On the recordJune 25, 2014
I rise today to speak in proud support of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, and to urge my colleagues to support it. This is an extremely important piece of legislation, and one I was happy to work on in the HELP Committee. It is also long overdue. We haven't reauthorized the Workforce Investment Act since 1998, and it is clear that the law isn't working for the 2014 economy. We know it isn't working because we have a large and growing skills gap. Now, what is the skills gap? Recent studies have shown that between one-third and one-half of manufacturers in my State have at least one job they can't fill because they can't find a worker with the right skills. That is the skills gap in Minnesota. Of course, it isn't just Minnesota, it is a nationwide phenomenon, and any colleague I talk to on the floor says that is the case in his or her State. A 2011 survey by Deloitte found that there were 600,000 manufacturing jobs nationwide that were unfilled because of a skills shortage. I just met with Bob Kill, the president and CEO of Enterprise Minnesota, a terrific organization that studies manufacturers in my State of Minnesota, and as he likes to say, ``we've been admiring this problem for a long time.'' And it is not just manufacturers. There is a skills gap in information technology, in health care, and in other sectors that have jobs sitting there waiting for skilled workers to fill them.…
