Welcome to the minnesota minority trades Council

The Minnesota Minority Trades Council advocates for a more diverse & equitable workforce in the construction & real estate development industry. 

We are a 501(3)c non-profit organization that is non-partisan and bringing together public, private and governmental agencies from diverse backgrounds including, but not limited to; small businesses, minority owned businesses, women owned businesses, veteran owned businesses, disabled owned businesses to connect with each other on diversity + inclusion for the building trades and business development, financial planning, project bonding and workforce capacity building. 

To be the voice for Minority Contractors of Color, Women, Veterans, disabled who have been Historically under-represented in Construction Ownership.  Leadership or Union Trades Membership. 

It is our mission to provide leadership on diversity, equity & inclusion to individuals and corporations who do business in Minnesota.  We are committed to providing information on public infrastructure projects that have DBE goals, assist in professional development, educational, and resource sharing in the industry, and programming collaboration services all from the perspective of a minority construction owner | advocate. 

We believe that construction and real estate should be a career for economic empowerment, not a burden to entry and that the policies need to include those that are underrepresented, At MMTC it is our mission to be the guiding organization by creating a more equitable industry for communities of color that will be sustainable into the future.

"According to the Associated General Contractors of America, people who identify has Black make up 12% of the total workforce, but only 6% of the construction labor pool. Women compose 47% of the overall workforce, but just 9% of construction workers". 

Last year, spurred by a global movement to celebrate diversity and strive for social justice reforms, tens of thousands of companies—including scores of construction firms in the United States—took a look at their own business practices and made public commitments to improving diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) among their workforces.

Diversity & Inclusion at its most basic concept means truly accepting, supporting and including the full range of human differences, including but not limited to race, ethnicity, gender and gender identity, sexual orientation, age, social class, physical abilities, religious or ethical values systems, national origins and political beliefs. It’s a practice that’s not just the right thing to do, it’s also good for business.

Diversity and inclusion programs—when properly facilitated—have a direct impact on employees, company identity and ultimately the bottom line. Happy employees that feel valued and included tend to be more collaborative and productive.

According to management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, ethically and culturally diverse companies are 33% more likely to outperform their competition. The firm also notes that gender diversity among executive teams correlates to 15% higher profitability and value creation.

The construction industry, like many others, has faced challenges with diversity and inclusion. Recent years, though, have seen industry associations and individual contractors take significant action to stamp out racism, sexism, harassment, pay inequality and other social injustice blights. While great progress has been made on that front, it’s clear there is a lot more work to be done.

In 2020 alone, dozens of highly publicized incidents of flagrant racism on construction jobsites occurred throughout North America. These included harassment and verbal abuse of workers of color, incidents of nooses hung in the workplace and racist graffiti. There were similar stories of sexism, sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination, ageism and more. One mid-2020 survey of construction professionals noted that 65% indicated having witnessed a racist incident on a jobsite.

Construction has long been an industry dominated by white male professionals, and despite younger generations of workers entering the construction workforce, the needle has been slow to move with regard to workforce diversification.

 One of the richest legacies of African Descendants is construction.  From the pyramids of Egypt to the building of America, Blacks have been involved in this industry that will survive the times.  We will always build.  Even when we demolish existing structures it is because we are about to build something new to replace it with utilizing a diverse workforce.  Yes, construction has a certain future.  It is a producer of many jobs and can provide not only a living for the laborers in the business but wealth for entrepreneurs to be handed down generation by generation. 

In a statement to NPR, the National Association of Realtors, the largest real estate group in the country, acknowledged its past role in housing discrimination and said it has implemented anti-bias training programs for its members.

"Decades of systemic racism have left millions of minority households behind, a system NAR regrettably helped perpetuate a half century ago," the group said. "Over recent years, NAR has recommitted itself to rectifying mistakes of the past, dismantling lingering nationwide housing inequities, and advocating for policies which ensure the market is more accessible in the years to come."

A  report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example, noted that while Black people comprise 12% of the national workforce, they make up just 6% of the workforce in construction. This figure has gone largely unchanged over the past 25 years. Women make up just more than 10% of the construction workforce, with the bulk of those roles in office settings versus in the field. 

Hispanic and Latino professionals account for around 30% of U.S. construction firms’ approximately 10.8 million professionals, though the majority of those roles are in the field as laborers. White construction professionals, meanwhile, still made up 88.6% of the overall construction employment figures and accounted for 92% of construction managers and 90% of chief executives.

Nearly every construction organization and association has made diversity a key priority for 2021 and beyond, but it’s clear a significant part of that is on construction companies to act.

 In the Star Tribune, Jessie Van Berkel reports, “Minnesota spends hundreds of millions of dollars annually on construction, but the contractors building roads, transit and buildings rarely meet state goals for hiring a diverse workforce. In dozens of instances over the past two years, companies contracting with the state did not employ a single woman or person of color as part of their construction team. Some in the industry called the state’s goals unattainable, because there still are not enough women and people of color entering and staying in the field. Minnesota officials acknowledge the numbers are aspirational but say they are critical to ensure progress.” 

Small business procurement is overdue for an overhaul. Largely out of benign neglect, the current programs have set up a financial and institutional structures that keep disadvantaged firms at a disadvantage from start-to-end of the federal contracting process. These issues are especially pronounced in infrastructure because of the large contracts and institutional complexity of contracting. In the recent past, reforms have nibbled around the edges with unified certification in MAP-21, limited personal net worth and gross receipts changes, and SBA-conformance in the FAA reauthorization; however, reformers have done little to address the systemic challenges facing minority-owned businesses. This has created five foundational challenges that any reform to supplier diversity must address.

Challenge 1: DBE firms are at a disadvantage when accessing the flexible capital they need
DBEs do not have access to the same financial system majority-owned firms do. Federal programs have been limited in the scope of the problem they’ve addressed. Whether it’s raising a first round of capital, building long-term capital reserves, or raising capital to quickly staff-up and mobilize for a project, raising funds is more difficult as a DBE. Federally backed programs statutorily provide DBEs with financial products less sophisticated and less supportive than those accessed by majority-owned firms. Even if a minority-owned business has the relationships, track record, and balance sheet to access capital, that capital is frequently provided via inflexible debt products.

The US Department of Transportation’s Short Term Lending Program exemplifies this issue. It offers debt capital but puts severe limitations on its use. This puts the very businesses this money aims to help at a structural disadvantage compared to majority-owned firms who can raise more flexible funds. The Trump Administration discontinued the program, meaning it’s due for a refresh under the Biden Administration; we would encourage additional flexibility. If DBEs are going to thrive, we must remove barriers like this and develop new financial products that address the financial disadvantages faced by the firms rather than reproducing them.

Challenge 2: Current procurement and contracting incentives inhibit growth

Procurement is where the rubber meets the road in supplier diversity. USDOT’s existing 10% federal set aside for DBEs has inadvertently created an incentive system for minority-owned business to “get certified and stay certified” rather than “get certified and grow.” Businesses with gross receipts that surpass $26.3 million seeking contracts through the DBE program are stuck between a rock and a hard place: they are too small to compete with larger firms and too large for federal set asides. (In infrastructure projects that often run into the billions, total revenue of $26.3 million is a rounding error. It may sound like a lot, but when considering gross revenues, it is not.) As currently constructed, the 10% set asides largely confine DBEs to subcontracting roles, meaning less project work, narrower operational margins, and less experience to someday exit the program competitively. In addition to this, the personal net worth caps for entrepreneurs participating in DBE programs has not been inflation and does not account for geographical variance (despite the wide variation in cost of living across this country). If we care about closing the racial wealth gap, then we need to update how we contract for infrastructure projects, starting with addressing the incentives that inhibit growth in DBE set-aside programs.

Challenge 3: The Fragmentation of Public Entities causes excessive administrative burdens.

Federal infrastructure spending will flow to a balkanized set of special, often independent, public entities including school districts, city agencies and public authorities who will in-turn procure specific contracts from firms. To-be-released McKinsey research reveals that these entities have different definitions of DBEs (as well as differing lists of DBEs), use separate processes for procuring goods and services and engage (or fail to engage) with different stakeholders in the ecosystem, including entrepreneurial support organizations and financial institutions. There is no unified approach to supplier diversity, meaning that the whole is less than the sum of the parts. In addition to the institutional issues this creates, it also leaves DBE firms filling out excessive — often duplicative — paperwork to qualify for similar contracts with different agencies.

Challenge 4: Certification has High Transaction Costs

The process of getting and staying certified as a qualified DBE or Minority Owned Businesses (MBEs) is overly burdensome for many historically underutilized firms. Despite recent improvements that streamline the certification process and increase reciprocity across state-lines, certification is often cited by disadvantaged businesses as one of the highest hurdles to participation in public contracting. This is both because of the administrative burden and lack of technical assistance to meet cumbersome, redundant, and sometimes conflicting certification and compliance requirements — especially considering that certifications often vary by agency and by state. Frequently, the staff time or outside professional services support needed to complete certification paperwork rivals the amount of effort required by the largest prime contractors, which have greater resources — by many orders of magnitude — to afford backend operations. Many of these burdens stem from well-intentioned efforts to support historically underutilized businesses and are now perversely limiting their access to contracts. Fortunately, the direly-needed reforms to certification are high-impact and can be accomplished with relatively-low effort by agency leadership.

Challenge 5: Lackluster transparency in enforcing DBE targets sets up conflicts of interest and erodes trust

The current federal process for meeting DBE goals relies on a system that lacks transparency and suffers from poor enforcement. This erodes trust, creates bad data, and is self-defeating. There are two areas where this problem is most pronounced. First, for each project funded by the federal government, prime contractors must undergo a “Good Faith Effort” to find a DBE that can meet the project’s DBE goals. These efforts mean, in essence, that the prime contractor has tried their best to solicit bids from DBE firms. Often, prime contractors report that there are no small and minority-owned firms that can do the work. This claim is often incorrect, but no countervailing structure exists to validate prime contractor reports. If no suitable DBE can be found through a good faith outreach effort, the prime is granted a waiver to self-perform the work in the contract. The lack of transparency in good-faith efforts often erodes DBE trust in the “good faith” of the efforts.

Firms selected as DBE sub-contractors are often recipients of support programs such as mentor-protégé, which are focused on growing business acumen. These programs are set up so the prime mentors the subcontractor on operational tasks like setting billable rates — which the sub-contractor then uses to bill the prime— and business planning to grow into vibrant firms that compete against the prime. The problem here: there is a deep conflict of interest at the heart of these programs, which require primes to negotiate against their own bottom line. On top of this, there is limited transparency into the treatment and outcomes of subcontracted partnerships for Black- and Brown-owned firms that partner with larger majority own suppliers, contributing to an erosion of trust in the DBE program’s commitment to wealth building.

In furtherance of these goals, Time for Change will host its first “Construction Inclusion Week, as its “first effort to harness the collective power of general contractors, specialty contractors, subcontractors, and suppliers.” It states, “Our objective is to build awareness of the need to improve diversity and inclusion in the construction industry by providing content and resources.”

These efforts to increase diversity at all levels of the construction industry, and to improve the work environment for women and minorities, will help construction employers build the workforces they need to sustain future growth.

In previous decades, the transportation sector has exacerbated inequality, destroyed Black and Brown wealth, and damaged Black and Brown communities in the United States. For the country to truly Build Back Better, America must not only eliminate the continuation of bad practices and remove old physical urban scars; we must also affirmatively contribute to the wealth building efforts of Black and Brown America. The coming American Jobs Plan is both a symbolically and materially impactful way of achieving the Administration’s goals of closing the racial wealth gap through federal procurement. The inverse is also true: an infrastructure package that does not consider Black and Brown construction procurement is blinded to the long shadow of transportation policy in this country, as well as the enormous opportunities that lie ahead. Our country will come up short if, after all is said and done, the Department of Health and Human Services buys 50% more paperclips from Black-owned firms, but little has changed in who is receiving prime contracts for building major infrastructure projects.

Billions of dollars are at stake for historically underutilized businesses to help close our country’s racial wealth gap, but will we act?

PRESS:  Diversity, Equity & Inclusion   -   

American DBE Magazine - American Diverse Business Enterprise Magazine 

 Governments fall short on hiring diverse businesses for Minnesota public projects (startribune.com) 

 Coalition: Minority students aren’t given opportunities to enter trades | Repairer Driven News 

 https://www.powerpartnermn.com/black-history-month-celebrating-african-american-contribution-to-the-trades/ 

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mckissack-construction-inside-the-nations-oldest-african-american-owned-female-run-construction-management-firm/ 

https://www.startribune.com/mortenson-and-five-other-industry-giants-launch-national-construction-inclusion-week/600096485/

https://www.cts.umn.edu/research/project/mndot-fy-2022-2024-fhwa-dbe-goals

 Union-trade group deal to help minority contractors get more work | Business (reviewjournal.com) 

https://spokesman-recorder.com/2022/02/09/minority-contractors-grow-frustrated-with-the-lack-of-inclusion/

https://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/news/2021/05/19/mndot-failing-to-meet-diverse-contracting-goals.html

https://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/news/2021/02/16/new-policy-adviser-for-mndot-help-latino-owned.html

 https://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/news/2020/12/10/cargill-target-and-medtronic-join-coalition-black.html

https://www.auditor.leg.state.mn.us/ped/pedrep/mndotgoals.pdf

 https://www.mda.state.mn.us/connecting-emerging-farmers 

 Building Opportunities for Minority Farmers through McGovern-Dole Program | USDA Foreign Agricultural Service 

 Investing in Black leaders to create lasting change | Company blog | U.S. Bank (usbank.com) 

 Programs help Black developers access capital | Finance & Commerce (finance-commerce.com) 

 New Funds For Black Developers Fronting Millions For Their Success (bisnow.com) 

 Wells Fargo Newsroom - Wells Fargo to Commission Third-Party Racial Equity Audit (wf.com) 

BIDDING FOR CONTRACTS: 

https://www.transportation.gov/civil-rights/disadvantaged-business-enterprise

https://mnucp.org/Contracting-Opportunities.aspx

https://metrocouncil.org/About-Us/What-We-Do/DoingBusiness/Small-Business-Programs/Disadvantaged-Business-Program.aspx

 Summary-MnDOT Workforce and Contracting Goals (state.mn.us) 

To learn more about Construction Inclusion week click the link below:

 Construction Inclusion Week 

 WOMEN IN CONSTRUCTION LEADERS 

 Construction Champions 2023 | Construction Dive