Bright Spots from the Senate’s Bipartisan WIOA Discussion Draft

Over the course of 2024, as Congress was mired in partisan gridlock and paralyzed by Republican infighting, both chambers somehow managed to draw up bipartisan bills to reauthorize the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. Better known as “WIOA,”, this law governs our “public workforce system” which provides a host of services to people who are looking for work and employers who are looking for workers. The House passed its bill - A Stronger Workforce for America Act - on a near unanimous vote in April. The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) released a bipartisan discussion draft in early July.

Both bills do more to affirm our public workforce system than to reform it, which may explain how they made their way through such a polarized Congress. That said, each bill, and particularly the Senate discussion draft, includes a few important departures from the existing law that could make the system more responsive to the needs of working people. Here are two that are especially promising.

A Focus on Youth: Both the House and Senate rightly focus on improving the quality and quantity of services provided to “opportunity youth” - young people who either are, or are at risk of becoming, disconnected from both school and work. According to Measure for America, more than 1 in 10 young people between the ages of 16 and 24 were neither working or studying in 2021, a level that has held mostly steady for over a decade. Research confirms that disconnection as a young adult is associated with a host of long-term negative outcomes, from lower educational attainment, to depressed earnings and labor force participation rates, to poorer physical and mental health. Helping young people re-connect or stay connected to school and work is an appropriate focus of public policy and a wise use of federal dollars.

The House and Senate bills point the public workforce system more in that direction. Both bills include a statutory definition of “opportunity youth” that is expansive and will make it easier for the system to serve young people at risk of disconnection. But the Senate draft goes further, homing in on the importance of high-quality work experience programs for young people and increasing the share of youth formula funding that must support them. A large body of research shows that “earn and learn” experiences are highly effective for helping young people who are leaving or have left school. Apprenticeships are the blue chip of work experience programs and can also be effective for addressing long-standing inequities in access to quality jobs. They include critical components like pay, mentoring, structured on-the-job learning, and worker protections, all of which make them ideal for setting a young adult on a successful career path.

But apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship programs are also hard to stand up and sustain, particularly for a system focused on rapid employment in “in-demand” jobs. The Senate discussion draft addresses that challenge by codifying the “Youth Apprenticeship Readiness Grant” (YARG) program. This competitive grant program aims to build the capacity of youth-serving organizations to develop and deliver high quality pre-apprenticeship and Registered Apprenticeship programs to young people, particularly opportunity youth. Taken together, the additional youth formula funds and the YARG grants can help make apprenticeship a more readily available option for many more young people.

Attention to Labor Law and Worker Protections: The bipartisan Senate discussion draft breaks new ground in an area that has received too little attention in workforce development: worker protections. The draft includes a requirement that employers applying for training contracts demonstrate they are in compliance with federal labor and employment laws and disclose any proven violations or penalties. The laws in question are those enforced by the Department of Labor, the National Labor Relations Board ,and the Equal Employment Commission. They cover practices like wage theft, misclassification, child labor, health and safety violations, union-busting, discriminatory hiring, and sexual harassment, among others.

Contrary to some overheated statements from business and industry groups, the provision is quite mild. It would only apply to employers that have been subject to final determinations and/or penalties in the previous two years and it makes no mention of “blacklists” or permanent disbarment. It’s similar to, but less stringent than, the requirements placed on many federal contractors. Given the rise in child labor violations and the pervasive problem of wage theft, union-busting, and health and safety violations in many of the industries that our public workforce system supports with training, ensuring that funds are not supporting employers who break the law is long overdue. Bravo to the Committee for including this important provision in their bipartisan discussion draft.

While there is a lot more in each bill, neither propose any significant changes to the structure of our public workforce system or the performance metrics that drive it. Neither includes any additional funding for a system that is chronically under-funded. But the youth and labor law provisions are both important steps in the right direction. They push the system away from the employer-led and “demand-driven” strategies that have failed to put people on a path to economic security.

Before the Senate recessed in August, HELP Chairman Sanders reiterated his desire to mark up the Senate discussion draft in September. We should know more in the next week, but given the tight timetable and resistance to the labor provisions from business groups, it seems a good bet that this process has come to an end for now. While that will come as a disappointment to some, it will also create an opportunity for us to step back and consider what we want from our public workforce system and whose interests it should serve - and that’s a conversation well worth having.