To paraphrase what U.S. Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn once said, “Anyone can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build it.” In today's political climate, from Washington, DC on down, there are plenty of people to kick down barns, but not nearly enough carpenters to build them.

During the most recent legislative session, the state legislature passed a series of bills called “Working for Alabama,” a great example of building good, effective policy that will help address some of the real issues facing the Alabama economy — bills that could benefit us for generations to come.

Anyone familiar with the legislative process knows that it is easy to kill a bill, but extremely difficult to pass a significant bill. Of the six ambitious bills included in Initiative for Alabama, all were passed within 50 days of being introduced, a remarkable feat.

One of the primary goals of this package was to address Alabama's noticeably low workforce participation rate. Our state ranks 47th in the nation and last in terms of having an active worker in the economy. Any small business owner in our state knows this problem all too well because it's one of the major issues we face every day. You can see this in the many “Now Hiring” signs hanging in storefronts across our state.

Lt. Governor Will Ainsworth recognized this problem and laid the groundwork to work with elected officials and private sector leaders to create solutions to fix the problem. In 2019, Ainsworth led a new commission to identify the issues contributing to Alabama’s low workforce participation rate and, more importantly, devise solutions. After several years of intense work, with input from other elected officials and private sector leaders from some of the state’s largest employers, including Alabama Power President and CEO Jeff Peoples and PowerSouth Energy President and CEO Gary Smith, Ainsworth’s commission produced a report with ambitious policy solutions aimed at addressing this problem and creating economic success for the state for years to come.

Ainsworth’s committee has laid the foundation for the policy solutions that make up the “Work for Alabama” package and will benefit Alabama’s economy for years and even decades to come. The solutions in this package are common sense, well thought out, and represent policies we can all support. This includes streamlining Alabama’s workforce development strategies and programs to make them more efficient, establishing accountability to ensure the state’s efforts are actually working (a concept missing in government bureaucracy), and ensuring that the people who actually employ Alabamians have a seat at the table when these important decisions are made. These, plus resources such as the child care tax credit to make increasingly expensive child care affordable for working parents, represent just a few of the important issues included in this package.

The last legislative session was contentious in many ways, with divisive issues like gambling causing fierce confrontations between the Alabama House, Senate and the Governor’s office, but thanks to Mr. Ainsworth’s leadership, a coalition of Republican and Democratic elected leaders and the state’s business community, the Legislature was able to put those issues aside and come together to get something done for our state that affects nearly every Alabamian.

This bill gives state leaders, including Governor Kay Ivey, House Speaker Nathaniel Leadbetter, Senate President Pro Tempore Greg Reed, Democratic Leader Anthony Daniels and Democratic Leader Bobby Singleton, an issue on which they can put partisanship aside and work together to address commonsense solutions to very real challenges facing Alabama.

The push for this monumental “Work for Alabama” program was made possible in large part through the efforts of Lt. Governor Will Ainsworth.

see you next week.

Steve Flowers is Alabama's leading political columnist. His weekly column appears in over 60 newspapers across Alabama. He served as a state representative for 16 years. Steve can be contacted at [email protected].