Green Labor Journal - Working for a Substainable Future

Dean Allen, CEO, McKinstry, Seattle

Proud union employer serves three groups - our people, our clients and our communities - in that order

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[Remarks of Dean Allen, President and CEO of McKinstry, at the 2010 Good Jobs, Green Jobs Conference in Washington, D.C.]

Forget Joe the plumber, I am Dean the plumber from Seattle.  But I am also a sheet metal worker and an electrician, and I am here to talk to you about the greatest opportunity of our lifetime to really make a difference.

My father, George Allen, started my company, McKinstry, 50 years ago this year.  It started with 5 employees as a plumbing company out of a shop in Seattle and has grown to 1,600 employees, in 17 offices, and 15 states. 

I came to McKinstry 33 years ago.  Though I dug ditches and carried a pair of channel locks in my back pocket growing up, I’m actually a biochemist by training.  I came to McKinstry after graduating to save up enough money for a Ph.D.  It was big fun and I forgot to leave.

I have a scientific mind and I like to ask questions when things don’t make sense to me, and I’ve been fortunate to have a career surrounded by people and partners that not only ask tough questions, but have the confidence and foresight to act on bold initiatives.

Proud union employer
McKinstry is built to last.  We are a private company that serves three constituencies—our people, our clients… in that order… and the communities we work and live in. 

We are a PROUD union employer with over 1,000 crafts men and women that call McKinstry home.  This includes agreements with Sheet Metal workers, Plumbers & Pipefitters, Electrical Workers and a dozen other trades we work with.

Over the last 50 years we have relentlessly worked to build a company that designs, fabricates, installs, commissions, services, repairs, retrofits and remotely monitors our clients facility systems in an approach we call DBOM. 

50 years and $5 billion of projects delivered from cradle to grave have taught us a lot and that’s what I want to talk with you about.

Three main issues
The way I see it there are three issues at hand. 

1)    We need skilled and innovative workers, both to dream up and design the new technologies, widgets, and systems—but also−equally skilled crafts folks to design, fabricate, build, install and service.  We need a focused and deliberate reinvention of STEM in our schools system.

2)    We have a trillion dollar opportunity to make the built environment more energy efficient and this can be done on a revenue neutral basis that helps protect the environment.  And time is being wasted to be leaders in this.

3)    We, the leaders in this room, also need to have an honest conversation about what it will take to actualize this new clean economy.  What it will take to create the union trades jobs of the future clean energy economy.

Science, Technology, Engineering and Math
First, let’s start with STEM—Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. 

Why would a plumber from Seattle spend half of each day working on this topic?  The new economy starts in our classrooms.  The health of my future workforce—union and professional− sits in schools all across America that are failing them.

For those parents that say to Tommy or Suzy—it’s ok not to take math or science, that not everyone is going to be a software programmer at Microsoft or an engineer at Boeing.  You are failing your kids.  And if you are an educator lowering standards and expectations, you too are failing them.

It doesn’t matter if you are an engineer or a sheet metal apprentice.  If you can’t pass a rigorous math and science competency test when you graduate from high school, you can’t work for McKinstry.

Our country’s global competitiveness—in the professional fields and trades alike-- DEPENDS on an education system that drives STEM deeper into classrooms and does away with the attitude that not every kid needs or deserves the education.

Energy and Environment
Next, let’s talk about ENERGY and the Environment 
We sit here faced with a TRILLION dollar energy opportunity.  80 BILLION square feet of non- residential real estate needs to be retrofitted.  Buildings consume 70% of all the electricity produced in America and we know how to change that.

I don’t think.  I know.
·    Energy efficiency has been our focus for last 10 years with over $1.0 Billion in energy project experience.
·    We have grown our energy business 100x in the last 7 years.

Federal stimulus and the American economy
Now let me take a step back.   We have all watched the stimulus funding get put to work in communities all across the county.  I’m here to stand up and say—well done, it has helped. 

Due in part to the stimulus and to our diversity, my company did not participate in the recession.  We have kept our union staff working, we have kept our professional staff busy, and we have kept all of these Americans paying taxes. 

But who here thinks there is an endless federal well to draw on?  No one.  We still have 30% or more of our trades folks out of work in America with NO end in sight. 

How do we as a community of skilled, smart, innovative, entrepreneurial individuals change the trajectory of our economy?

In keeping with our focus on education, the first and best place to start is in our schools.  We have an opportunity to not only create better, safer, healthier learning environments, but also leave teaching tools−living laboratories to further the demonstrate STEM applications−in the classroom.

We are a proud northwest company so I am going to draw on an example from my home state. 

Today, in fact at this exact hour, Washington’s Governor, Chris Gregoire, is signing an unprecedented bill into law investing $600 million to create jobs retrofitting our K-20 school system. 

Your union members, your environmental affiliations, and your progressive business coalitions worked together over the last year to make their own opportunity.   Over fifty organizations banded together and showed us what local change can and should look like.

50 % of the energy in this country is wasted.  Much of that going into the aged and failing infrastructure of schools, colleges, and university systems.

We have underfunded schools, we have resource poor districts, we have achievement gaps in the most critical subject areas—STEM all across the US.

We also have skilled carpenters, architects, auditors, plumbers, contractors, engineers, sheet metal workers… on the sidelines waiting for work to pick back up.

Washington state model
The Washington model is a quadruple bottom line.  Folks are being put back to work, creating a better physical learning environment for kids−and the savings associated with the reduction of energy will be put directly back in the classroom to fund great teaching. 

And in the classrooms touched we will leave systems exposed, and computer systems available to interact with as curriculum and experimentation platforms.  And the environment wins as well.

That is leadership. That is a model I hope you take back to your own states.

Building the funnel of talented workers and creating a durable demand for that talent through non-residential programs like Washington’s Jobs Act is vital. But those alone won’t be enough.  Those alone won’t get your members back to work.  And it won’t position American to lead the new global energy economy.

Our economy is growing, shifting and evolving and as a long and proud union employer I am saying it should be the goal of every person in this room to figure out HOW you get off the sideline and innovate. 

You need to get in the middle of the new clean energy economy, and grow the clean economy from the ground up.  

It first starts with a collective appreciation that things going forward will be different.  But different can be good.  It can be good for your members, it can be good for companies that value workers and the environment, and it will spur new economies of scale and opportunity.

Let me give you an example:

Over a decade ago, in concert with our Pipefitter and Sheet Metal union partners, we took on a predominately non-union service market in the Seattle area and converted it into a marketplace that employs 300 union craft people today at my company and 4 times that at other union firms.  But to do this we had to reinvent the handling of jurisdiction issues, work rules and develop a tiered craft approach. 

Most importantly these changes were guided by both what the customers needed and demanded, along with what would work for the workforce and for sustainable and profitable work for the contractors.

It was not easy: not easy to plan, not easy to sell, to customers or union members. 
But together we knew this was critical for our future so we plowed ahead, together.  And we won.

Clean energy economy
Today we need to do just the same with the clean energy economy.  Here’s what we need:

1.    We need to understand what customers need and what they will pay for and we need to educate them on the long term value of lowering their energy costs in a competitive world,

2.    We need to advocate for policies that help them retrofit, such as national energy policy that supports energy efficiency as equivalent to renewable energy sources and a clear signal on the future cost of carbon,

3.    We need to invent and contribute to financing strategies and tools that leverage energy savings streams into serous capital to retrofit buildings,

4.    We need to streamline our union construction trades approach to this type of work across all trades to maximize our competitiveness

5.    We need to use our EXISTING training programs to train and retrain the union workforce we need for this work,

6.    We need to demand that this work carry performance guarantees to ensure that the energy stays saved.  This is good for us as citizens but it also ensures that quality craftsmanship and sophisticated aftercare approaches that union partnerships like ours can deliver are leveraged and rewarded.

7.    And lastly we need to be sure we do not wait for help from the federal level.  We need to think globally, but act locally, like we have in Washington State.

Bold initiatives of McKinstry
So I leave you with this. 

We can do things the way we’ve done them in the past and we may be successful.  We may not be.  We may grow.  We may not. 

Let’s be blunt, things have not gone well and I’m not sure we should wait for someone else to solve our problems.

But I like hard questions.  I embrace bold initiatives. And I don’t mind hard work.

·    We need to get to work reducing energy use in America’s buildings, right now.  And we need our government to get the damn policy in place to support this,

·    We need to get our schools fully engaged in excellence in STEM education for EVERY student,

·    And we need to come together like never before to forge the partnerships and actions plans to get this done, TOGETHER.

This is the effort McKinstry will tirelessly work towards and be your committed partner in.  Thank you.

Dean Allen is President and CEO of McKinstry, headquartered in Seattle, Washington.  Allen has over 30 years’ experience in the design, construction and real estate industries in the Pacific Northwest.  Through Dean’s vision as President and CEO, he has built McKinstry from a mechanical contractor into a comprehensive design, build, operate, and maintain enterprise with over $400 million per year in revenues and over 1,600 employees.