The tool brands are now in the same room. Milwaukee Tool said Sept. 30 that it has joined the Alliance for America’s Skilled Trades, the workforce coalition Google, BlackRock, Carhartt and Ford launched in July. DEWALT is already a member. So is Barton Malow, the only general contractor on the list.
Milwaukee’s headline number is that its investment in U.S. skilled trades workforce development is expected to exceed $200 million by 2030. Read the fine print, though. That figure includes what the company has spent since 2010.
What Milwaukee Tool brings to the skilled trades alliance
The Brookfield, Wisconsin, company says it supports more than 16,000 apprentices a year, works with more than 1,300 training centers, and partners with 25 national union and non-union organizations. It reports more than 11,000 U.S. employees across 34 U.S. locations, more than $2 billion of U.S. investment over the past decade, and more than 4,000 jobs added in the last five years. All of those are the company’s own figures.
Spread evenly across 2010 to 2030, $200 million works out to under $10 million a year. That’s real money for training centers that buy their tools at a discount or get them donated. It isn’t a new commitment of the scale the headline suggests, and the release doesn’t say how much of the total is still to come.
“Milwaukee Tool has built our business around the skilled trades, and we believe America grows when the trades grow,” said Shane Moll, group president.
How the skilled trades alliance says it will work
When it launched on July 21, the alliance cited an estimate that 2.1 million skilled trades positions, across electrical, technical and construction work, could go unfilled by 2030. Its stated goals are broad: widen access and exposure to trades careers, scale earn-and-learn apprenticeships and pre-apprenticeships, and bring in more industry, labor, education and nonprofit partners. The founders said they’d work with Burning Glass Institute and Jobs for the Future on measurement.
The membership list now includes AT&T, Barton Malow, BlackRock, Carhartt, Cintas, DEWALT, Ford, Google, The Hershey Company, ManpowerGroup, Meta’s America’s Workforce Academy, Microsoft, Milwaukee Tool and Verizon. That’s a lot of balance sheet and one builder.
What contractors should watch for
This is the second big-name trades coalition in three months. The Lowe’s Foundation effort that signed up 75 companies to train one million tradespeople by 2035 set a numeric target. The Google-led alliance, so far, hasn’t published one of its own.
For contractors, the useful question is where the money lands. Apprenticeship programs run by unions and ABC chapters need instructors, lab space and equipment, and federal dollars are moving the same direction, as with the $65 million DOL just put into community college training. Tool donations to a training center help. Paying for journeyworker time to teach is harder, and that’s where most programs actually run short.
The alliance’s launch announcement promised measurement. The first outcome report will say more about this coalition than the member list does.