Vice President Kamala Harris speaks to union members and their families following a tour of the Carpenters International Training Center Saturday, July 3, 2021.
Saturday, July 3, 2021 | 4:45 p.m.
During a visit to Las Vegas in March, Vice President Kamala Harris met with volunteers packing emergency food boxes at a time when so many in Southern Nevada had lost their jobs because of the pandemic and depended on those boxes to feed their families.
On Saturday morning, Harris flew into a fully reopened tourist mecca, it its world-famous Strip and downtown brimming with tourists for the Independence Day holiday weekend. The weekend is another step forward in a state that’s crawling out of the economic disarray caused by COVID-19.
Harris visited the Carpenters International Training Center near McCarran International Airport, which is touted as the “largest skilled trades training center in North America,” and spoke to a crowd of about 300, most of whom were members of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America union.
The event was part of the Biden administration’s “America’s Back Together” tour celebrating the country’s progress against COVID-19.
In speeches to cheering supporters, Harris and Democrats in the Nevada congressional delegation touted federal COVID relief, business reopenings and vaccination efforts that have taken place during Joe Biden’s six months as president.
They also heaped praise on the bipartisan infrastructure framework reached between Biden and a group of Democratic and Republican senators. The White House said the eight-year, $1.2 trillion package would earmark $529 billion for transportation-related projects, including $109 billion for roads and bridges. Harris said 28 bridges and about 1,000 miles of highways in Nevada needed repair.
The jobs created by the infrastructure framework, Harris said, would be “good union jobs.”
“This year not only will we celebrate our independence,” Harris said. “We will celebrate our nation’s resilience, because this year America is coming back together, because this year America is getting back to work.”
The recovery, however, could be stunted by the spread of the coronavirus among unvaccinated Americans, the Democrats warned.
Harris noted that Nevada had the largest spike in the nation in new coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths in the last week. The “vast majority” of those cases involved people who were unvaccinated, she said, noting that she’d spoken to Gov. Steve Sisolak about the issue.
“If we want to keep growing our economy, we also need to get more folks vaccinated,” she said. “Frankly, we gotta do better in Nevada,” she added, “guys, we gotta do better in Nevada.”
In the U.S., 47.6% of the population ages 12 and over has been fully vaccinated. In Nevada, 45.17% of people in that age group have been fully vaccinated, or about 1.2 million in the state, according to the Nevada Health Response COVID dashboard.
To get the point across that more Nevadans need to be fully vaccinated, the state set up a mobile vaccination unit outside the training center, which Harris toured.
“The bottom line is that getting vaccinated is safe,” she said. “It is the ultimate act of solidarity. ”
Before her remarks, Harris toured facilities in the International Training Center, witnessing training in concrete forms, industrial scaffolding and conveyor work, the union said.
The vice president spoke to carpenters like Jovan Johnson, now a business representative with the Southwest Regional Council of Carpenters, a union that represents about 55,000 members.
Prior to moving to Las Vegas nearly 20 years, the 45-year-old single mother said hadn’t imagined “hanging from the side of the highway, you know, 50 feet in the air.”.
Before Johnson was promoted to her administrative position, she completed a four-year apprenticeship at the training center, and then helped build highways, hotels, schools, hospitals, “anything you can think of,” she said.
Growing up, Johnson said, girls were either not allowed or dissuaded from joining shop and woodworking classes in school. As a carpenter, she’s found a career that helped her pull her family upward.
She said a federal infrastructure deal would help many others.
“I’ve built my career on infrastructure, and fed my family on infrastructure,” Johnson said. “So, to know that there’s more infrastructure coming, I can just picture the community wealth that can be built (for) families.”
Johnson said Harris’ easygoing personality made her comfortable and that the vice president “asked a lot of great questions” about “how things get done.”
Johnson, who is Black, said she’s met Biden and former President Barack Obama in the past, but that having a woman of color as vice president was tremendous because “representation matters.”
And Johnson is representing what was once a male-dominated field. “You’re a carpenter, you’re not a female carpenter, you’re not a male carpenter, they teach us all the same,” she said about the training center.
