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DOL chief to attend Calif. meeting on WIOA
CNMI Labor Secretary Edith E. Deleon Guerrero will be meeting this week with federal grantors to discuss the progress in the implementation of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act.
According to Deleon Guerrero, who took part in Monday’s inaugural Marianas Indigenous Conference, she will be leaving this week to attend a town hall meeting with CNMI-DOL’s federal grantors in San Francisco, California.
“This whole week I will be leaving to San Francisco to attend a town hall meeting. There is a lot of conversations and a lot of changes going through,” she said.
The meeting, according to Deleon Guerrero, will focus on a unified state plan for WIOA, which will require the local labor office to come up with plans, policies, and benchmarks.
President Barack Obama signed the WIOA into law on July 22, 2014. It aims to help job seekers access employment, education, training, and support services to succeed in the labor market and to match employers with the skilled workers they need to compete in the global economy.
WIOA requires the state to develop and submit a four-year strategy in the form of a “unified state plan” for core programs that will allow U.S Department of Labor’s regional offices to report on the work performances, plans, and procedures of every region.
CNMI Labor is under Region VI of San Francisco as its federal grantee.
“The feds check at every level because everyone has a specific role to play in every transformation,” Deleon Guerrero said. “There is so much going on right now and writing the new the effective date from 2015.”
Deleon Guerrero said that one of the biggest changes that might be discussed at the town hall meeting is the unified state plan, performance benchmark, and getting all the key players in the system to transform themselves.
“Each particular granting agency in the federal level are working on guidance and instructions to each individual state and program and there is still so much work to be done by 2015,” she said.
