Construction employment was significantly affected by the COVID-19 crisis in April, decreasing by 975,000 jobs following a decrease of 29,000 jobs in March, according to www.abc.org.
The construction unemployment rate was 16.6% in April—an increase of 11.9 percentage points compared with the same time last year and the highest rate since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking unemployment in 1948. Because of technical reasons related to the BLS survey and a classification error in several responses, the unemployment rate for construction likely is closer to 20%. The national unemployment rate for all industries rose from 4.4% in March to 14.7% in April.
All three nonresidential segments registered job losses, with the largest decrease experienced in nonresidential specialty trade (-393,100), followed by nonresidential building (-88,500) and heavy and civil engineering (-78,900).
“The hope had been that construction activity would hold up well given the industry’s classification as an essential industry in much of the nation and the presence of substantial backlog coming into the crisis, which stood at 8.2 months in February, according to ABC’s Construction Backlog Indicator,” said Associated Builders and Contractors Chief Economist Anirban Basu. “But alas, in large measure, those hopes were not realized. The level of construction industry job loss in April easily surpassed that of the worst month sustained during the Great Recession, when 155,000 jobs were lost in March 2009. Between April 2006 and January 2011, construction industry employment declined by 2.3 million. The construction industry lost nearly a million jobs last month alone.
“Based on a combination of business confidence indicators, initial unemployment claims and other emerging data, May will represent another month of crushing construction employment loss,” Basu continued. “Project postponements and cancellations are now commonplace, with construction backlog failing to be the protective shield that it normally is during the early stages of economywide recession.”
