Workforce

The national mission for workforce development and integration is a comprehensive federal initiative designed to significantly expand and enhance the American workforce. This mission will:

Attract up to 30 million additional workers into the workforce, targeting "discouraged workers" and unemployed young workers in part by providing paid training, healthcare, childcare, and special services and treatment for people struggling with addiction, untreated mental illness, and other problems that are preventing millions of Americans from joining the workforce.

Implement a proactive international recruitment strategy to attract qualified immigrants, focusing on skills and qualities aligned with workforce needs.

Establish a network of federal workforce training and support centers in every community that will provide a range of services including transportation, childcare, healthcare, career coaching, counseling, and more to support new workers in joining the workforce.

Operate this federal program essentially as a staffing agency, offering competitive wages and benefits to workers while solving labor shortages for employers across various sectors, with a particular focus on supporting the national mission for homes and buildings.

This mission is inspired in part by the transformative impact of the New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which mobilized millions of unemployed workers in beneficial projects all over the country. As with the CCC, the approach of this mission is holistic, recognizing that barriers to employment often extend beyond the lack of job opportunities.

At the heart of this mission are community labor centers, envisioned as hubs of support and resources, addressing the diverse needs of workers and their families. By offering comprehensive services in one location — and transportation between home, the centers, and job sites — they will remove many of the logistical and practical obstacles that currently prevent individuals from entering or re-entering the workforce.

By actively engaging discouraged workers, young unemployed individuals, and immigrants, the initiative seeks to tap into a vast pool of potential that has been largely underutilized. This approach not only addresses current labor shortages but also enriches the workforce with a diverse range of skills and perspectives.

The integration with other national missions, particularly the homes and buildings mission, ensures that the newly trained workforce has ample opportunities to apply their skills. This not only aids in the successful execution of other missions but also guarantees steady employment and growth opportunities for the workers involved.

This mission is currently designed primarily to add millions of new workers to a labor force that is stretched thin. In America today, we don't have an unemployment problem, rather our problems are that too many jobs are low quality and low pay, and that too many workers are employed in sectors that do not contribute to economic development and building real wealth. In this context, it will be necessary to bring a huge number of workers into the workforce — similarly to what happened in World War II. If, however, the Mission for America takes place in a context of high unemployment — e.g. due to advances in AI or an economic crisis — then the workforce mission will need to be reimagined to focus on retraining and reintegrating laid off workers back into the workforce in new roles and even totally different industries.