Mixed jobs report from Vineyard Wind in year 3 – The New Bedford Light

NEW BEDFORD — Vineyard Wind released its latest jobs report at Thursday’s offshore wind conference, stating that in its third year of operations, it has exceeded some of its targets for union hiring, but fallen short on its goals for employing women and people of color. As the project approaches completion, the workforce will be reduced, the company said, to pivot from construction to operations and maintenance. 

“With a project of this magnitude, at any given time, we have anywhere between a dozen to several dozen contractors working,” said Jennifer Cullen, who oversees labor relations and workforce development initiatives for Vineyard Wind. 

Cullen told the luncheon audience that Vineyard Wind has exceeded its target to create 500 union jobs. In its first year, which began with building out the Barnstable substation and ended with the first stages of offshore cable installation, Cullen said the project employed 199 union workers. The workforce ramped up to 857 union workers in the project’s second year, she said, as Vineyard Wind took control of the port facility and began turbine installation. The number of union workers has tapered off to 453 in its third year as the Barnstable substation work was completed, she said. 

Cullen said Vineyard Wind has employed a total of 2,808 people on the project (both union and non-union), for varied lengths of time. The unions include piledrivers, electrical workers, welders, steel workers, carpenters, longshoremen and others. There are also 57 fishing vessels working on the project, which are not part of the unions. 

“Our partnership with labor is really important to us,” she said. “We want to be able to take this first project and build on it by making the workforce stronger.” 

Cullen said that Vineyard Wind has fallen short on its commitments to hire women and a diverse workforce. There are also some discrepancies when it comes to Vineyard Wind reaching its goals of hiring local people. 

Vineyard Wind is the first industrial-scale offshore wind farm to come online since the Biden Administration fast-tracked 32 projects that are currently in the pipeline for development. The company signed a historic Project-Labor Agreement (PLA) in July 2021 that pledged to employ unions, women, people of color, tribal nations and local residents. Though many politicians, city officials and media outlets were present for the signing of the PLA, the final details were never publicly released. 

Cullen said at the panel that Vineyard Wind had set a target for people of color to comprise 20% of the workforce, though in its third year of operation, people of color only make up about 15% of the workforce. She added that women make up about 5% of the workforce, which misses its 10% target. 

Union workers with New Bedford zip codes have increased from 18% in its first year of operation to 36% in its third year of operation, Cullen said. However, she said those numbers included people who reside elsewhere but are temporarily living in New Bedford while working. “They are living here while they’re working here,” she said. “They are contributing to the economy here.” 

She added that Vineyard Wind has exceeded its goal of ensuring at least 51% of its union workers come from the four local counties in Southeastern Massachusetts, though it is unclear if they are also only temporarily living in the region. 

As of September, Vineyard Wind had installed 47 of the 62 planned turbine foundations that make up the wind farm. Cullen said that as the construction phase concludes, the construction related jobs will subside as the workforce pivots toward operations and maintenance. She said operations and maintenance jobs are mostly concentrated on Martha’s Vineyard and will employ fewer people than the construction phase — somewhere between 80 to 90 full-time workers — but the jobs will last for as long as 20 to 30 years. 

“Those jobs [operations and maintenance] are now building up on Martha’s Vineyard as we hopefully will be ramping down in New Bedford,” Cullen said. 

The three-day event, hosted by the New Bedford Ocean Cluster at the Whaling Museum, features speakers from across the offshore wind industry. It included executives at leading offshore wind developers, shipping agencies, manufacturers and researchers in addition to city and state officials. The event is sponsored primarily by Vineyard Wind, SouthCoast Wind and Avangrid. 

Cullen said to boost employment in the future, Vineyard Wind would develop its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs and apprenticeship programs. 

“We would like to be doing better,” she said. “We need a very deep bench of people.”

Email reporter Will Sennott at wsennott@newbedfordlight.org.

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