Construction Trend Tuesday (#12)

Increased access to benefits

Construction Trend Tuesday covers one (hopefully) interesting industry trend in a quick, two minute read. You can access the archive of CTT posts here.

Last week’s CTT post discussed how the fatal injury rate for construction workers hasn’t improved over the past decade or two. Our readers offered up a few possible explanations, including:

• The workforce is younger and turns over faster.

• Residential work is more dangerous, and there’s more residential work going on.

• “There seems to be far less enforcement of construction safety in recent years. OSHA who?”

• The workforce is more multilingual, frustrating safety efforts.

This week, we’ll take a look at the share of construction workers with access to employer sponsored benefits. While access to paid vacation and healthcare benefits have increased modestly over the past 15 years, access to paid sick leave has nearly doubled—that’s almost entirely the result of new state and local laws.

Last thought: I doubt it’s a coincidence that access to paid vacation peaked in 2021 when labor was incredibly hard to find; more competition for workers means more generous worker benefits.

What’s Next

This week is loaded with data releases, including on construction spending and the all-important BLS jobs report. We’ll cover that and a whole lot more in Week in Review, our every-Friday post that covers all the economic news and data in a breezy, five minute read.

Week in Review is only for paying subscribers. If that’s not you and you want it to be, just click the subscribe button.