A Survey of Construction and Leisure Jobs: the Private Sector Expands During the March 2019 Building and Construction Confidence Index (Boundary Report)
The private sector added 232,000 jobs overall. Construction added 39,000 jobs in March, about twice its average monthly gain in the past year. Employment in hospitality and leisure, which plunged during the pandemic, continues to bounce back and is now above its February 2020 levels.
The ABC’s most recent Construction Confidence Index found nearly 48% of builders expect to add jobs in the next six months, while only about 11% expect job cuts.
Ryan Odendahl, CEO of Kwest Group, which is a civil and industrial construction firm in Ohio, said they were seeing an increase in project opportunities. We are doing everything from a large road construction project to a park-style project.
Kwest is looking to hire more employees. About 20% of the company’s employees are military veterans, which Odendahl calls a good training ground.
The Federal Reserve’s Strong Labor Market Recovery: Inflation and Wage Growth Despite Economic Recession, Job Growth, and Health Care
“A squad leader is a foreman with different skills,” Odendahl said. “The ability to work outside. The ability to change quickly and handle adversity is what it takes to be a successful project.
Odendahl said that young people are starting to see the potential from the construction industry’s growth potential. “We need to do a better job as an industry of telling some of the great things that are going on in construction. We are competing with all of the other industries in the economy for people.”
“We don’t need to be in an hurry to cut,” Fed chairman Jerome Powell said recently at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. “We can wait and become more confident that in fact inflation is coming down to 2%.”
Wage increases cooled off after their peak rates of growth in 2022, but inflation still outmatched wage gains from late 2021 to early 2023. In March, average hourly earnings for workers were up 4.1 percent and in the year to date they have increased by 4.1 percent.
Labor market analysts say the continued strength in the labor market may increase confidence in the Federal Reserve because they think the US has reached a healthy equilibrium in which growth in employment and wages coexist.
Some analysts were worried about a trend in one of the two surveys that the government uses to track the labor market: out of step with most other data on job growth and layoffs, it showed weak hiring rates that, if correct, would have probably indicated an economy “already in recession,” according to the economic research team at Bank of America.
Andrew Flowers, a labor economist with Appcast, said that there were few places to criticize the labor market.
Some have worried that as the booming labor market recovery transitioned into a slower expansion, job growth would mostly narrow to less cyclical sectors like government hiring and health care. Gains in health care — including hospitals, nursing and residential care facilities and outpatient services — led the way in this report, but job growth, for now, remains broad-based.
The “continued vigor,” said Joe Davis, the global chief economist at Vanguard, has come from “household balance sheets bolstered by pandemic-related fiscal policy and a virtuous cycle where job growth, wages and consumption fuel one another.”
Fuel has been added by the better-than-expected gains in business productivity. Businesses large and small have had to navigate an obstacle course this decade: a pandemic, inflationary pressures and a steep rise in the cost of credit. But recently released data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis shows corporate profits have reached a record high.
Officials at the Fed have expressed cautious optimism that they are on their way to meeting their goals of low unemployment and stabilizing prices as a result of recent increases in interest rates.
The preferred measure by the Fed shows inflation has fallen from its peak. But it ticked up in February to 2.5 percent, still a half-percentage point away from the Fed’s target. The delicate state of affairs is worried that rising oil prices or instability could upend it.
Gilbertie: Why energy prices should go up if Ukraine stays the pressure on Russia and not the size of the Russian economy in the next few years
Sal Gilbertie, the chief executive at Teucrium Trading, which covers commodities markets, said he thinks that energy prices could do a “touch higher on oil if Ukraine keeps the pressure on Russia and economic numbers remain healthy.”