U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg Highlights Good-Paying Jobs Created by the Infrastructure Law While Visiting IBEW Training Facility in Indiana

Secretary Buttigieg: “While I know a lot of things are about to change in Washington, I also know that the importance of this work will not change and the need for skilled work will not change” 

More than 1.6 million construction and manufacturing jobs have been created across the country under the Biden-Harris Administration, part of more than 16 million jobs total

SOUTH BEND, IN – Yesterday, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg met with apprentices and union workers and leaders at the South Bend Joint Apprenticeship and Training Committee (SBJATC) 153 in South Bend, Indiana, where he served as mayor from 2012-2020. Secretary Buttigieg heard first-hand about the job opportunities being created by President Biden’s Investing in America agenda. The administration’s investments in American manufacturing and infrastructure through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act are building a pipeline of projects and job opportunities that will last for the years and decades to come.  

See the full transcript of Secretary Buttigieg’s remarks below: 

Good morning and thank you -- thanks for the chance to be with you.  

Thanks so much to this facility, to Mike [Leda] and to Joe [Gambill] and to Local 153 for hosting us, and thanks to all of you for joining.  

It is emotional to be back in South Bend, and the most important thing I want to say is how enormously proud I am of this city and this community and everything that has taken place.  

When I think about where we started, how far we came on my watch, and how far this community has continued to come since I proudly wore the title of mayor—it's breathtaking. And of course that is attributable in so many ways, to so many of you.  

The city has thrived under the leadership of Mayor James Mueller, who I'm very proud of. 

And the local government and civic and advocacy and business and academic leadership in this community has just made amazing things possible.  

So one of the reasons I told my team in Washington that I wanted to make sure one of my last visits as Secretary of Transportation—a job that's now taking me literally to every state in the country—that one of the last things I want to do is to come back here to South Bend.  

It was because I wanted the chance to celebrate and reflect on everything that's changed and everything that's become possible. 

And we felt it both in my hours just around town, seeing that everything here is just the way I left it, only better. And the hours I've spent here where we had a terrific tour and then conversation with a number of apprentices in the apprenticeship program here—a program which has I can only say exploded in size. 

I mean, if you would have told me when I was starting out as mayor—when unemployment was in the double digits; when we did not have enough residents for our houses; and we did not have enough jobs for our residents—that in a few short years we would now be seeing a situation where it is taking an enormous amount of effort to find and qualify the skilled workers for all of those jobs and build the houses for all of the residents who are coming here, I would not have believed even in my great optimism about our city that that could be achieved so quickly.  

Sitting with the apprentices, we heard stories from so many young people—by the way, with and without college degrees—of various backgrounds and generations, some of whom had two or three generations back in the trade, and some of whom found out that this might be for them because they saw a friend on social media posting about her experience as an apprentice. People who figured out pretty quickly that college wasn't for them, and people with master's degrees sitting side-by-side participating in one of the most amazing stories in modern American history, which is the Renaissance of manufacturing and infrastructure in our country and particularly in the industrial Midwest.  

When I became mayor, they told us we were done making things. And the story that was being told in the building trades, in particular, was pretty much that you ought to give up.  

I mean, folks remember what that was like.  

And now something completely different is happening.  

Most of the credit belongs to you, to this community, to your leadership, to everybody here who didn't give up.  

But I also believe and will insist—not just through the weeks I'm remaining in this job but for the years I'm remaining on this earth—that a lot of this credit also goes to Joe Biden and the Biden-Harris Administration. 

Because the extraordinary things that are happening didn't just happen. Just like the achievements that we had on my watch would not have been possible without the results of things like the then-unpopular decision that President Obama and Vice President Biden led to rescue the American auto industry, which is the issue that helped propel me into politics in first place in those days when I was working out of the basement of Building Trades Hall on Northside Blvd.  

To today, when an industrial strategy that is directly responsible for chip manufacturing returning to the United States, for EV battery manufacturing coming to the United States, for that kind of growth to be happening right here in the industrial Midwest where they told us that our auto making days, in particular we're behind us.  

And of course the infrastructure work. I hadn't heard that figure that Joe said in 38 projects that are linked in some way with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. But that is an extraordinary thing.  

Everything from the hundreds of millions of dollars that went into the South Shore Train that I will be taking today to get to Chicago in less than two hours—as I always vowed and wished as mayor would become possible. To the $2.5 million planning grant that's helping address what I always called “The On Ramp to Nowhere,” over on [Indiana State Road] 23 by the farmers market.  

Which made a lot of sense when you had 10,000 Studebaker workers getting off their shift at the same time but now there's a highway-style on ramp to accommodate the level of traffic that could probably be dealt with by a stop sign tying up some of the best land in the city while it's at it. Finally doing something about that with federal funding to help get the plans on the drawing board so that they can one day be building and completed.  

These things happen because President Biden and a lot of legislators including a number of Republicans, by the way, who crossed the aisle to work with us, work with Democrats and get it done, passed that bill.  

It is also happening because this administration insisted that these be made in America and union-made jobs. And we are proud of the historically pro-union, pro-worker record of this president and this administration. 

And they're happening because we insisted on making sure that we deliver for places that have been left out in the past and while we were at it include things like local hiring and support for DBEs and giving people more of a chance to be part of this future who hadn't had that chance in the past. 

So this is, I think, a testament to how local and federal leadership can work together.  

And while I know a lot of things are about to change in Washington, I also know that the importance of this work will not change and the need for skilled work will not change.  

And it is my hope that ideology and partisanship will not pollute the importance and the unity we ought to have around getting big things done. 

I’ll offer just one other reflection because of course when you come to a place that is so important to you, it's been so important in your life, you reflect on what's the same and what's different since you were here last.  

The most important thing in my life, in Chasten’s life, something that did not exist when I was mayor, is our kids—our son and our daughter, Penelope and Gus, who are three years old right now. Who are doing all the things that three-year-olds do. We’re this close on potty training, it's going to happen soon. They just experienced their first snowball fight.  

And we're raising them in the Midwest, in Traverse City, and I'm excited—I haven't figured out the “how” and the “when” yet, but I'm excited to introduce them to South Bend and where their papa grew up.  

And the thing I keep reflecting on is that when I was a kid growing up here with the acres of the collapsing Studebaker factories on the South Side on the way to school or the Drewrys at the end of College Street when I was growing up. And all the way through to when I became mayor and then the 30 years between those two things happening—me being born and become the mayor—and my whole generation.  

We had to use an enormous amount of imagination to picture what South Bend looked like at its moment of greatest prosperity.  

You really had to think hard and imagine hard to replace in your mind's eye the image of those collapsing factories with the image of the bustling Main Street and the people going to shop at Robertson’s and all the things they told us we used to have.  

And, of course, it also took some imagination to recognize that we had a future that was just as prosperous but very different from the past.  

What I love to reflect on now is that when I introduce my kids to South Bend it will take enormous imagination for them to picture what it was like when we had collapsing factories, and lean and hungry years, and far more workers looking for jobs than jobs ready for workers. And all of that pain and all of that hardship that this community powered through for years. 

I'll have to tell my disbelieving children how hard things were here because they won’t know it any other way. And that's pretty cool to think about so with that with enormous gratitude for the chance to be with you, we're going to have a conversation and I’m excited to share the stage with my friend and successor Mayor James.