Construction (Un)Employment Causes Labor Shortage

By Heather Bunn, Rafn Company Vice President 

I have recently had the opportunity to talk about our success during the latest recession. One key fact that amazes people the most is that Rafn was able to keep all of our people gainfully employed during this time. Meanwhile across the US, from 2007 – 2011, the construction industry suffered a loss of 5 million jobs. That is a staggering number even before you couple it with the projection that “a net of 2 million construction employees left the industry when unemployment approached 20%, and most are simply not coming back”. 

What that means for most of our clients and business partners is a serious shortage of craft people as the market heats back up. We are just now beginning to see the shortage impacting construction sites across the region. This phenomena is not new, but it is of a larger magnitude than the last cycle. Hopefully as an industry we learned some lessons that can be brought forward to prevent repeats of the sleepless nights. 

So what can we do? Short term we need to be cautious and we need to pace ourselves. We need open communication with our subcontractors about their capacity and we need to be honest about our own. We need to balance the work so that not all projects are starting and ending at the same time. We need to balance the types of work so that not all of one specialty trade or specialized vendor gets used up. We need to keep lines of communication open to make sure that none of the team gets stretched beyond their capacity. We need to ensure that those assigned a particular task are properly trained and experienced, and that the “new guys” are being well mentored. All of these tactics will pay off for our industry across our region in the short term. 

Long term, we need to encourage young people to look seriously at the trades as career choices. Our craft workers earn good wages, have great health care, PTO (paid time off), and a generous 401(k) program. Many of our craft workers will spend a good portion of their working years here and will retire with a comfortable nest egg after a very fulfilling career. Some of them will also graduate from the “University of Rafn” to become the future leaders of the company.