Since the Great Recession, the U.S. construction industry has experienced a significant labor shortage.
“The labor shortage, specifically in the residential construction side, has been kind of a uniquely post-Great Recession experience,” says Rob Dietz, chief economist at the National Association of Home Builders.
The construction industry lost about 1.5 million jobs during the financial crisis and has not yet gained back those jobs, according to news.yahoo.com.
Dietz says there has been “a whole set of limiting factors” for the construction industry during the past 10 years, including lack of labor, material issues and legislative issues.
“The aging existing workforce, which took an enormous hit during the Great Recession with people losing jobs, in some cases leaving the industry and not wanting to come back, means that we really have this large deficit of skilled labor,” Dietz says.
Additionally, young people are becoming more college-educated and less interested in construction industry careers.
“Surveys that we’ve done of young adults, 18-25, construction doesn’t fare very well in terms of an intended career,” Dietz says. “You see stronger attachment to wanting jobs that are less seasonal, less physical, that are in office environments behind screens. That’s a consequence, I believe, of the fact that we’ve got a much greater fare of people going to four-year universities today than we did 30, 40, 50 years ago.”
Dietz says immigration policies also have affected the labor shortage. The U.S. labor force has grown by almost 30% since 1990, and immigrants account for about half of the net increase; construction has one of the highest numbers of foreign-born workers. Dietz says there are two factors involved.
“One is the slowdown in immigration—construction, traditionally, going back to the mid-1800s, has been an important source of employment for immigrants,” Dietz said. “The other factor, though, is we are having difficulty in the construction industry attracting that native-born American population, getting young people coming out of high school.”
The opioid crisis is another challenge for the construction industry. Yahoo Finance previously reported on a note from Barclays Research, which found construction workers are nearly six times more likely than other industries to develop an opioid addiction.
Dietz says with various factors affecting the industry, there is not one single remedy.
“It’s going to be a combination of recruiting new people into the industry, people who can become skilled tradesmen and ultimately, small-business owners,” he says. “And it’s also going to need investment in innovative technologies, processes, by which we can raise productivity.”
