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“Contractors continue to signal that they are searching far and wide for additional workers,” said ABC Chief Economist Anirban Basu. “With more workers reentering the labor market, job openings continue to translate into employment growth. Given elevated backlog and the expectation that demand for services will remain high, according to ABC’s Construction Backlog Indicator, construction employment is poised to grow further this year."
“It will get worse before it gets better,” said ABC Chief Economist Anirban Basu. “Not only has Russia’s assault on democratic Ukraine created supply challenges in a number of categories, including oil and natural gas, but the reemergence of COVID-19 in parts of Asia and Europe is also poised to produce additional impacts."
Survey respondents in all four regions cited labor and material availability and costs as the factors chipping away at their backlog, while a few respondents in the Midwest cited winter weather as a frustrating factor.
Overall, the industry has recovered virtually all (99.0%) of the jobs lost during earlier stages of the pandemic. The construction industry added 60,000 jobs on net in February, according to an Associated Builders and Contractors analysis of data by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The construction industry will need to attract nearly 650,000 additional workers on top of the normal pace of hiring in 2022 to meet the demand for labor, according to a model developed by Associated Builders and Contractors.
“While many economists expect inflation to moderate over the course of 2022, as of now, there is effectively no relief in sight for the nation’s contractors,” said ABC Chief Economist Anirban Basu. “Inflation remains hot, hot, hot, with estimates of price increases repeatedly coming in above consensus expectations."
