New members are our lifeblood for a bright future

By Kevin Ferreira
Executive Director, Sacramento-Sierra’s BCTC

As summer begins to wind down, I want to bring a fall event to your attention. In September, we will be hosting a union job fair at Grant Union High School.

This is an exciting and important opportunity both for our unions to bring in vital new members, and to teach young people about the engaging, important and well-paid work the Trades have to offer.

We expect more than 2,500 students from Grant High to attend, and possibly hundreds from other local high schools as well.

If you know of a young person looking for a pathway to a strong and exciting future, please let them know they are welcome as well. This is a hands-on event that will give our young women and men and real taste of what the Building Trades is about, and I can’t stress enough how terrific it is that we are seeing so much interest and support in our unions.

As I’ve written about many times in this column, our unions are in a place of strength and growth. Let me just recap some of the work we have going on right now and coming up in future years.

There’s our Project Labor Agreement with the Washington Unified School District which will help to modernize the  Elkhorn Village Elementary School. It is budgeted for tens of millions and will lead to a remodeled school that gives students a state-of-the-art facility to further their learning.

We also have a Project Labor Agreement with the Sacramento County Department of Airports, covering six projects at that site—work that will be ongoing for years.

Those projects include a new parking garage for Terminal B, the Terminal B Concourse Expansion, the Terminal A Expansion, the Ground Transportation Center, a new road out of Terminal A and finally the Consolidated Rental Car Facility.

In all, this is almost $1.3 billion in construction work.

And don’t forget our Project Labor Agreement for the Power Control Center for SMUD. And maybe the biggest project of all: the expansion of UC Davis in Sacramento.

For that, we are building a new tower at the medical facility to ensure it meets seismic standards. It’s a $3.8 billion project that will span 14 stories and include a five-story pavilion. We need to have that done by 2030, which means our members will be working hard for the next six years!

Hundreds if not thousands of Building Trades members will work on this project during its construction.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up our big Roseville project, where the European company Bosch is updating a semiconductor manufacturing plant as we speak—a $1.5 million dollar project.

So we have a lot of work happening in our region, now and in the future. That is why it is so critical for us to bring in new members—to keep our ranks strong, trained and active in the industry and the union. This job fair is just one way we are working to make sure our future is as bright as our past. And again, get your young people out there! They will thank you for it.