Hispanic workers continue to make up a large and growing segment of the national construction industry’s labor force, according to a new report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
While the number of Hispanics in the country’s overall workforce is at 17.6%, their presence in the construction industry now stands at more than 30%, up from 20% two decades ago.
The Hispanic numbers are particularly strong in such industry employment segments as carpentry, painting, and paperhanging, but markedly lower in construction management.
Meanwhile, according to the BLS, other demographic groups are seen as underrepresented, with Africans Americans making up 11.3% of the construction workforce, although that’s a doubling of their recorded numbers in 2003.
The Asian American construction workforce remains historically low at 1.8%, only slightly up from exactly 1% nearly two decades ago. White workers remain the largest represented demographic, making up around 60% of the construction industry’s labor numbers.
The BLS report, Spotlight on Statistics, also shows that by far the most jobs in the building business, at 59.4%, are in construction and extraction; with the management and financial operations segment accounting for 20.4% of the industry’s national workforce.
A distant third at 5.7% is made up of workers in installation, maintenance, and repair.
Age-wise, the Baby Boomers remain a massive presence in the industry’s labor force, with those above 55 years of age representing nearly a quarter of all workers, up from 15.4% in 2003. The largest group, between 25 to 54 years of age, is now down to just under 68%, a drop from its peak of 75% two decades ago.
Despite vigorous outreach programs on the part of many construction companies and associations, the numbers for women workers continues to lag, according to the BLS report. In 2003 there were 975,000 women workers in the industry, a number that has since increased to only 1.1 million.
The numbers for men during that same time period went from 9.1 million to 9.6 million.
By Garry Boulard
