In Pittsburgh, diversifying the trades isn’t billed as DEI. It’s a ‘business decision.’

Technical.ly partnered with PublicSource to explore the landscape of work in Pittsburgh — famed for its industriousness and intense union-management conflict and collaboration — as it is pressure-tested by changes in governmental policy, technology and economics.

Throughout the region, industries from construction to advanced manufacturing are struggling to grow their workforce. The demographic that long filled roles — white men — has dwindled. In need of new people, marginalized groups are being sought to meet demand, largely through programs helping to expose them to the field. 

Until recently, these efforts may have been classified as diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives. Many sprang up following a nationwide call in 2020 for organizations to reassess their hiring practices. But under a new presidential administration curtailing anything related to DEI, leaders of Pittsburgh-area trade training programs are hesitant to affix this label to their strategies, even as more women and people of color enter the professions because of them. 

On a recent Saturday at the Carpenters Pittsburgh Training Center in Collier, students in a cohort of six Black men, seven white men and six women pressed power saws into planks and braced for teacher feedback. Over eight weeks, they are plunged into the world of carpentry through the union’s Carpenters Apprentice Ready Program [CARP]. At the end, they get to decide if they want to make a go of it as an official apprentice. 

The group’s demographics weren’t purposeful — “I didn’t aim for these numbers,” center Director Rich Paganie said. “We just took the best candidates.” 

The inclusion of women and Black participants “does diversify our ranks,” he said, while the white male pre-apprentice number “shuts up the ignorant people that are going to hate on wanting to diversify the industry.”

CARP’s goal in Pittsburgh, according to the Eastern Atlantic States Carpenters Union website, “is to identify and train motivated Southwestern Pennsylvania residents that have existing barriers to employment in the building trades.”

A news post on the union’s website states CARP was formed “because increasing diverse representation in the trade has long been a goal.” The Philadelphia CARP — where it was initially established — explicitly lists women and minorities as groups the program targets.

Why the concern about backlash then?

Lance Harrell, the director of DEI and workforce development for the Master Builders’ Association of Western Pennsylvania, said diversity and worker growth are often referred to in the same breath in the construction trades. 

Though he said conversations were taking place about ways the industry could evolve and reach new people even before his hire four years ago, the push toward underrepresented groups isn’t necessarily a moral one. It’s a move borne out of practicality. 

“It really just comes down to the numbers. If you don’t have enough workers or white men in the field, there is a void, and here’s a perfect opportunity for women to step in and minorities to have access to those opportunities,” he said. 

A women-only carpentry cohort

The region’s construction industry is older and whiter than the national average. In Allegheny County, a third of the workers are 55 and older, and more than 90% of the workforce is white, according to data from the labor market analytics company Lightcast. 

That reflects Pittsburgh’s history of legacy or family connections as the main way workers entered the field, helping to maintain a sort of demographic status quo. 

Since its arrival in Pittsburgh, CARP has drawn mostly men, though last year it led a women-only run of the program.

Typically, there would be between two to five women out of a cohort of around 15, Paganie said. Noticing the low numbers, he wanted to remove any potential intimidating factors acting as a barrier and brought in women laborers as instructors.

Out of the 16 women in the cohort, two are still involved in the trades — which Paganie considers a win.

“The people that went through this program and are in the Carpenters right now probably wouldn’t be … if they didn’t do the program.”

Paganie personally feels making the sector more diverse is “something that needs to be done.” 

Harrell and others don’t envision anti-DEI rhetoric heavily impacting the industry since labor demand is still high. And for his part, he doesn’t have any plans to stop promoting the trades to those in marginalized communities.

Natural hair in the funeral home? 

In death care, there’s an old guard, said Mark Marnich. And they aren’t necessarily proponents of change. So issues can emerge when a program that’s not explicitly about diversity nonetheless brings new perspectives to the ancient trade.

Marnich, a mathematics professor at Point Park University, runs the university’s funeral services program, which is in partnership with the Pittsburgh Institute of Mortuary Science [PIMS]. The program’s students take their general education courses at the university and major-specific ones at PIMS. 

It’s a best-of-both-worlds kind of deal, he said, offering all the advantages of living on campus, and the industry expertise that only the vocational school can provide. And it’s exploded in the last five years. 

Marnich said enrollment would stall between five to 10 students a year before the COVID-19 pandemic. Now it’s doubled, and the demographics of those interested have changed, too.

More women, women of color and LGBTQ+ community members want to work in the industry and are bringing new ideas with them. However, they may be filtering out just as quickly as they entered, according to PIMS and Point Park instructor Chelsea Cush. 

“We have funeral directors, still, occasionally, they’ll call and they’ll say, ‘I want an intern, but I want a male,’” she said. 

The traditional viewpoints of those in the field’s leadership are causing high turnover, Cush said. And she believes this tension between new and old may soon reach a fever pitch.   

While the Point Park-PIMS partnership isn’t one aimed at introducing historically underrepresented groups to the industry, the swing in student demographics has led to more conversations about the field’s inclusivity. Cush said a student recently asked if it was OK to wear her natural hair while in a funeral home. 

“Obviously, yes it is, but is she going to potentially face some issues with that? Unfortunately, yeah, the potential is there.” 

Point Park could not provide specific demographic data for those enrolled in the funeral services program. Marnich said the increase in the number of nonwhite students might not be as steep as the increase in white women students; still, the program is now more proportionally representative of the population than it was years ago. 

If the diversifying trend continues, both Marnich and Cush believe the industry will have to be responsive to it, particularly as funeral directors hit retirement age. But, Cush said, “it’s a tug of war right now.” 

“The funeral homes that are looking for white male employees are going to run out of white male students … something’s got to give,” she said. 

Tech seeking ‘people who have been left out’ 

Pittsburgh was recently hailed as an emerging “innovation hub” for the tech industry in Gov. Josh Shapiro’s annual budget message. Experts, though, have warned against the city falling into the Silicon Valley trap of “white-majority and exclusionary workplaces, vast wealth inequities and a housing crisis,” as Brookings described California’s tech region. 

Trying to avert that scenario is Apprenti PGH, an apprenticeship program run by the Pittsburgh Technology Council [PTC]’s nonprofit arm Fortyx80. PTC President and CEO Audrey Russo said it was developed four years ago from a desire to create a talent pipeline that would result in better representation of the region. 

Russo said people from areas like the Mon Valley have been left out of opportunities “because the density of tech and innovation tends to be clustered in neighborhoods” they aren’t part of. 

Apprentices are hired by companies at the start of the program while receiving ongoing tech training for the following 14-17 months. It’s not a radical model, Russo said.  

“We’re mimicking trades.”

Since its development, 47 apprentices have gone through the program with 60% identifying as women and 50% of participants being Black, 12% Latinx and 12% Asian. Even with those numbers, Russo wouldn’t tag Apprenti PGH as a DEI program. 

“We bill this as an opportunity for people who have been left out of the workforce, but left out means a lot of things,” she said. “We’ve had people who are living in deep poverty and they’re Caucasian.”

On PTC’s website, Apprenti PGH lists active recruitment efforts in “underrepresented groups, including women, people of color, veterans, people with disabilities and displaced workers.” 

“But all are welcome to apply,” follows this. 

Fortyx80 is, according to its organization description, “committed to the principles of diversity and inclusion in the workforce.” Russo said she hasn’t seen the national political pressure to move away from DEI initiatives generating much concern in the Pittsburgh tech community, and she doesn’t believe that current is changing a lot of hiring practices.

Anti-DEI pushes, she said, are having much less of an impact on the workforce conversation than another trend: With the advancements in AI, calls for highly degreed professionals are increasing, which is something that Apprenti doesn’t address. 

Russo said PTC is always thinking about how the program will have to shift, but there aren’t any plans on the council’s part to stop advocating for employers to hire “different kinds of people.” 

In a similar vein, Petra Mitchell said the local nonprofit economic development organization Catalyst Connection is continuing to develop a program to support women entering advanced manufacturing. Former President Joe Biden’s administration awarded the program’s $712,000 seed funding, and it’s unclear whether the money will still make its way to them as President Donald Trump’s administration scours outgoing grants — particularly those focused on inclusion. 

But echoing other leaders, Mitchell doesn’t characterize outreach into untapped communities as trying to diversify the industry for diversity’s sake. Rather, she calls it “a business decision, more than anything else.” 

“If we’re not able to provide that type of awareness building and opportunity creation, the whole talent pipeline is just going to get smaller,” she said. “There’s only so many white guys to go around.”