U.S. Labor Secretary Walsh talks tight market, touts federal investments in Indiana tour

U.S. Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh touted federal infrastructure and job training investments during a visit to Indianapolis and northern Indiana Wednesday.

The secretary’s first stop, the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District (NICTD), received more $150 million in federal fiscal year 2022 appropriations for projects that aim to boost rail service.

Zachary Trunk works in the district’s Michigan City maintenance shop and is chairman and president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) union, local 2355.

The new projects won’t immediately create a need for more workers here, Trunk said, but eventually “it’s going to equal more trains running, it's going to equal more maintenance and more work for us to maintain these trains.”

“We definitely need more guys in the long term,” Trunk said. “We have a lot of older guys that are looking to retire too. So you got to keep that in mind, plus the expansion, plus adding more cars to our fleet as well.”

Part of the federal money going to the NICTD is being used to add about 17 miles of secondary track along the existing South Shore Line, cutting travel times between Gary and Michigan City by about a third.

The project’s initial projected cost was about $491 million. It has received just about that amount from federal, state and local funding sources since January 2021. Part of the money came from the Federal 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill.

“So voting and supporting the infrastructure bill, it's billions of dollars of investment, 8 billion in Indiana. So our roads, our bridges, our waterways, but this project is an implication that it creates jobs,” said U.S. Rep. Frank J. Mrvan (D-Highland), who joined the secretary for this tour.

This shop has struggled with hiring and retention over the last two years, like many others across this and other industries, South Shore Line President Mike Noland explained to Secretary Walsh during his visit to the Michigan City site.

Indiana – like the rest of the nation – is experiencing a tight labor market. Preliminary job data estimates for July and August suggest there are about four job seekers for every 10 openings. And while only about 63 percent of the state’s working-age population is participating in the labor market, the total number of employed people in the last two months of data has broken records.

“The workers are there,” Walsh said. “We just got to show them that these industries are there for them. That they can actually do well.”

He pointed to job training and apprenticeships as potential salves for employers’ hiring issues.

We have a real opportunity to continue to build a workforce of the future that might look a little bit like the industrial revolution in this country,” Walsh said. “We have to make sure that we catch young people that are coming out of high school that might not want to go into college and let them know there's really pathways into careers, such as the South Shore Line, working in the building trades, working manufacturing.”