Housing Won't Tank the Job Market

Housing Won't Tank the Job Market

 

There's no doubt the bottom has fallen out of the home-building market in the last year.  But if you're trying to find an out-of-work carpenter or skilled craftsman today, you'd think the nation was still in the middle of a building boom.

 

According to government figures, employment in home building has fallen 4 percent from a year ago, but construction employment overall has slipped just 0.2 percent over that period.   The difference?   A 2.7 percent jump in the number of workers on construction sites for hospitals, roads and other projects aside from homes and residences.   And the shift may be even more dramatic than those numbers suggest.

 

Experts in the field suggest several reasons for the strength in construction employment despite the housing downturn.

 

Some of it is due to the shift of workers to non-residential construction jobs, some of it is due to employers not wanting to let go of skilled craftsmen in case the homebuilding market picks up.

 

And part of it may be due to the large use of immigrant labor in the construction industry.  If contractors and subcontractors were not reporting off-the-book employees to the government during the housing boom, their absence now won't be missed in the figures.

 

Then there's the harder to measure question about the use of illegal immigrants in construction.  The Labor Department's household survey, which samples workers and unemployed people rather than employers, estimates that 25 percent of construction workers were foreign-born in 2006, up from 23 percent in 2005.