Construction job openings plummet in January
In December, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed that there were 488,000 job openings in the construction industry.
What a difference a month makes. The latest construction-job-opening number for January plummeted to 248,000—a drop of 240,000 in a single month.
Those figures “seemingly defy credulity,’ said Anirban Basu, chief economist for the Associated Builders and Contractors, a construction industry trade association.
“Today’s construction job openings number was simply shocking,” Basu said.
“In a nation that is set to rebuild much of its infrastructure and is operating in the megaproject era, including the construction of manufacturing facilities for computer chips, inputs to growing alternative energy industries and electric vehicles, today’s numbers seemingly defy credulity,” said Basu. “That said, job openings figures are not broken down by residential versus nonresidential construction, and while many nonresidential contractors continue to report lengthy backlog and numerous open jobs, the single-family homebuilding segment has entered a period of significant retrenchment.”
According to the bureau’s construction industry job openings and labor turnover survey (JOLTS) data, here are job opening numbers:
• January 2023: 248,000
• December 2022: 488,000
• January 2022: 396,000.
Analysts link the massive drop in jobs to high interest rates that discourage new home buying.
“While this construction job openings number is likely to be revised or at least eventually viewed as aberrational as new data arrive, there are likely some construction segments that have substantially slowed their pace of hiring,” said ABC’s Basu.
Openings across all sectors tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics decreased. By 410,000 to 10.8 million in January, down from 11.23 million in the prior month. But job openings increased in the following sectors: transportation, warehousing and utilities as well as nondurable goods manufacturing.
Another general stat from across industries and sectors: there are 1.9 job openings for every unemployed person, that’s down from 2.0 job openings in December.
