new construction jobs report shows pandemic impact decline

There were just over 334,000 job openings this summer in the construction industry nationally, according to a new report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That number, from BLS’ end of July survey, is roughly 5 percent down from where it stood, at 353,000 openings, in the mid-summer of last year.

The report, officially called the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, more troublingly reveals that total construction job openings from March through June of this year were off by  43% over the same period of time in 2019.

New hires in July at 463,000, meanwhile, represented only a marginal increase of 0.7% over the numbers recorded in July of 2019.

At the same time, layoffs and discharges as a percentage of the total employment picture, increased from 2.2% in July of last year to 2.5%.

Crunching the numbers for all industries, the latest BLS report notes that the “number of job openings increased to 6.6 million on the last business day of July.”

With the job separations and discharge rates decreasing, says the report, the latest changes in the labor market “reflect an ongoing resumption of economic activity that had been curtailed due to the coronavirus pandemic and efforts to contain it.”
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The report additionally notes that job openings overall stood at 4.5% in July, significantly higher than the 3.8% recorded in March, during the first month of the Covid-19 outbreak and economic shutdown.

​By Garry Boulard

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