Editor’s note: This story was published and reported by CAI, the Cape and Islands NPR Station, on Oct 28. We are co-publishing with their permission, as we believe it can enlighten our readers on the sprawling and complex story of offshore wind.
New jobs data from Vineyard Wind show the project has employed more than double the 500 union workers it promised. But how many workers come from southeastern Massachusetts is impossible to say — because of the way Vineyard Wind is collecting the data.
In remarks at an offshore wind conference in New Bedford last month, Jennifer Cullen, Vineyard Wind’s senior manager of labor relations and workforce development, presented the employment numbers.
Three-quarters of the union jobs have been filled by people who report southeastern Massachusetts zip codes, easily exceeding Vineyard Wind’s goal of 51 percent.
But Vineyard Wind records local zip codes for those who move to the region to work on the project, even if they only live in the area for a few months, and even if they stay at hotels.
“We went back and forth with the consultant that has been doing our reporting about how we should capture those people, because they’re not from here, but they are working here, and they’re living here while they’re working,” Cullen said in her presentation. “And his perspective was — and we try to be very transparent about this, so that we’re not misrepresenting — but if they’re living here while they’re working here, they’re contributing to the economy here. And those benefits in large part are stimulating the local economy around here, whether it’s renting apartments or staying in hotels.”
In a CAI interview afterward, Cullen said she does not have data to show how many of the people employed by Vineyard Wind lived in the area before they started work on the project.
“We don’t have that data, just because we can’t back into a person’s life in advance of that,” she said. “That’s something that we might be interested in. Like, it would be more anecdotal, I guess, for us to better understand who’s coming in.”
She reiterated that Vineyard Wind was being transparent about how it collected residential information.
“We also want to make sure we’re capturing the economic benefit of people who are staying here in New Bedford, because they are eating here, they’re sleeping here, they’re spending money here,” she said.
The onshore workforce building the Barnstable substation made up the largest segment of Vineyard Wind workers in the past year, at 43 percent, and even more the year before that — 70 percent.
Barnstable represents a smaller percentage of the work now that the substation is nearly complete, and offshore work has ramped up.
Cullen said the Barnstable substation represented a real opportunity for Cape Cod workers.
“We had lots of people that were working down at the substation for a couple of years, because that’s how long the work went on,” she said. “It was about two and a half years — three years for some of the contractors. So don’t ignore the cable landfall in terms of what the economic benefits can be for a community that’s willing to host that kind of infrastructure.”
Vineyard Wind has created 2,808 direct U.S. construction jobs to date, measured in headcount, not full-time equivalents, she said in her presentation. That number reflects both union and nonunion jobs.
Some of the employment has been driven by the project taking longer than planned, she said.
In the past three years, 18 percent of the union workforce for the project was identified as BIPOC (Black, indigenous, and people of color), nearly meeting Vineyard Wind’s goal of 20 percent.
But just 5 percent of union jobs went to women, compared with a goal of 10 percent, and 12 percent went to apprentices, compared to a goal of 20 percent.
“We had goals that are considered fairly ambitious for the industry that we’re all working in,” Cullen said.
She said the data will help Vineyard Wind understand how to do better.
