La., Miss. share $2.3 million labor grant

• By GARY PERILLOUX
• Advocate business writer
• Published: Nov 19, 2009 - Page: 6B

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Louisiana will get most of a $2.3 million federal labor grant, to be shared with Mississippi, as it studies green job growth in the states and training needed to meet that demand.

The project is funded by stimulus money from President Barack Obama’s $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

LSU will play a lead role, assisted by Mississippi State University, in surveying 10,000 employers from each state to establish hiring and training needs related to clean-energy industry work.

Louisiana Workforce Commission officials said the grant would help it produce labor market information for about a half-dozen job sectors: biofuels, renewable electric power, energy-efficient construction, the advanced drive train industry, the energy-efficiency assessment field and sustainable manufacturing.

Work should take about 18 months, and recommendations will be given to regional Workforce Investment Boards and economic developers across the state.

“With this grant, we can better understand the requirements of green occupations and ensure that we are training workers to meet these needs,” Curt Eysink, the commission’s executive director, said in a statement.

Here’s how the funding will break down:

• The Louisiana Workforce Commission will get $865,000 as the project leader.
• The Mississippi Department of Employment Security will receive $531,000.
• LSU will gain $838,000 for its research work done in consultation with the two state agencies.
• Mississippi State will get $45,000 for its work with LSU.

Patty Granier, who manages labor market information for Louisiana, said the state won’t be adding specific “green job” categories to its monthly job reports because of this grant work. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics uses a formula and a monthly survey of 2,757 businesses across the state to establish job figures and unemployment rates in the state and would have to make that call, she said.

Some researchers have criticized attempts to base much of the U.S. economy’s growth on green jobs.

“Forecasts of future green jobs are completely unreliable. … The (U.S.) Conference of Mayors based its forecasts on nothing more than an arbitrary set of assumptions of how many jobs will be created,” researchers David Tuerck, Benjamin Powell and Paul Bachman claimed earlier this year in a report by Boston-based Beacon Hill Institute. They argue that green jobs — if they require more workers for less energy, even if it’s alternative energy — can be more of a cost than a benefit to productivity.

However, Repower Louisiana, an environmental nonprofit, touts the U.S. Mayors report, which projects the clean-energy sector generating more than 27,000 new jobs in Baton Rouge and nearly 5,000 more in Lafayette in the next three decades.

What the latest state grant will do is establish a baseline for an emerging job sector in the state and produce a blueprint for ramping up training, Granier said.