Article source: ConstructConnect

There are two big stories from the September Jobs reports just released for the U.S. and Canada.

For the U.S., total employment in the latest month rose by only +194,000 jobs, a disappointing figure resulting from re-emergent coronavirus cases due to the virulence of the Delta variant. As vaccination coverage continues to widen, this negative influence will gradually dissipate, and analysts are hopeful that October will see a better jobs creation performance.

But for the U.S. construction sector, the truly eye-catching numbers from September reside in the compensation tables. According to Table B3, which includes supervisory personnel, construction worker weekly earnings were +7.2% year over year.
From Table B8, which is strictly for production workers (i.e., it excludes bosses), construction worker earnings in the latest month were +10.2% y/y. That’s a double-digit percentage increase for the first time in the data series going back to at least January 2000.

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Article source: ConstructConnect

U.S. Housing Starts Stay Elevated

Construction activity in the U.S. is currently being sustained almost exclusively by residential work. Year to date through August, the put-in-place capital spending figures from the Census Bureau show the residential dollar volume to be +25.8% compared with Jan-Aug 2020 and nonresidential to be -6.7%. The grand total is +7.0%.
The usual proportions of residential to nonresidential in the total PIP numbers are 40% to 60%. Presently, residential has increased its prominence to claim an almost equal share, at 49.5%, to nonresidential construction’s 50.5%.
Among nonresidential construction’s 16 type-of-structure sub-categories, only one has managed a year-to-date increase in spending, ‘sewage and waste disposal’, +3.6%. Furthermore, that gain is tied to the burst of new single-family homebuilding that is taking place.
Housing starts in the U.S., as the average of the monthly seasonally adjusted and annualized (SAAR) figures through August of this year, have been ahead by one-fifth (+20.3%) versus the first eight months of last year.
The monthly average of single-family starts (in units) has been +23.9%, setting a pace nearly twice as fast as multi-family starts, +12.6%.
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