The U.S. economy’s post-Covid growth spurt has come amid one very big problem: lack of workers for jobs across sectors as they bounce back from the pandemic and now attempt to grow amid tighter financial conditions. The labor market, where job openings have reached as high as two for each available worker, is a force within the inflation that continues to challenge companies looking to hire skilled workers. Nowhere has the tight labor market been more extreme than in construction.
The construction sector is a fundamental backbone of the nation – without structures created by construction workers, Americans would have nowhere to eat, sleep, work, or live. And yet, the industry is currently battling the highest level of unfilled job openings ever recorded.
According to an outlook from Associated Builders and Contractors, a trade group for the non-union construction industry, construction firms will need to attract an estimated 546,000 additional workers on top of the normal pace of hiring in 2023 to meet the demand for labor. The construction industry averaged more than 390,000 job openings per month in 2022, the highest level on record, while unemployment in the sector of 4.6% was the second lowest on record.
A long-term labor force problem
There are simply not enough workers to keep up with the growing demand for houses, hospitals, schools, and other structures. What’s more, with the passage of Biden’s infrastructure bill, American municipalities have large sums of money to invest in the revitalization of their buildings, but no one to perform said revitalization. The number of online applications for roles in the construction industry fell 40% at the beginning of the pandemic and has remained flat since, according to ZipRecruiter data from April.
“Despite sharp increases in interest rates over the past year, the shortage of construction workers will not disappear in the near future,” said ABC Chief Economist Anirban Basu in a February release on its labor supply…
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