Amtrak and worked both jobs for about 2-3 years I went to SEPTA I'm a native of Philadelphia and I became a not in the normal path of transportation I came into the track department under SEPTA that's labor work as a result what we did was I saw an imbalance when it came to the labor work and when it came to skilled labor and it became important for me at some point because of my background with Amtrak to go into that same field which was running equipment which I did at Amtrak I went into construction equipment I ran construction equipment for close to almost 30 years for which is heavy equipment cranes back hose up to 200 tons loaders and so forth so on but what became apparently clear when I got there that there were not a lot of people to look like me there were drivers of operators of vehicles but there were no heavy equipment operators the highest skilled level and as a result that got me involved in our union and by 1984 I was a section section officer and by 1986 I was chairman about 1990 I was on staff of our union and from 90 to 2001 I was elevated through the process of vice president to recording secretary but what became more important to me I promised myself by the time I got to anywhere in there had no idea I'd be president of the local but I became president of the local in 2004 and what became important to me was to change the face of our union change the face of our union not just for black males but for minorities in general I was successful in bringing three females one Caucasian white woman who was on welfare and was nationally on 60 minutes at one time and became a track equipment operator and still is to this day successful in bringing in two black females who one of them came and constructed equipment operator under Inceptor and one is a train operator to this day in transportation but as I saw that was an issue and we didn't have a conduit between us and the school district as well I started looking at as I became president that our workforce was aging and as Brian alluded to 40% of our members 10 years were going to be in mode of retirement and that was the highest skill level the first class, the specialists, the technicians and so forth so as a result I went into the school district sat down with individuals sat down with the mayor of Philadelphia at the time the governor and other legislators and what became important was a partnership with the school district of Philadelphia but more than that I thought it was we couldn't start at the high school level we had to start before that you can't catch children at high school and expect them to go right into those careers when they had no background so we I got a commitment for us to go into the middle schools and as a result those middle schools we created an internship which still exists to this day that internship was a conduit for them to get to the training but it didn't get them the job per se or it got them in entry level jobs and wouldn't get them any further once they got there so by 2005 my first negotiated contract as president I negotiated an apprenticeship and that apprenticeship gave them the bridge to prevent anyone from just going into the low level jobs or even existing employees and members of my union staying in those low level jobs and not becoming electricians, plumbers carpenters and so forth I'm proud to say one of the individuals I went to school with I won't mention how many years ago because I'm 56 but I will say that it was necessary for us to move forward and to get us to a place where we needed to be become a plumber and now has retired from that as well as I have so with that I just wanted to give you some little insight I appreciate your help in being here but I appreciate more than anything the ability for us to be able to move forward and possibly get moved this nation in a direction where we can have training individuals who are voice for the voiceless we tried to get a whole lot into this session and so I have lots of questions but I'm not going to actually give my questions because I want to open it up to the audience here to go deeper with your questions for any of our panelists and can you identify who you are? by the way what I've heard a long time about five children the jobs of one one of you 30 years 30 years of life sustaining other thank you yes great and you are? this year of jobs over here