Gobble, Gobble, Gobble. The Good News for Construction Workers

Peter Coy

The housing market is a turkey, but construction workers have plenty to be thankful for this holiday. Surprisingly, construction employment has fallen only a tiny bit by one measure and actually risen a lot by another. One explanation: Non-residential construction has taken up the slack from residential construction.

Here are the amazing stats, quoting a report yesterday from Goldman, Sachs & Co.

"Construction employment according to the establishment survey—which captures employees on company payrolls but excludes the self-employed—has fallen by a negligible 12,000 over the past three months. Construction employment according to the household survey—which includes both employees and self-employed workers—has risen by 292,000 over the same period. This has the startling implication that roughly half of the decline in the unemployment rate from 4.8% in July to 4.4% in October was due to employment growth in the construction sector!"

Read what the American Institute of Architects said today:

Following housing construction numbers from the Department of Commerce that dropped to their lowest level in over six years, the Architecture Billings Index (ABI), a leading economic indicator of construction activity, continued along the path of modest growth in October. Sustained demand for nonresidential projects should continue to offset the lagging housing market’s effect on the overall economy, and future growth in construction activity will come primarily from the commercial / industrial and institutional markets.

Things could be getting worse, though. Goldman, for one, is less sanguine about the future:

"However, we expect construction employment to weaken sharply over the next 6-9 months, with monthly payroll losses averaging 25,000-50,000. There are some early signs of deceleration in nonresidential construction; housing completions are due to fall sharply; and seasonally adjusted construction hiring will look very weak in the spring if employers simply fail to hire the workers now being idled in line with the seasonal norm."

Michael Englund of Action Economics says there's a simple, economic-textbook explanation for the strength of non-residential construction. Here's what he told me in an interview last week:

During the housing construction boom, homebuilders bid up the price of construction labor as well as building materials like copper and cement. Prices got so high that some non-residential construction projects became unaffordable, so developers put them on the back burner. Now, with residential construction slowing down, labor and materials costs are coming down, making non-residential projects affordable again. Says Englund:

"Try to find the unemployed roofer or cement truck driver."