Upgrading Infrastructure and Energy Staffing Practices to Unleash the American Economy
by Xuan Yong and Mike Witte, Co-Founders of Workrise
Today, we are changing our name from RigUp to Workrise. For a seven-year old company, a name change is a risk. But it’s one we had to take. Because Workrise is the result of uncovering a massive opportunity to unleash the forces that will allow the United States to once again lead the world in the twenty-first century.
Our new name means many things. It is:
- A representation of our commitment to empower people who get the hard work done.
- Not a departure from our origins in oil and gas — an industry to which we remain committed — but the encapsulation of our own evolution to a company that is working ambitiously to serve as many infrastructure and energy industries as possible.
- Emblematic of the update and upgrade to outdated energy and infrastructure skilled labor staffing practices that will allow the American laborer and the industries they serve to rise to meet the demands of the future.
Most of all, Workrise is a rally cry for skilled laborers to reimagine their careers, where they will gain multiple skill sets in order to work in multiple industries. It is to imagine a future where they will move nimbly among industries as a means of avoiding economic hardship, or even despair, when a project ends or a company faces its natural end.
Working to push infrastructure and energy staffing practices into the future — a future that is coming, whether these industries are ready or not — is our mission, our obsession. But, this was not the original intention of Workrise when we launched in 2014. If we’re honest, we stumbled into the work that has become our calling — by encountering a series of opportunities that opened our eyes to the macro problem that is today our single-minded focus since.
Opportunity 1: Outdated Staffing Practices Drive Excess Costs and a Worker Shortage
Workrise was born as a platform similar to Angie’s List, where oil and gas companies could find, vet, and hire vendors and skilled laborers for projects. The technology was robust and user-friendly — but we weren’t getting much traction.
We would come to learn that most oil and gas companies had no problem connecting with larger vendors. Yet, we watched as individual workers eagerly used our platform to showcase their skills and find work. Matching individual workers to work was the one area of our offering getting a consistently positive response.
Included in our platform were services that made work easier on the individual worker. We made sure they got paid on time. And we connected them to more jobs. As it turned out, what we viewed as basic benefits for workers had not been consistently available to skilled laborers for decades thanks to the clunky worker-staffing model.
Traditionally, the individual oil and gas worker has gone through staffing companies that take steep finder’s fees from their paychecks. They also require workers to sign non-competes, which legally bar them from employment through other staffing firms and risk limiting their universe of available jobs.
At the same time, operating companies struggle to find workers with specific skills. The mix of benefits and flexibility we offered workers meant we were able to attract and partner with a deeper bench of them. As a result, word spread that Workrise is a “one-stop shop” for a large worker pool free of non-competes. As we continued to iterate our technology to deliver the best experience possible for individual workers, our network scaled rapidly. In turn, we created more value to client companies. Along the way, we discovered that the workforce dynamics in oil and gas weren’t unique to just oil and gas.
Opportunity 2: Widespread Staffing Inefficiencies Exacerbate Job Supply-Worker Demand Challenges
The same issues — of steep commissions out of workers’ pockets, outdated staffing practices, and companies struggling to find workers — plague skilled laborers across all energy and infrastructure industries. Similarly, companies across industries have work for which they can’t find workers.
With this knowledge, we found our mission — to empower people who get hard work done.
Two years ago, we made the strategic decision to methodically grow our infrastructure industry base and, eventually, serve more skilled trades in the United States. Everything we do is directed at making it easier for workers to find work and for companies to find in-demand workers.
We have since begun incorporating solar, wind, construction, and shipyard/marine industry workers and companies into our platform. We have replicated the success we found in oil and gas across these industries. Workers are finding more jobs and more often, and clients are finding a solution to the job demand-worker supply problem that had otherwise frustrated their efficiency and growth.
Supporting workers in additional industries provided an unexpected advantage — it gave us a bird’s eye view on what is a huge and troubling worker shortage across all infrastructure and energy industries. We had stumbled into the third opportunity — a problem whose solution is the reason we at Workrise exist today.
Opportunity 3: Decades of Socioeconomic Issues Have Culminated in a Skilled Labor Shortage
After World War II, a global realignment positioned the United States at the epicenter of the world economy. Various innovations that were born of wartime need would prove to have alternative applications. This paved the way for an unprecedented American boom in the creation and production of tangible assets. Importantly, the U.S. also experienced an unprecedented population boom, which provided the manpower needed to fill skyrocketing job demand.
Post-WWII America built the strongest and largest middle class the country — and world — had yet seen. Thanks to meteoric demand for infrastructure and manufactured goods — on American shores and beyond — skilled laborers had secure employment and solidly middle-class wages.
This persisted through the 1970s, after which growing trade imbalances and the early stages of globalization prompted American companies to seek cheaper labor in developing countries. Since then, old-guard manufacturing jobs have consistently moved overseas, leaving once-thriving manufacturing towns — and families — decimated.
Meanwhile, four additional socioeconomic circumstances collided to create a skill gap and skilled labor shortage that has impacted both skilled laborers and the companies that could otherwise employ them:
- The locus of American industry shifted from infrastructure and manufacturing to computer and internet technologies and services. While this spurred an employment boom, these new jobs demanded a skill set that the skilled laborer lacked.
- Various effects of trade policy and globalization have served to depress real wage growth for decades, further gutting the middle-class skilled labor force.
- As a net effect, more families discouraged their children from infrastructure or manufacturing skilled labor, believing rightly that it no longer afforded sufficient career and economic opportunity. Today, the majority of skilled labor workers are Baby Boomers, set to retire throughout this decade.
- In more recent years, infrastructure and energy industry shifts have opened up new skilled labor opportunities. While the sun is setting on certain industries, the sun is rising on new ones — such as solar and wind. Commercial construction, and its related infrastructure industries, continue to realize projected industry growth (and are on pace to continue to do so despite setbacks resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic). Jobs to build out and operationalize these industries are in desperate need of filling.
The skilled labor workforce has been shrinking as skilled labor jobs are returning. This has amounted to a sprawling skill gap and labor shortage that has yet to be reconciled. If it is not, it could amount to a $2.5 trillion loss for the American economy by 2028.
As we expanded our offering to more industries, we grasped that there are multiple transferable skills between these industries that neither the companies nor the workers could see. It clicked — we would retrain skilled laborers whose employment opportunities are on the wane for energy and infrastructure jobs on the rise. We would also retrain laborers for other areas of industry in which they have an interest and desire to work. Along the way, we would unlock a degree of job autonomy, mobility, and skill fungibility not yet seen for these workers.
The Opportunity No One Is Talking About
The skilled labor shortage introduced us to a larger problem — and, thereby, an opportunity — that no one is talking about.
The countries that can develop, build, and harness technologies in energy infrastructure will reap enormous economic rewards and lead the way for others to follow in this century. We believe that the pieces are in place for the United States to take this lead.
As innovation and investment expand in this area, job demand in it will soar. However, as of today, the United States fundamentally lacks the number of skilled laborers to meet this demand.
This is a high-stakes problem, where the missed opportunity if not solved or the captured opportunity if solved is massive.
That this problem is not getting nearly the attention it deserves is, in our observation and analysis, a function of many possible factors:
- In part, this problem is the byproduct of certain industries approaching their natural end or new energy sources or manufacturing technologies rendering them obsolete. Those in this camp are focused solely on self-preservation.
- Industry itself is at the center of numerous environmental and political debates. Many players are distracted by these conversations and therefore missing and failing to plan for the larger inevitabilities and opportunities.
- Especially when they struggle to find enough workers to begin with, companies are disincentivized from supporting the reskilling of their workers for other areas of industry and might be resistant to the idea — even though, ultimately, it will put more and entirely new candidates in their pool.
- Many stakeholder groups, if not most, simply lack the macro-environment perspective that we have been fortunate to gain.
But here’s the thing we have found: skilled laborers prioritize consistent employment and sufficient pay to provide for themselves and their families.
The politics, the controversy surrounding this industry or that industry, and the myriad distractions from the macro-industry circumstances are pulling the narrative away from what truly matters in to workers — the economic opportunity and resilience to provide nice lives for themselves and their families.
As a company steadfastly committed to expanding the universe of potential work for any individual laborer so that he or she can once again earn a solidly livable wage, we care about what the workers care about. We also can see that when the workers are well paid and consistently employed, the entire American economy will benefit.
This is our lens. And it shapes all of our conversations and plans — present and future — at Workrise.
Our Vision for the Future of Skilled Labor
A fateful series of events set us on a path of uncovering opportunities that would, in time, deliver us to the work that we at Workrise consider the most important of our lives. Going to bat for our vitally important skilled laborers — so that they may push the American economy into the future — is our purpose. This means we cannot simply help them find work in the industries they’ve always worked in; it means we must help them leverage transferrable skills and train them with the qualifications to work in multiple industries — current and of the future.
It also means that the appeal of skilled labor must be restored to draw more people to it. We need more skilled laborers in general, and we need more with transferable skills. The United States is in the uniquely fortunate position of being the only developed economy not staring down devastating population decline. Thanks to immigration, our population will continue to grow. More people will be available to fill vital jobs in multiple industries — so long as they have this breadth of skill sets needed to move freely among them.
Central to our vision to address this most urgent of problems is creating the incentives and circumstances that will both retain current skilled laborers and attract new ones with great pay, unparalleled benefits, job access, relevant re-skilling, and respect. The future demands it.
Skilled Laborers Will Propel Us Into the Next Frontiers of Industry
When one of our workers shares with us how game-changing, even life changing it has been to partner with us, we are overcome with pride. And gratitude — while it was a path with twists and turns, we arrived at the work we were born to do. While we are just getting started, we are grateful that we have not missed our fate.
Similarly, we are hell-bent on ensuring America’s skilled laborers also do not miss theirs. And their fate is to dramatically elevate their potential and earning power by changing their career mindset. It is to step out of blue collar work as they’ve always known it and into future collar work — work that unlocks autonomy, an upward path, and the wherewithal for consistent employment weaving in and out of the skilled labor industries of their choosing.
And America’s fate is to march the world forward once again in the industries that will define the twenty-first century, leaving more prosperity for all in her path.
The pieces are in place for the United States to take the lead in the twenty-first century. We won’t stop until the barriers blocking her otherwise stratospheric growth are removed.
