This week Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg came under fire on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast for a comment he made about the number of white people working in the nation's construction industry.
During the recent episode, renowned host Joe Rogan pointed out the Transportation Secretary‘s "profound lack of understanding" and stressed that workers should not be selected based on race but on merit.
He “shows a profound lack of understanding of skilled labor because if you're talking about people that are carpenters, people that are plumbers, and people that are electricians, and people that are framers and roofers, like that's skilled labor," stated Rogan during a conversation with Bridget Phetasy, guest comedian on the program.
The host emphasized that if there are good people in a trade, they should be hired. He went on to explain that if there is no skilled labor in the community where construction is being carried out, the next best thing would be to hire people who know how to do the job properly, even if they live outside that community.
"That's important, look if you see what happens when you have unskilled labor and unskilled people working on buildings, you have f---ing disasters," Rogan said.
The host also took the opportunity to point out that, in his opinion, Buttigieg should have taken time at the National Association of Counties Conference to talk about the recent train derailment instead of making segregationist comments about the workers.
"The fact that he talked about that, and he didn't talk about this derailment, this derailment should be, but the derailment's a colossal failure on the part of the Transportation Department," he said.
Buttigieg made no mention of the Ohio train derailment while speaking at a conference this morning but did find the time to say that there are too many white people who work construction. pic.twitter.com/q4WNcq10h9
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) February 13, 2023
Pete Buttigieg's commentary
"We have heard way too many stories from generations past of infrastructure where you got a neighborhood, often a neighborhood of color, that finally sees the project come to them, but everyone in the hard hats on that project, looking like doing the good paying jobs, don’t look like they came from anywhere near the neighborhood," expressed Pete Buttigieg during the National Association of Counties Conference.
