VOCATIONAL TRAININGApprentices Needed: Construction Shortages Threaten American Growth
U.S. plans for new factories, new tech hubs—even new homes—are about to crash into one very inconvenient fact: Not enough people work in construction to turn those plans into actual, hammer-and-nail reality. Not even close.
U.S. plans for new factories, new tech hubs—even new homes—are about to crash into one very inconvenient fact. As a recent RAND paper makes clear, not enough people work in construction to turn those plans into actual, hammer-and-nail reality. Not even close.
That one bottleneck threatens everything from America’s competitive edge in high-tech manufacturing to its exit from a grinding housing crisis. The answer may seem simple: Just hire more construction workers. But construction jobs often require four or five years of training in an apprenticeship program. And as researchers found, those programs have not scaled up fast enough to meet the need.
“The impacts could be substantial,” said Marwa AlFakhri, a labor economist and associate policy researcher at RAND. “The cost to build anything will go up. Housing will get put on the back burner. But we’ll also fail to meet a lot of our benchmarks for new manufacturing and semiconductor facilities. There just aren’t enough people to do the work.”
In fact, the United States would need to add more than 430,000 new construction workers to keep up with demand—this year alone. That’s according to estimates from Associated Builders and Contractors, a trade group. It would require roughly one in eight high school graduates to trade their mortar boards for a hard hat.
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“The United States would need to add more than 430,000 new construction workers to keep up with demand—this year alone.”
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Apprenticeships are not the only way to fill that gap. Immigration and community colleges also supply workers. But state and federal leaders have looked to build up apprenticeship programs in recent years as a key part of the answer. President Donald Trump doubled federal grants for apprenticeships in his first term. U.S. Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer has promised to maintain that focus on apprenticeship programs— “growing those, investing in those”—in his second.
But like many improvement projects, this one has a few structural issues that need to be addressed: a low ceiling and a leaky pipeline.
