FACT SHEET: The Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act Creates Good-Paying Jobs and Supports Workers

The deal reached by President Biden and the bipartisan group of Senators makes a once-in-a-generation investment in our infrastructure and will create good-paying union jobs repairing our roads and bridges, replacing lead pipes, and building energy transmission lines. It invests in clean energy manufacturing and zero-emission vehicles ensuring that the jobs in the clean energy industry are good-paying, quality American jobs. The deal ensures that all taxpayer-funded infrastructure projects use materials made in America.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will create good jobs for workers across the country, including workers in rural areas, hard-hit energy workers, historically disadvantaged workers, and workers in distressed areas. This historic investment will accelerate the economic recovery, put Americans back to work, and boost wages for workers across the country.

The legislation will:

• Create millions of good-paying jobs. With the President’s Build Back Better agenda, the investments in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will add, on average, around 2 million jobs per year over the course of the decade, accelerating America’s path to full employment while bringing workers who have been left behind into the labor force.
   
• Protect critical labor standards on construction projects. The overwhelming majority of the funds in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will be subject to Davis-Bacon requirements, which ensure that contractors pay workers on construction projects a fair, prevailing wage so that local wages, labor markets, and workers won’t be undercut. These requirements will protect wages for millions of workers, grow the economy, and support good-paying, union jobs.
   
• Grow wages in the clean energy industry. President Biden committed to ensuring that the new jobs created in the clean energy industry—solar, wind, carbon capture, energy transmission—would be good-paying, union jobs. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act extends prevailing wage protections to all energy infrastructure provisions, including the construction of EV charging stations on highways and in communities, ensuring that these critical jobs come with good wages and benefits and support local unions.
   
• Put pipefitters to work making communities safer. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will put pipefitters to work across the country with an historic investment in our water infrastructure, including funding to replace all of the nation’s lead water pipes. It also invests $1 billion to modernize and repair natural gas distribution pipelines, creating good-paying jobs while fighting the climate crisis by reducing methane emissions, as well as making our communities safer.
   
• Buy America. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act lives up to the President’s commitment to ensure that the future is made in America by American workers. The legislation includes a comprehensive Buy America provision to ensure that all taxpayer-funded infrastructure and public works projects are built with American iron, steel, manufactured products, and construction materials. This will create good-paying manufacturing jobs here at home and further the President’s commitment to revitalizing the domestic industrial base.
   
• Protect and support transit workers. The agreement provides unprecedented support for transportation workers who have worked tirelessly on the frontlines of the pandemic. The legislation includes new provisions to prevent operator assaults built on collective bargaining and labor-management collaboration, so that no transit worker should fear for their safety just for doing their job. And it provides over $300 million in grant funding to train transit workers on the zero-emission vehicles of the future, including through registered apprenticeships and other joint labor-management training programs.
   
• Support auto workers. Auto workers and good, union auto manufacturing jobs are the backbone of communities across the country. As the country transitions to zero-emission vehicles, the President committed to building those vehicles and their components here in the United States. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act invests in grants to support battery and battery component manufacturing, manufacturing facilities, and retooling and retrofitting of existing facilities. It also invests in good-paying jobs building a nationwide network of electric vehicle charging infrastructure along highway corridors, which will accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles to address the climate crisis and support domestic manufacturing jobs.
   
• Invest in coal and energy communities. America’s coal miners and energy workers have powered this country for more than a century. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act invests in places impacted by shifting energy markets, including directing billions of dollars for advanced energy manufacturing facilities and clean energy demonstration projects to communities where coal mines or power plants have been shut down. The legislation also invests $21 billion in environmental remediation, creating good-paying union jobs in hard-hit energy communities cleaning up superfund and brownfield sites, reclaiming abandoned mines, and capping orphaned gas wells.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is just one part of President Biden’s plan to create and support good-paying, union jobs and deliver workers the dignity and rights they are owed. The President’s Build Back Better plan will pair job creation efforts with workforce development programs, invest in child care and long-term care and the care workers that enable others to go to work, provide national paid family and medical leave, ensure federal agencies have the necessary resources to protect workers, and invest in other efforts to create good, union jobs.

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